According to Gary Chapman (1995), there are 5 major love languages: receiving gifts, quality time, words of affirmation, acts of service and physical touch. These languages of love are rooted in your own receptiveness to each language, and Chapman encourages partners to consistently speak their partner’s top love language(s) to increase intimacy. Knowing your own love language can be helpful, but may not be the surest way of enabling your partner to successfully connect with you.
The love languages are great descriptors of needs that arise within relationships: needing to be seen and heard could be validated by your partner giving you a gift or by spending quality time with you. Similarly, your needs can change as time goes on, so being receptive to a single love language can be difficult to indefinitely speak your relationship progresses. (Relationship growth is a good goal to have: are you more trusting, more loving, more committed to the relationship- or are you regressing to independence/isolation?)
Each language encourages connection between partners for fruitful intimacy and there is not one that is superior to the others. In some ways, if the love languages inspire connection and intimacy for you and your partner- keep using them. But if you are using the languages to decrypt your partner’s needs, you may be missing the point. In other words, knowing that your partner loves acts of service, you may not be effectively meeting your partner’s needs and wants for the relationship by only serving them.
The goal instead would be for you to be able to speak several (or all) love languages fluently in order to best attend to the needs of the relationship. Knowing when to speak and which language to speak can be difficult to dial in, but the goal is connection and attunement not just communicating in acceptable ways.
If you missed it the past few weeks, click here for a free PDF that has 45 questions that can inspire intimacy in any relationship.
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