The 5 Love Language – by Gary Chapman

With Valentines Day coming up, we thought we’d delve into The 5 Love Languages so you can heighten the experience with your date or your partner.

Psychologists have concluded that the need to feel loved is a primary human emotional need – without it you will be emotionally and socially challenged. However, we all experience the feeling of love differently and we all have certain things that make us feel loved. Gary Chapman has broken this down in to 5 ‘love languages’ – we all have our own language, and we often can’t understand or speak other languages. Every partner needs to feel loved which best communicated through one of the 5 Love Languages.

#1 – Words of Affirmation

#2 –  Quality Time

#3 – Receiving Gifts

#4 – Acts of Service

#5 – Physical touch

TAKE THE TEST: You can take Gary Chapman’s “Love Languages” quizzes here: https://www.5lovelanguages.com/quizzes/

The 5 Love Languages Summary

  Psychologists have concluded that the need to feel loved is a primary human emotional need. Among the basic emotion needs, none is more basic than the need for love and affection – this is the need to sense that he or she belongs and is wanted.

    Most of us enter our relationships by way of the ‘in love experience’. In your mind your partner is the most wonderful person you’ve ever met, “I know it’s crazy, but I’ve never been so happy!”

  The physical characteristics and personally traits creates enough electric shock to trigger our ‘love alert’ system. Sometimes we lose the tingle early, other times it gets stronger on each date. Eventually we get convinced that this is the real thing, we’re falling in love.

 The 5 Love languages show us that unfortunately the ‘in love’ experience is fiction, not fact. Eventually we will descend from the clouds and plant our feet on the Earth again. Our eyes become open and we see the warts on the other person, their sharp sense of humour now wounds, those little bumps we overlooked when in love become huge mountains. 

   This ‘real’ kind of love is emotional in nature, but not obsessional. It is a love that unites reason and emotion, it involves an act of will and an act of discipline, and it recognizes the need for personal growth. It is a choice to expand energy and effort to benefit the other person. It is knowing that his or her life is enriched by your effort. It doesn’t require the euphoria of the in love experience, but it needs the euphoria to run its course. 

  When you’re spouse’s emotional love tank is full, and she feels secure in your love, the whole world looks bright and your spouse will move to reach her highest potential in life. Garry is convinced that keeping this emotional love tank full is as important to marriage as maintaining proper oil level in an automobile. 

The 5 Love Languages

You’ve probably had the ‘in love experience’. When you’re in it, you think that your partner is the most wonderful person that you’ve ever met. You only see your partner’s best characteristics. You’re riding high, floating in the clouds… but eventually you plonk back to planet Earth. With your eyes now fully open, you start to see their warts. We’ve all got personal blemishes, but those little speed bumps you previously overlooked now seem like insurmountable peaks.

‘Real love’ is something different to this ‘in love experience’. It takes a lot more emotional effort and empathy to serve the needs of your partner. If you want to sustain real love, you need to learn your partner’s Love Language. We’re not talking about learning a bit of Spanish to kink up your role play, we’re talking about learning effective new methods of communication.

Let’s use the analogy of a vehicle to explain the state of a healthy relationship. When your emotional love tank is full, you feel great. When your partner’s emotional love tank is full, you feel even better. They feel secure and in love. The whole world looks bright to them. You’re on their team, helping them achieve their highest potential in life. But when the tank moves towards empty, you’re in the doghouse. Your relationship will deteriorate and you might be sleeping on the couch. For an amazing relationship, keep one eye on the tank at all times. You need to ensure that you’re keeping their tank full. The only way to do that is to speak their Love Language.

You might think you’re expressing your love and appreciation, but if you’re speaking Dutch and they can only speak Japanese, your partner will feel unloved. You might think that you’re opening up, being vulnerable, sharing your love, giving all that you can give… but they’re not even noticing it. It is rare that both partners will have the same love language, so it will take some effort for both parties to learn to speak a new language.

Words of Affirmation

For some, words can make or break a day. They can drain the love tank or fill it to the brim.

If this is your partner’s love language, try sprinkling these into your words. Verbal compliments and appreciation go a long way. It could be as straightforward as sentences like these:

• You’re looking pretty sharp in that suit
• WOW – you look incredible in that dress – WOW
• I really appreciate how you’re on time to pick me up from work
• I really admire how you’re able to connect with all different types of people when we go to church
• I want you to know I don’t take that for granted
• You’re really good at (fill in the black), you should do it more!

