Have you heard of the 5 love languages? It’s a concept that was brought to light by Dr. Gary Chapman, an author, speaker, and marriage counselor, who has a passion for helping people form and maintain long lasting relationships. He wrote a book called The Five Love Languages: How to Express Heartfelt Commitment to Your Mate, which outlines 5 different unique ways that people express their love.
The 5 love languages include: Words of Affirmation, Acts of Service, Receiving Gifts, Quality Time, and Physical Touch.
In his book, Dr. Chapman explains how each person will typically use at least one of the love languages when giving love. Additionally, they will use another (or sometimes even the same one) when it comes to receiving love.
To give you a good example, I’ll explain a bit about my love languages. My primary love language when giving love to others is acts of service. So this means I show my love by providing acts of service to those I love (cooking a meal, planning a surprise for someone, etc.). However, my primary love language when receiving love from others is words of affirmation. So this means I feel a stronger sense of love when others say things like “I appreciate you” or “I’m proud of you”, as those words mean a lot to me. I took a quiz to figure out the exact percentage of how each love language comes into play when it comes to me, specifically.
You can actually take the official love languages quiz at this link to learn more about what your primary love language is, as well as the percentage of each love language in order of most valued to least valued:
https://www.5lovelanguages.com/quizzes/
Since everyone is different, and everyone reacts uniquely when it comes to the various types of relationships in their life, it’s really cool to be able to understand each other’s love languages, especially to understand how you can provide love in the most effective way possible. And this doesn’t always have to apply to a romantic relationship. It can be applied to any type of relationship (friend/friend, father/son, brother/sister, etc.)
Dr. Chapman gave an example of a husband and wife who were having trouble in their marriage due to misunderstandings in their love languages. The husband would buy the wife expensive gifts, thinking this would make her feel loved. But all the wife wanted was for him to do the laundry. In his mind, he thought he was doing everything he could (buying her the best gifts) to make her feel loved. But in reality, she didn’t care much for those gifts. She would’ve appreciated him much more and felt his love more strongly through an act of service (like doing the laundry). Make sense?
To learn more about love languages overall, and also look into the remaining books Dr. Chapman published, you can visit the official love languages website: https://www.5lovelanguages.com/
I relish, cause I found exactly what I used to be taking a look for. Odille Neale Zoes
Interesting article Snigdha, like you said everyone reacts uniquely and understanding their needs is truly beneficial to the relationship. Nothing wrong in working a little hard to make the ones around us feel better, right? 🙂
Exactly! Totally agree on that 🙂 Thank you!
Very insightful article Snigdha! You make it easy for couples to get to know each other’s preferences. I will work on it.
Thank you!