If you’ve ever proclaimed that your love language is acts of service while staring directly at an overflowing trash can, you’ve turned a 1992 self-help book into leverage. And that’s not the point.
That book is Gary Chapman’s The Five Love Languages, which sorted affection into five categories: physical touch, quality time, words of affirmation, acts of service, and gifts. The idea took off like wildfire, and it started getting applied to literally everything. Venmo once sent customers an email with the subject line “Security is our love language.” Self-help had made it to fintech.
There’s some research behind the general idea that people have preferences for how they’re loved. One study of 100 couples found higher relationship and sexual satisfaction when partners gave each other the kinds of affection they preferred, especially touch and time together, Psychology Today reported.
What the Five Love Languages Gets Wrong
The interesting part wasn’t that couples had matching preferences, though; it’s just that happier partners were willing to offer something that didn’t necessarily come naturally to them.
That’s where researchers start pushing back on the five-language idea.
“We were very skeptical about the love languages idea, so we decided to review the existing studies on it,” Emily Impett, a psychology professor at the University of Toronto Mississauga, said in a university release. Her team’s 2024 review found little evidence that people actually fall into five distinct categories, or that matching with someone who shares yours makes a relationship happier.
UC Davis psychologist Paul Eastwick was even less charitable. “There’s no evidence for ‘matching’ whatsoever, and there is no shortcut to meaningful and effective communication,” he told Live Science.
There’s also the issue of who Chapman was looking at when he came up with the idea. Impett noted that his observations came from “a sample of white, religious, mixed-gender, traditional couples,” which is a very pigeonholed group of humanity for a theory that now gets applied to basically everyone. Her team suggested thinking about relationships more like a balanced diet, with different kinds of care filling different needs.
Love languages are fine if they help two people talk. They can also become a very “therapy-speak” way to avoid the fact that your partner has already told you what they want.
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