What are Love Languages? And Where did they come from?
Part 1 of 3 on a deep dive into love languages
Like marriage, the concept of love languages has embedded itself in the zeitgeist of modern discussions of love — for better or worse. It is a topic of theory, obsession, criticism, and widespread memes on social media. It serves as the basis and title for numerous popular songs across genres such as Alternative, R&B, and Rap (shoutout to SZA, Kehlani, Ariana Grande, and Talib Kweli).
But most importantly, it’s used as a tool to resolve relationship issues by both the general public and professionals. Surprisingly, the concept has gained new relevance in the past two years despite originating from a book written in 1992. Despite all this surrounding context, I cannot pinpoint how its vernacular was directly passed down to me.
Nobody taught it to me, and I never actively looked it up until now. I just subconsciously absorbed it. The same way a song gets into your head after repeatedly hearing snippets from social media and social gatherings. Now that I am conscious of it, I want to know if the idea has any merit. But to be fully transparent, I am coming in with some massive skeptical bias — I’m kind of a hater.
Whenever I hear of popular ways of organizing people into neat little categories I am typically not convinced, especially when there is little to no scientific backing. Myers-Briggs personality tests? Get it away from me. Astrology? Don’t make me laugh. Blood type personality theory? Burn it with a fire! But what I lack in objectivity, I make up for in comprehensiveness.
I read the older version of the book this concept is based on and took the author’s quiz. Furthermore, I have read over twenty articles on the subject and dug into their sources, eventually landing on and reviewing the findings from around a dozen academic research papers.
In addition, I familiarized myself with the layperson’s opinion by discussing the topic with friends and colleagues around me. Lastly, I noted observations from dozens of the most popular posts on YouTube, TikTok, Reddit, and X (Twitter) on the subject — I went as deep as I singlehandedly could.
Over the course of this and 2 additional articles, I hope to take you on a journey through all this material and give you a more complete picture of the concept, some surprising insights, and practical takeaways.
Origins: The Book
Love languages were thrust into our collective consciousness by Dr. Gary Chapman in his 1992 book “The 5 Love Languages: The Secrets to Love That Last”. Divorce rates in the US were on a sharp rise between 1960 -1980 and people were looking for solutions to save their marriage even as the rates began to slightly decline towards the ’90s.
Chapman, armed with degrees in Anthropology and a Doctorate in Adult Education delivered a solution the public slowly fell in love with. In the book you can tell his framework is heavily influenced by his Christian faith, anthropological training, counseling experience, and a very strong commitment to saving relationships in the heterosexual family unit.
In the beginning, he starts with a commonly accepted psychological concept called attachment theory. This he uses to explain people’s tendencies to be avoidant, anxious, and secure in future relationships depending on relationships with their primary caregivers in childhood.
He also brings up a newer concept called limerence to explain the rush of love we often feel at the beginning of a relationship. The “in love phase,” he explains, is an early stage marked by obsession and infatuation that clouds judgment, but this feeling eventually fades, leaving the lover with a person they no longer recognize.
He claims that everyone has an emotional love tank. When full, the person feels loved and appreciated; when low or empty, the person feels unloved and neglected. To fill this metaphorical tank, one needs to receive acts of love in their primary love language. He believes people adopt this language based on their childhood and life experiences. The languages are categorized as follows:
Words of Affirmation — Verbal expressions of love, e.g., giving compliments, showing appreciation.
Quality Time — Expressing love by spending time with full attention on your partner. e.g., having a deep conversation, going for a walk together.
Gift Giving — Expressing love with tangible symbols. e.g., giving a thoughtful present, surprising them with a treat or outing.
Acts of Service — Expressing love through actions that help and support a partner. e.g., helping with chores or errands, providing support with a project.
Physical Touch — Physical expressions of love. e.g., hugs, holding hands, sexual intimacy.
He theorizes that the main problem in relationships is that each partner tends to express and receive love in their primary love language, which may differ from their partner’s. Thus, a partner’s attempts may be lost when conveying love to their significant other, leaving their emotional love tanks empty.
Additionally, even if partners speak the same love language, they might use different dialects. The solution? Learn your partner’s love language (and dialect)! Fill their love tanks, and the relationship will become fulfilled, resolving that fundamental conflict.
He includes anecdotes of how this theory has helped various people’s marriages, sprinkles in some biblical scripture to give his message theological weight, and provides exercises couples can do to navigate the landscape of love languages. He now has an online quiz to help people identify their primary love language (below are my results).
