How The Five Love Languages May Get Us Into Trouble

The Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman is a popular and wonderful book that has helped many couples make sense of their relationship. I have a few copies on my shelf and often refer people to it. It helps us understand how we can often “miss” each others attempts to offer care and love.

At the same time, if we only look to these love languages to create intimacy, or believe that we must find a partner with the same language, or “train” our partner to “speak” it when it makes no sense to them, we can run into problems.

Since people have different love languages, it’s obvious that the languages themselves are only symbolic. The actual language (e.g. a gift or hearing praise) is not the thing that conveys love, it’s how we interpret it or experience it.

The power of love languages is in the experience of safety or care that the language conveys.

If growing up, when mom put dinner on the table I felt loved, I now associate this act of service with this feeling. When my partner now cooks lunch, the same feelings gets triggered. There’s nothing wrong with that, but when we depend on love languages as the only ways we can communicate love, we run into problems, because that is actually not true. As you can see, dinner on the table can be associated with love for one person, but not another.

The love language is a trigger, or stimulus, that we associate with the response of feeling loved in our bodies. It is created in a particular context and sometimes more so in certain cultures and not others.

When our partner has the same love language, it not only creates a feeling of love, but an experience of shared reality. I wanted flowers to feel loved, and you wanted to do that, and you did! I feel validated and normal in my need for flowers. You get me, you understand me, I feel seen and accepted when we share the same language.

If my partner offers me physical affection because he knows it’s my language, but it’s not his...and I get the sense he’s trying hard but it’s not authentic...it may not feel the same to me. Again, notice it’s not about the hugs, but the emotions and experience underlying the behavior. If he is going through the motions and I feel it, I probably won’t feel so loved.

Again, the language itself is not the most important thing. But the validation of my experience, that getting those hugs makes sense and you want to do it!

So what’s the answer? One possibility is to recondition our partners to have the same love language. If we created these associations early in life, maybe they can be conditioned now. Not easy, takes time, and there’s a better option.

A more direct way to help someone feel loved happens at a nervous system level. It happens in therapy all the time, as a client can feel loved, safe, accepted and cared for without the therapist knowing or employing the client’s love language.

In other words, there is actually a universal trigger for creating love. The ultimate love language.

How do we trigger this? As humans, when we calm the nervous system down of another human, help them feel safe and relaxed, seen and known, validated, we start creating connection. This happens when we can regulate our own emotions and co regulate with another. It requires emotional intelligence.

When we respond to others by validating their emotions, helping them feel like we get them, that their experience makes sense, we create emotional safety and feelings of being cared for. When we are able to share our own vulnerabilities and feel cared for and safe, we feel loved too.

A great example of intentionally creating connection without love languages is the popular study involving 36 questions by Aron (as mentioned in this NY Times article). Authentically sharing responses to these questions can create a sense of safety in vulnerability, of actually being seen, which generates intimacy.

Notice, however, this experience is not limited to verbalized words. In the study, participants are asked to gaze into each other’s eyes in silence. The emotional presence of another human is more powerful than we often recognize.

The love languages provide a simple way of thinking about communicating love, and it can be effective and useful. When we believe the love languages are a dealbreaker, the only way to connect, we can miss out on huge opportunities for love and connection.

The feeling of love and intimacy can be much more powerful when we understand how we feel loved. When we learn how to use our own emotions and bodies to help another person feel safe, we can be even more empowered to make love!

*An interesting article that asks, Is There Science Behind the Five Love Languages?