The Five Love Languages

The Five Love Languages, by Gary Chapman

I found this book to be very interesting. Although the book was originally intended for married couples, the concepts in the book can be applied to anyone in a relationship with anyone else. Gary Chapman has written other books with the same concept, including The Five Love Languages of Children, and The Five Love Languages of Teenagers. As you can see, it is not limited to a married relationship. It seems pretty useful to me.

The premise of the book is that each person expresses love in different ways, metaphorically called languages. Just like with a real language, you grow up speaking a native language because your parents and friends speak it. If you speak English and your friend speaks Spanish, saying I love you is meaningless to your friend. You have to learn to say it in Spanish. In the same way, when you enter a relationship with someone with a different love language, you have to learn to speak their language if you are going to communicate "I love you" effectively. According to the author, there are only 5 real ways to say "I love you." However, just like a real language, there are hundreds of different dialects (which accounts for the magazine articles with titles like "39 ways to turn her on" and "20 ways to keep your man at home").

Ok, so what are the 5 love languages? The first one is "Words of Affirmation." This means verbally saying, "Thank you for taking the trash out, that means a lot to me." "I really love when we find time to cook together." "Oh you did the dishes? Thanks, I was dreading that." It also works in the negative. If your friend's love language is Words of Affirmation, and you constantly ask that person when they are going to get around to coming over to play a game of poker with you, you are just stressing them out. Stop bugging them, and start telling them they are good at something else. They just might come over to play poker with you.

The next love language is "Quality Time." This is simple. Watching TV together is not quality time, because the TV is getting your attention. Washing the car together and hitting each other with dirty sponges is quality time. You are not focused on the car, but on how silly the other person looks with suds in their hair. You are enjoying the person's company. The person who came over to play poker with you might have been a Words of Affirmation Person but the one constantly asking to play poker is a Quality Time Person.

Moving on... "Receiving Gifts." The best example of this is in a child who just picked your prized tulip out of the garden and runs up to you saying "Mommy, look, I brought you a flower!" Instead of getting angry, recognize that the child's love language is receiving gifts, and wants to say I Love You by giving a gift of his own. In a little bunny trail, this chapter contains the coolest sentence in the world: "Fred was... a young black man of 28 years. Fred had lost a hand in a fishing-by-dynamite accident." Just think about that for a minute.

Number Four is "Acts of Service." Imagine yourself going over to a friend's house to hang out and you see a pile of dishes in the sink. If your friend's love language is acts of service, it would mean a lot to them if you did their dishes, not because they hate dishes but because you are doing an act of service. A husband helping his wife around the house is another example of an act of service. Incidentally, you should do these things out of love, not because you are a doormat. If a doormat does the act of service, eventually the relationship will dissolve.

Number Five is the one everyone thinks is them. "Physical Touch." Everyone thinks, "I can't live without sex/kissing/holding hands/hugging my friends/whatever." In actuality, you probably can. But the person whose love language is through physical touch will begin to feel unloved if they are deprived of physical contact. One of the best examples of this didn't come from the book but from a friend of mine, who always went out of her way to come into physical contact with her boyfriend. Sitting down at a restaurant booth, her thigh or foot would always be in contact with his, or walking across a room, passing him, her path would veer just enough for them to brush shoulders. It was not sexual, it was simply physical. She loved him and wanted physical contact.

I found all this information incredibly fascinating, because I found myself analyzing my actions and the actions of my friends. I learned to read the actions and figured out that if you can understand what someone else's love language is, then even if it is not your love language, you can understand anyway that they are trying to say "I love you." Basically, the more I understand the concepts in this book, the easier it is for me to take someone's affirmative words and translate that into "Oh, he or she is actually trying to say they love me. Cool."