About 10 years ago in my couples therapy practice I started having partners rank Gary Chapman’s five love languages on my intake forms. At the time, few people had heard of it. Something has happened since, because now the majority of my couples come in already knowing about the five love languages and a bit about how it fits for them.
I see a lot of distressed couples, often on the brink of divorce or separation, and the odd thing is that over the years I’ve found that more often than not these couples are actually pretty well matched in their love languages!
Chapman’s basic idea was a good one: that we each have certain modalities that are especially meaningful in terms of giving and receiving love, that we tend to give what we like to receive, and that one of the ways relationships can go awry is by being out of sync in these dimensions. So, for instance, I may feel especially loved when my partner cooks a nice meal, or straightens up the living room. Those would be what Chapman terms acts of service. Since people usually give what they like to receive, I will show my love to my partner by doing similar things — maybe taking out the garbage, or making them tea.
However, suppose my partner feels most loved when they receive what Chapman calls “words of affirmation.” As it sounds, these would be things like praise or thanks for things that they’ve done, loving words, appreciation for their good qualities, and so on. In that case, my showing love through acts of service may not register as loving for my partner, since they are more focused on words. Similarly, my partner may be giving me words of affirmation, but the words are falling on deaf ears because I’m primarily tuned to acts of service.
You can see that the key here is to know what counts as loving for one’s partner and to make sure to give that, rather than what you might want for yourself. The broader statement of this is the platinum rule: “Do unto others — not as you would have them do to you— but as they would want done to them.” It also invokes the critical relational concept of differentiation. We are all different people, with different values, ways of seeing and experiencing the world. We are not the same person. (For more on this see Disillusionment.)
Chapman’s five love languages — in no particular order — are:
- acts of service
- words of affirmation
- quality time
- touch
- and gifts
They’re all pretty self-explanatory, although I like his definition of quality time as undivided attention. I agree with him that these 5 modalities are significant, fairly exhaustive, and fairly distinct.
Most people intuitively know which of the five are their top go-to’s. And some people can’t really rank them — they give and receive love on all channels.
To generalize a bit from my experience, people with predominantly male energy are apt to prefer words and touch, and people with predominantly female energy tend to prefer words and quality time. Gifts usually are last for most people, though for some they can be quite significant. People from more traditional, collectivist cultures often favor acts of service.
If a couple has a big mismatch then that’s obviously a place for more awareness and improvement. But given that many distressed couples actually match on their top two or three of these five, what’s gives? I would argue that, like many simplifications that are pleasing in their ease of grasp, the five love languages just don’t go deep enough.
For starters, even within each of the five modalities there can be many submodalities. Within acts of service for example, there are many possibilities: physical organizing and maintenance in the household, cooking and serving meals, errands and chores, picking up and dropping off kids, and so on. Within words of affirmation there are such different flavors as appreciations, empathy, cheerleading, validating, acknowledging, supporting, etc. So even if you match on one of the main five categories, there may be more specific representations that are important to ferret out.
These might all be considered part of what eminent relationship researcher John Gottman refers to as Love Maps. Your Love Map for your partner is all the things you know about their preferences, beliefs, values, wishes, dreams, life circumstances, formative years, vulnerabilities, emotions, and so on.
Knowing how to express and receive love is certainly important, but there is also the darker side of knowing what things set yourself and your partner off — often referred to as triggers. I like to think of these in a compassionate way as vulnerabilities. If we’re human we have vulnerabilities. Vulnerabilities become extra tender under stress. And often a couple’s complementarity paradoxically ends up provoking each others’ raw spots (e.g., see Deep Acceptance). We have to create maps to know and keep track of what those are for ourselves and for each other.
They both had made assumptions about the other having the same beliefs and experience as themselves. Ed took it for granted that Marlena thought the arrangement was satisfactory. And Marlena presupposed that Ed shared her view that it was perhaps workable but not exactly satisfactory. And I imagine there were some significant beliefs and emotions behind her feeling that it wasn’t satisfactory.
In addition to knowing your own and your partner’s love maps and triggers there are many other things to learn. The Five Love Languages are a good introduction, but there can be layers of nuances and special situations. A crucial skill in relationships is repair, or healing the damage after the inevitable fumbles we make. What kind of repair works for your partner? How are they best soothed when hurt? And then there’s how to lift your partner up when they’re down, or how to calm them when they’re stressed, or how to assuage them when they’re angry? Some of these may fall in line with what I abbreviate as the 5LL’s but others may require more finesse.
So take the 5LL’s as a starting point, but don’t stop there. And as Marlena wisely reminds us, it’s good to be humble about our assumptions, because We Never Truly Know Our Partners.
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This post was previously published on P.S. I Love You.
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