I know you have heard someone talk about “love languages” before. Maybe they did it to make a joke. “Netflix and chill are my love language”, that kind of thing. Or, maybe someone was very serious when they told you what their “love language” is, in the hope you would know what to do with this information.
Either way, the concept of a “love language” is now firmly embedded in our culture, hovering somewhere between pop psychology and pop culture. But do you know where this comes from? I do, and as far as I am concerned, ‘”love languages” carry all the academic authority of star signs or Hogwarts houses. What’s worse, they are rooted in some seriously outdated and damaging ideas. And because my love languages are sex positivity and peer-reviewed data, I’m going to explain why I think we should ditch the entire theory.
I got thinking about love languages after I recently noticed you can now add them to your dating profile on the Bumble app. In fact, there are now dating apps that go even further than that and are based entirely on the theory of love languages. The Language of Love Dating app launched earlier this year and “promises something dramatically different from the shallow dating apps available today”. Given how prevalent this idea is to modern dating, it seems odd to me that we take such little time in asking where it all came from.
Love languages are not the product of rigorous sociological or psychological research, far from it. They are the brain-child of Baptist minister Dr Gary Chapman, who published The Five Love Languages: How to Express Heartfelt Commitment to Your Mate, in 1992. It is important to point out that he’s not a psychiatrist or a psychologist. He holds degrees in anthropology, and a doctorate in adult education from the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.
The original Five Love Languages was later revised to The Five Love Languages: The Secret to Love That Lasts, and, to date, it has sold 20 million worldwide and been translated into 50 languages. Impressive. The book is born from Chapman’s work counselling married couples at his Baptist church in North Carolina. He writes: “My conclusion after many years of marriage counselling is that there are five emotional love languages – five ways that people speak and understand emotional love.” These five languages are words of affirmation, quality time, receiving gifts, acts of service, and physical touch.
He suggests that everyone has a primary love language, a way we express and receive emotional validation from a loved one. If you are not getting on well with your partner, it might be because you are communicating in different “languages”. If you are fluent in gift giving, for example, a lover who is conversant in words of affirmation will struggle to understand your primary language of love. They may be following you around telling you how nice your hair looks when what you really need is a John Lewis gift voucher. Disaster.
You can take the online test to find out what your love language is, if you really want to, but there really isn’t any science to back this up. In the 30 years since the book’s publication, there have been a handful of studies to try and determine the validity of the “five love languages”, most of which were inconclusive. One 2017 paper actually studied couples with aligned love languages to see if they were any happier, but found that “results provided limited evidence that love language alignment promotes satisfaction”.
The love language model also manages to be vague and overly rigid at the same time. How does “make me laugh” fit into these five boxes, for example? I couldn’t see any kind of future with someone who didn’t make me laugh, no matter how many “acts of service” they were prepared to do. I also get bored very quickly, so I really like to be challenged by a partner. Why isn’t that a “love language?” What about being intellectually stimulated? Does that fall under “quality time” or is that “words of affirmation”? See what I mean? It’s all just a bit wishy-washy.
However, the basic tenet at work doesn’t actually bother me that much. It is clunky and reductive, but ultimately boils down to “find out what your partner likes and do more of that”. If your other half values quality time together, do that. If touch is important to them, high five them after sex, that kind of thing. What really irritates me about it is that the concept of five love languages is steeped in deeply misogynistic and exclusionary beliefs. What’s worse, advising people to place themselves in the service of their partner’s needs is perilously close to promoting co-dependency and coercive abuse. Don’t believe me? Allow me to introduce you to Ann.
Ann is a case study in The Five Love Languages, you can find her in the chapter titled “Loving the Unlovely”. Ann is a deeply religious woman who confesses to Chapman that she “hates” her husband Glenn, and it seems with good reason. She reports he has treated her “as an enemy”, cursed at her, mistreated her, and told her that he hates her. He won’t attend Chapman’s counselling sessions with her, and her friend’s advice is to “get out… he will never change” and that she is “just prolonging the agony”.
