As Meyers-Briggs quizzes are to corporate bonding retreats, love languages are to Hinge profiles. They show up again and again on dating sites, and on relationship advice forums and social media memes and debunking podcasts. There is something about the idea of love languages that seems to make people feel very passionately: My love language is words of affirmation. My love language is clean sheets. My boyfriend says he doesn’t have a love language, and I don’t know how to express my love to him. Love languages are bull crap. My love language is hating on love languages.

These agents of provocation emerged from the mind of Baptist pastor Gary Chapman, author of the 1992 book The 5 Love Languages. Chapman developed his theory of love languages while he was offering pastoral care to couples who came to his church looking for support in their marriages. As Chapman sees it, the reason married people fight is that they are each trying to express their love in ways the other person doesn’t understand. It is as if, he explains, they are speaking different languages.

Chapman’s initial modest offering has developed into a full-fledged media universe: The 5 Love Languages of Children, The 5 Love Languages Singles Edition, The 5 Love Languages for Men, The 5 Love Languages of Teenagers, The 5 Love Languages Military Edition. There is an app. There are Chapman-hosted podcasts.

The basic premise of the Chapman universe, however, has a pleasing Hogwarts house-style simplicity. Chapman cataloged five love languages, which he says are all the same for everybody: quality time, physical touch, receiving gifts, acts of service, and words of affirmation. You get one love language as your primary and another as your secondary, like being on the cusp in astrology. You aren’t allowed to have more than that. Ideally, you and your partner should have at least one in common. To pick your language, you take the personality quiz at the back of the book, now available online.

For true believers, the love languages are the key to relationship communication. Say one person feels loved when they’re cuddling (physical touch), while their partner considers cleaning the house (acts of service) to be the ultimate expression of their affection. Both of them might feel as though they’re putting in all the work for the relationship and as though the other person is neglecting them. Chapman’s love language concept gives both parties a way of talking about what they’re missing from one another without accusations.

Critics, however, point to Chapman’s rigid and conservative gender politics (most prominent in the earliest editions of the book) and the lack of scientific basis for his theories. Love languages, they warn, can be too inflexible to be practical.

“If someone identifies their primary love language as ‘gifts,’ they might unconsciously downplay the significance of spending quality time, being physically affectionate, engaging in deep conversations, and so on,” says Gideon Park, a co-author of........

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