How Learning About 'The 5 Love Languages' Can Transform Your Life: Skeptics' Edition

Imagine this. Your teenage daughter and you have entered into those muddy waters of puberty together, and the atmosphere in your family has gradually been deteriorating. Already at your wits' end, your daughter sends you a text message declaring that she feels you don't even care about her. What? You've just spent the afternoon cleaning her room for her, and was planning to cook her favorite meal afterwards!

Your friend is the kind of person who likes to read self-help books, and her question just has you wonder what on Earth she's been into now. "Love languages", at first sight, sounds like something right out of some New Age course, right? Well, perhaps. Wait up, though!

What? Wasn't Love A Universal Language?

"If you smile at me, I will understand... 'cause that is something everybody everywhere does in the same language," Crosby, Stills, and Nash sang in the harmony only they could nail so well. While healthy humans experience love and form bonds, however, we all know that there's a lot more to expressing it than smiling.

READ Why Do You Want to Make Love?

Take my mother. Good at DIY, she's been known for her inability to sit still for long periods of time and the accompanying tendency to just get up and start fixing things that are broken in the houses of people she is visiting for as long as I can remember. If someone's in trouble, she'll be there — taking care of the practical side of things, whether they want her to or not. Then take me. When I'm facing stressful times, what I really want is for someone to sit there with me, listen, and offer encouraging words — which is also what I tend to try to give to others in difficult situations. Sure, I'm happy to go grocery shopping or book plane tickets for someone, but I'm much more likely to first ask a loved one if they'd like to share a beer and a nice chat.

My mother's primary love language is, it turns out, "acts of service". Me, on the other hand, I'm a "words of affirmation" kinda gal. It doesn't take much to figure out that someone who really appreciates their loved one mowing the lawn for them might get frustrated if they instead get a pep talk, or that someone who just wants a listening ear and instead gets their chores done for them might feel that their needs are unmet.

Love might be (near) universal, but the "language" we use to express it is far from that.

What Are The 'Love Languages', And Where Did They Come From?

Dr Gary Chapman is a marriage counselor with multiple decades of experience, as well as a husband. Over the course of his career, he gradually came to the conclusion that different people have different ways of expressing love as well as different ways in which they prefer others to express love to them. The secret to fulfilling relationships is more than mutual love alone, he found — if you want to truly meet a loved one's needs, you need to know what mode of receiving love is most meaningful to them. 

Eager to share his knowledge with the world, Dr Chapman wrote a series of books, the first one of which is called The 5 Love Languages: The Secret to Love That Lasts. In his view, there are five love languages, and every single person — whether we're talking about your friend, your child, your parent, your spouse — has a primary and secondary love language.

What are these love languages as identified by Dr Chapman? Let's take a peek:

• Words of affirmation: Some people feel most loved when others verbally build them up with compliments and expressions of caring. "You really nailed that math test!" "The wording on your work presentation was genius!"
• Quality time: Others feel most loved when you make time to spend with them alone — when you switch your phone off, and have lunch with your partner, just the two of you, or you help your child with their science project, showing great interest in their ideas.
• Receiving gifts: That bottle of wine you picked up for dinner? That book you left on your son's pillow? For some people, it's those little surprises that most clearly express that you care for them.
• Acts of service: "Mom, I did your laundry for you and cleaned your kitchen!" Yep, some people feel your love most clearly when you take a load off their shoulders.
• Physical touch: Then, there are those who crave physical reminders of your love. They thrive when you kiss them good morning, when you give them a pat on the shoulder, or play-wrestle with them.

Though Chapman says that the love languages cover everyone, some others disagree and have identified more, while saying there may be others. Some people may express and experience love by providing for others or being provided for, for instance, while others see helping others self-actualize, or be their best selves, as the ultimate expression of love.

READ Resistance to Receiving Love

So, How Do You Find Out What Someone's Love Language Is?

Love languages apply to everyone, from your best friend to your five-year-old son, to your partner. I can speak from personal experience in saying that finding out what someone's primary love language is can transform relationships. (My son's primary love language is "physical touch", while my daughter's is "receiving gifts". Both have "quality time" as their secondary love languages.)

There are plenty of online quizzes that should aid you in finding someone's love language — where possible, have your loved one take a quiz for themselves. Should that not be possible, because they're unwilling to take a quiz, the results come out unclear, or you're trying to build a better relationship with a co-worker, well, there's other ways of finding out:

• Try expressing your love and appreciation in all the different ways, and see to which your loved one reacts best.
• Try to observe how they themselves express their love and appreciation, and you've likely hit on their primary love language.
• Watch what they complain about: the things they find lacking are likely to represent their love language.

READ Love and Relationships: Best Feelings, Worst Feelings

Love, Our Way

If people important to you learn your love language and start expressing their love for you in the way that makes most sense to you, your feeling of being appreciated will go up a whole lot.

On the other hand, if you find out that a loved one of yours, say your partner or a child, prefers to receive love in a way that is totally alien to you, you may have a challenge on your hands. It may be hard to express your love physically when you grew up in a very low touch family, for instance. With time and effort, you can find out what the love languages of all those most important to you are, and learn to express yourself in them.

Finding out what someone's primary love language is also helps in another way. Now, I no longer find my mother's "acts of service" annoying: I know that she does these things to express her love.

Stick with it, and the magic that results may just surprise you.