From where I’m sat, that is excellent advice, but this is not the approach Chapman takes. From the Bible, he reads Luke’s account of the life of Christ to her, which is to “love your enemies, do good to those who hate you”, and then counsels Ann to do the following: “… if you could speak Glenn’s primary love language consistently for a six-month period … somewhere along the line his emotional need for love would begin to be met; and as his emotional tank filled, he would reciprocate love to you.” Chapman also tells Ann not to complain to her husband. Rather she should write any complaints down in a private notebook instead of “saying anything about it to Glenn this month”.
So, Chapman’s advice to Ann was to make herself as serviceable and servile to her clearly abusive husband as possible, in the hope he starts to be nice to her. And what was Glenn’s love language? Physical touch, meaning sex. When Ann asks how she is going to have sex with a man she feels “used” by, Chapman tells her: “I am confident you can, with God’s help, find your way back to a mutually satisfying sexual life together.” He goes on to say that “there are times it won’t be easy to make this emotional connection.. you will probably have to rely heavily on your faith in God in order to do this. Perhaps it will help if you read again Jesus’s sermon on loving your enemies, loving those who hate you.”
What an appalling piece of advice! To my mind, this is the obvious danger of identifying a partner’s “love language” and trying to fulfil it. It couldn’t be that Glenn is just an obnoxious shit, no! It’s that Ann isn’t speaking his love language. After six months, Ann reported that Glenn “responded positively to almost all her requests”. Chapman goes on to say that “to this day, Glenn swears to his friends that I am a miracle worker”. I bet he does.
In the chapters that discuss the importance of sex (within marriage, obviously), Chapman has some more questionable advice. “For the male, sexual desire is physically based. That is the desire for sexual intercourse is stimulated by the build up of sperm cells and seminal fluid in the seminal vesicles. When the seminal vesicles are full, there is a physical push for release.” I’m sorry, what? This is simply not how testicles work. They will not explode if you don’t have regular sex. This coercive “blue balls” nonsense that tells women men need to have regular sex and that it is their duty to provide it. But, if that’s his “love language”, that’s what I have to do, right?
This is a book for straight, married, monogamous couples. Chapman is quick to dismiss the idea that polyamorous relationships can be fulfilling, describing them as “fanciful”, and something to be objected to on “moral” and “emotional” grounds. Most of the women in the case studies are neglected, stay-at-home mums, dealing with a workaholic husband whose “love language” is physical touch and words of affirmation. Basically, they want more sex and to be told they are a good boy afterwards. The women largely just want a bit more help around the house, which is framed as “acts of service”.
It is staggeringly heteronormative. His only case studies are married heterosexual couples. Over the years, Chapman has found time to write about the love languages of children, the love language of single people, the five languages of apologising, and the five languages of appreciation in the workplace, but has never updated his original work to include same-sex couples.
It’s not so much that I object to the idea of a “love language”, it’s more that I am denying the entire validity of the concept. Saying nice things to a partner, spending time with them, touching them, giving them gifts, and doing things to help them out from time to time, are not emotional “languages”. They are the absolute basic requirements for any loving relationship, be that straight, gay, poly, or pan. They are also entirely context dependent. I might take the love languages quiz and discover mine is words of affirmation, but should I find myself with a punctured tyre and in need of a ride, you better believe I’m switching to acts of service.
But what I really dislike about categorising the most basic requirements of a loving relationship into “languages” is that it easily becomes manipulative and coercive. If someone tells me they have taken the quiz and their love language is gifts, is it now my responsibility to keep buying them stuff? The whole concept is not about self-improvement, it’s about putting your own needs to one side to meet someone else’s. This is co-dependency 101, with some pretty questionable ethics thrown in.
So, the next time someone talks about love languages with you, steer the conversation back to star signs and Hogwarts houses. You’ll be on much safer ground.
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