In addition, he shares some of his general observations based on the predominantly heterosexual Christian couples he counseled. Despite this limitation, he believes that his advice is general enough to fit a wide variety of cultures.
He wraps this in a message of requesting love from your partner, never demanding it, and encouraging couples to employ a radical amount of empathy with each other. Lastly, he extends this message to society but places particular emphasis on parents’ relationship with their children.
Despite Chapman’s intentions, the most positive principles of his work are not being applied in the way he intended.
Social Media
Lots of people are using the framework of the ‘love languages’ without even realizing it’s from this book. In its most tame misuse, it’s often used as a format to say “Hey this is a specific thing I deeply appreciate, do you relate?”. Here are some of the most popular and hilarious ones I noted from X(Twitter).
Joke’s aside, I noticed a serious disconnect happening online. Chapman encouraged people to learn their partner’s love language and modify their actions to speak it. Online this sentiment has been replaced with a preoccupation with knowing your love language to find a partner who shares it.
In an ironic twist of fate, instead of being used as a tool to turn to one’s partner, it is being used as a prescreening tool to turn away potential partners. The majority of Chapman’s couple seemed to have been aligned on values or visions of the future at the time they met (often the traditional American Christian family-based ones). The love languages were just a tool to keep them together.
Rather predictably, men disproportionately tend to boil down the love language of physical touch to only its sexual component on dating apps. And both sexes on TikTok seem to hyper-fixate on touch in the majority of the most popular posts on love languages.
Posts often include a single couple or a barrage of them romantically holding each other. Although innocuous on its face, the comments on these often contain a sea of people daydreaming of the fulfillment they will receive from their partner, not what they can give. Some of this may be attributed to touch-starvation but a lot come across as a physical manifestation of a deep longing and obsession — ultimately limerance.
Inadvertently people are obsessing over the expressions in ways that a real living being cannot possibly live up to: always being in the mood for romantic touching, constant showering of gifts, always having time for fun or a deep conversation no matter what your prior mood is.
Instead of looking inward for what they truly want people are internalizing performative expectations from social media and projecting that as the minimum requirements from their partner.
Lastly, people are using love languages as a way to fully understand another person instead of digging deeper and figuring out what dialect they speak. Oh, your love language is giving gifts? You are going to love me after I buy expensive gifts for you right? Is your primary quality time? You probably want to spend every minute together and get upset if we do things separately. Wrong. Wrong.
Instead of understanding someone through the lens of extended time and deep attention, people are attempting to use it as a heuristic toward understanding others on a deep level. Understanding people takes time, and learning to love them even more, there are no shortcuts. Chapman’s work urges us to choose the longer path, which I believe is ultimately more rewarding.
That said, Chapman's work is not off the hook yet. Some questions remain on the 5 love languages framework. How limiting are Chapman’s assumptions on love? How meticulously should we follow his instructions? Join us next week as we continue the analysis of the Love Languages by diving into what science has to say about it.
Follow me @Thinkinganddata on all platforms including:
Substack | Medium | Instagram | Threads | X(Twitter) | Reddit
Sources/Additional Reading :
Videos/Podcasts
Psych2Go. (2024, March 5). What is Your Love Language? [Video]. YouTube.
Psychology Insider. (2024, February 18). The 5 Love Languages Explained [Video]. YouTube.
Hannah D’avanzo (2024, January 25). Dr. Gary Chapman on The Five Love Languages [Video]. YouTube.
BlackLove. (2021, February 1). Love Languages | Men’s Round Table | A Black Love Series [Video]. YouTube.
Jimmy O. Yang. (2023, May 2). Love Languages | Jimmy O. Yang: Guess How Much? [Video]. YouTube.
Related Articles:
The Creator of the Love Languages Wasn’t Looking for a Hit by The New York Times—August 27, 2022
It Isn’t About Your Love Language; It’s About Your Partner’s by the Atlantic — October 20, 2019
What Are The 5 Love Languages? Everything You Need To Know by MindBodyGreen — May 07, 2024
Here’s how ‘love languages’ can actually change your relationship by Science Focus — February 14, 2024
Your Love Language Might Actually Be All Of Them by refinery29 — November 21, 2023
Nice comprehensive summary! Truity conducted a 500,000 person survey recently, that overlaid the theory with a data set of modern couples. Just leaving it here, in case helpful: https://www.truity.com/blog/page/seven-love-styles
Interesting, thanks for the info. I’ll cover this in my next article