Love Languages: A Musing

            In 1992, pastor Gary Chapman released The Five Love Languages: The Secret to Love that Lasts[1], an addition to a collection of self-help books detailing ways to grow and mend marriages and relationships. In this collection, he asserts there are five distinct ways in which people show and understand love; Physical Touch, Words of Affirmation, Quality Time, Gifts, and Acts of Service. It is his opinion that every person will favor one form of communication over another, and that couples with matching love languages (or an understanding of one another’s languages) will have a more successful relationship. While there is no scientific or statistical data proving the existence of love languages or their importance in relationships, there is an abundance of anecdotal evidence that has slingshot the idea of Love Languages into cultural relevance, over thirty years after their initial inception.

            While I find myself doubting whether love can be diluted into five simple languages, I will admit that as someone analytic in nature, there is an appeal in putting love into neat boxes. It makes the act of love bite-sizeable, and easy to track, like you could enter it all into a spreadsheet and track love on a graphable line (my dream!). As if to say, I know my friends love me because they spent x amount of time with me, because they gave me y gifts, and touched me z times. You could turn love into an equation, a loving word problem. Would you be able to calculate who loves you the most? Or could you figure out the best way to show love to another person? Like, Annabel likes to receive gifts, Simon prefers to be hugged, Freddy wants to sit quietly together on the couch. Could you maximize your love input and output? If love is a job, then I want to make six figures.

            There are tons of online quizzes and articles meant to tell you your primary love language, and depending on the day, I tend to swing between Words of Affirmation and Quality Time. The assertion is that your primary love language is how you best give and receive love, but for me I feel that my showing of love speaks more in Physical Touch and Gift Giving. Not to say I don’t often—and loudly—tell my friends that I love them, but that sometimes those acts feel like they are more for me than for them. I know they know that I love them, I tell them approximately ten thousand times a day. But sometimes, perhaps selfishly, I tell others that I love them just so I might hear it back, and I often find that I give compliments that I would want paid back to me in some degree or another. Not to say that I don’t mean my declarations with my whole chest (I absolutely do), but that sometimes I hope to feed myself when feeding others, like my love is a pizza that I fully intend to serve to my friends but cannot help hoping that they save the slice with the extra mushrooms for me.

            But lately I’ve been wondering about the disconnect between my giving and receiving. I wonder about the conditioning we all experience growing up, especially those of us raised to be women, often being told that our acts of service and what we can provide in labor is the highest form of love. I wonder about the influence of religion, of traditional marriage, and the expectation placed on people to have children, for men to provide financially, for women to provide maternally. I wonder about their influence on my giving of affection, my understanding of how best to show others that I care about them. I also have been considering my existence as a person on the neurodivergent spectrum and how, as per usual, I tend to think about simple things way too hard. I have had to observe how others show affection to figure out how to show mine, because my natural preferences didn’t seem to work. So, I watched TV and movies, watched how the big declaration of love came with a dozen roses or a key to a house, how love was often sealed with a kiss, with sex. And now, I fill my friend’s hands with trinkets—rocks from beaches, notebooks that remind me of them, little things that I think they would like, and I hold their hands, touch their shoulders, press kisses to their cheeks. If I had grown up in a household with more traditional values though, perhaps my love would have come out in washing dishes, folding laundry, paying for meals. It’s interesting to think about how we love, and how we could have loved, not less, but different.

            But all this musing on my love aside, let’s talk about the birds. I began writing this blog with a purpose, to compare our human acts of love to the avians, to write about their love language and how we might learn from them (and it’s coming, fret not!). But I find this line of questioning important. We are, by nature, social creatures, meant for community, meant for connection. How we communicate is of utmost importance, and while I might not fully advocate for a drastic simplification of the language of love, I cannot deny that it makes things a little easier for someone like me, who needs direct language in order to understand things, and who likes feelings to be quantifiable and ready for analysis.

            So, my challenge to you (should you chose to accept it): Consider the language of your love, how you give it, how you receive it. Consider each act individually, how have you been socialized to love in the way that you do? Are you denying yourself your true preference for love in favor of what is easy, what is more socially accepted? And how might you speak this language back to yourself? Write a letter to yourself in the language of your love (not necessarily literally). If you favor acts of service, make yourself a meal, if you desire quality time, sit with yourself quietly. Speak the love back into yourself, bask in it, taste it on the tongue.

[1] Chapman, Gary D. (1992). The Five Love Languages: The Secret to Love that Lasts. Chicago, IL. Northfield Publishing.