What is Love Language
Hannah Brown
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Posted Oct 18, 2023
What even is love language?
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Love is something that everyone wants to experience in their lifetime. People want someone to fulfill their needs and to be heard and understood. Whether it’s a friend or a romantic partner, humans want a connection with someone else that can stand the test of time. However, with maneuvering such a difficult thing like love, how can someone know exactly what their partner needs to feel that love and fulfillment in their relationship, how do they even get that fulfillment back? Well, in 1992, Gary Chapman released the book The 5 Love Languages, and after selling over 20 million copies across the world, the media believed they had their answer. With so many copies coming around, there also followed a string of myths and misconceptions, one of the most prevalent being that gift-giving is the best way to satisfy a partner. In this article, we will be talking about what is happening and what really is the purpose of the 5 love languages. Instead of the different love languages being a roadmap for how to please your partner, I predict they are just a supplemental way to make your partner happy. We will be going over what exactly are the love languages, the myths that follow, and how those myths are wrong.
The first article to review is Walking the Walk, Talking the Talk: Love Languages, self-regulation, and relationship satisfaction by Selena Bunt and Zoe J. Hazelwood. In this article, they looked at Chapman's five love languages and pointed out how even though it was widely recognized and used by psychologists to explain love, it was untested. Their hypothesis was that couples with similar love languages will have higher levels of relationship satisfaction. Throughout the article, they pointed out how Chapman’s model got immense popularity there has been very little empirical research to support his findings. They made the connection between Canary and Stafford’s rational maintenance typology ideology, assurance, social networks, openness, positivity, shared tasks, conflict management, and advice, which were like Chapman’s love languages and often referenced back to this established model. However, moving through their finding, they tested the difference between men and women and how they find satisfaction in their relationships, and they found no significant gender differences in relationship satisfaction. They also found that 76% accurately demonstrated knowledge of their partner's love language through the survey they participated in; however, they did not find a significant relationship between this and relationship satisfaction. They summarized this by saying that love language did not significantly improve relationship satisfaction however, willingness and capability to express those behaviors does.
This takes us to the next article I Love the Way You Love Me: Responding to Partner’s Love Language Preferences Boost Satisfaction in romantic heterosexual couples by Mostova, Stolarski, and Matthews. In this article, they strove to see the expression of love reception of signs of affection through the five love languages. They also relationship satisfaction, sexual satisfaction, and empathy were also looked at. After studying 100 heterosexual couples, they found quality time was the most frequently declared love language, followed by physical touch, acts of service, words of affirmation, and receiving gifts. There was no significant association of gender in these findings. Overall, they found that women are more strongly oriented to take on an expressive and nurturing role in a marriage, while men’s emotional contribution could be downplayed by socialization.
Hughes and Camden used The third article, Using Chapman’s Five Love Languages Theory to Predict Love and Relationship Satisfaction. Similar to Bunt and Hazelwood’s article, they strove to predict that if partners perceived that their partners used their preferred love language, this would lead to a highly satisfying relationship. They recruited 981 individuals and had them complete an online survey; after completion, they found that women reported greater feelings of love when their partner used their love language than men did. Once again, in this study, quality time was the most preferred love language, with 40.8% of participants declaring this.
The fourth article was The Meditating Role of Five Love Languages Between Differentiation of Self and Marital Satisfaction by Ince and Isik. This study focused on 161 Turkish married heterosexual couples in order to test self and marital satisfaction. They found that marital satisfaction wasn’t based on the usage of love languages but instead found it more useful to use these different love languages as an important clue of what could be needed in a relationship. However, on its own, it did not give significant satisfaction in either self or marriage.
Lastly the fifth article used in this research was Speaking the Language of Relational Maintenance: A Validity Test of Chapman’s (1992) Five Love Languages by Egbert and Polk. In this article, they strived to find out how Chapman’s five love languages truly affect relationships. I felt that this article had some great findings. They made a correlation between Chapman and Stafford et al’s scale and found that Stafford et al’s scale reflects the intentions of the communicator, whereas the LLs are the behaviors people enact to carry those intentions to the recipient. So, instead of looking at the two scales individually, look at them as two different types of love to give to your partner rather than one or the other.
After looking at all these articles individually and comparing them against each other, it is clear that there is a continuous theme between them all. Though Chapman’s ideology of the five love languages was widely known and used by many to describe what love is to them, this had not been tested as other theories and ideologies had been, and when it was tested, it did not have the effect that many believed it would be. Instead of using Chapman’s ideology to find satisfaction in one’s love life, use it as a supplemental factor to things like communication and trust. Love is going to be unique to everyone, so keep an open mind, and don’t write off any one way to find love and satisfaction in your relationships
Reference:
İnce, Ş., & Işık, E. (2022). The mediating role of five love languages between the differentiation of
self and marital satisfaction. American Journal of Family Therapy, 50(4), 407–423. https://doiorg.
/10.1080/01926187.2021.1930607
Mostova, O., Stolarski, M., & Matthews, G. (2022). I love the way you love me: Responding to
partner’s love language preferences boost satisfaction in romantic heterosexual couples. PLoS
ONE, 17(6). https://doi-org /10.1371/journal.pone.0269429
Hughes, J. L., & Camden, A. A. (2020). Using Chapman’s five love languages theory to predict
love and relationship satisfaction. Psi Chi Journal of Psychological Research, 25(3), 234–244.
https://doi-org /10.24839/2325-7342.JN25.3.234
Bunt, S., & Hazelwood, Z. J. (2017). Walking the walk, talking the talk: Love languages, self-regulation,
and relationship satisfaction. Personal Relationships, 24(2), 280–290. https://doi-org
/10.1111/pere.12182
Egbert, N., & Polk, D. (2006). Speaking the language of relational maintenance: A validity test
of Chapman’s (1992) five love languages. Communication Research Reports, 23(1), 19–26.
https://doi-org. /10.1080/17464090500535822