For bonus points, make sure you’re giving these words of affirmation in front of others. If your partner’s come over for dinner, make sure you lather on the praise and whip out a few words of affirmation so that everyone can hear. To go one step further, tell your mother-in-law how good your wife is. Your mother-in-law will tell your wife all the good things you said about her (probably with a little extra salt and pepper as well), plus your mother-in-law will think you’re an incredible partner to her daughter. Double points!

For those whose love language is ‘words of affirmation’, words are a tool that can cut both ways. Be careful what you say, a big failure could be saying things like “are you sure you want to wear that out tonight?” or “well don’t you look fabulous, I wouldn’t have the courage to wear my hair like that”.

Quality Time

Some partners need to hang out with you. This doesn’t mean putting on an episode of Lost to zombie out in front of the TV – the TV has your focus, not your partner! Quality time means giving your undivided attention. It’s not just being in the same room as your partner, it means breaking free from all distractions and giving them your focus.

You don’t need to gaze into each other’s eyes all night. It doesn’t mean that all day every day has to be spent doting on their every need. It can be as simple as sitting down on the couch (without any devices) and looking at each other while you talk about your day. Or, go for a 15 minute walk around the neighbourhood and speak about what’s on your mind.

Time is a precious commodity. We only have a fixed amount of time. If this is your partner’s love language, commiting just a  few hours of your week will go a long way to filling up their love tank.

Receiving Gifts

A gift is something you can hold in your hand and say ‘they were thinking of me’. The gift is a physical symbol of your love, it doesn’t matter how much it cost. If this is your partner’s love language, understand that you don’t need to be buying fancy watches or expensive jewellery. A more important indicator than the pricetag is the amount of thought you put into it.

Maybe on your evening run you grab a neighbour’s flower. Or when you’re on your lunch break, you grab a $3 trinket that reminds you of your last overseas trip together.

Acts of Service

Do the things that you know your spouse would like you to do. You seek to please them by serving them, to express your love by doing things for them. Cooking a meal, setting the table, emptying the dishwasher, keeping the car clean, paying the bills, trimming the shrubs or making the beds. They require thought, planning, time, effort and energy. It might seem like a minor inconvenience to you at the time, but three or four minutes out of your day could have powerful leverage over how it makes your partner feel.

This doesn’t mean spending all day doing chores, cooking them food, giving them foot massages. It takes empathy and understanding to work out what is truly important to them. You could spend all day cleaning the house and your partner’s love tank could still be empty if this isn;t what they needed for you. Conversely, you can whip out the hedge trimmer and spend two minutes shaving the edge off the bush and fill up the tank to the brim, if this was the correct act. It’s less about the act or the outcome, and more about taking the time to think about their needs.

Physical Touch

Physical touch includes holding hands, kissing, embracing or touching. Unlike the other senses, touch is not limited to one localized area of the body. Tiny tactile receptors are located throughout the body. When these nerves or receptors are touched, they carry impulses to the brain. It causes pain or pleasure, and can be interpreted as loving or hostile.

Touching your spouse on the shoulder as you walk through a room only takes a moment, but it helps them feel your love. The same goes for holding hands as you walk from the carpark to the supermarket, or putting a hand on their leg as you sit on the couch, or taking a short break from your work by standing up from your desk to take 30 seconds to give them a hug. For bonus points, learn a few massage techniques – a simple little hand massage, neck massage or back massage could do wonders and add a lot of fuel to the tank.

Using the last few pages, you can identify your own love language, then use it as the basis of a discussion with your partner to determine their’s.

As you read through these, you might have recognised yourself in one of these descriptions. Most blokes will instantly think that their Love Language is physical touch, which they think is code for ‘more sex’. That’s what we thought ours was at first too. But it turns out that for us our language is ‘words of affirmation’ and ‘acts of service’ respectively.

If you couldn’t work out your love language just by reading the above descriptions, here are a few other thinking tool that might help you:

• Think about what you ask for the most (what do you nag your partner about). If you get pissed off that they never do the dishes, then acts of service might be yours. If you always ask them to bring you home flowers after work, maybe receiving gifts is your love language.
• Think about what hurts the most when you don’t get it. Whatever you’re craving, or whatever upsets you when it’s missing, is a good indicator.
• Think about what you express the most. If you’re always showering your spouse with praise, then you might fall into words of affirmation. If you’re always booking in date nights and doing the planning and organising, then quality time is probably you. We’re most comfortable with our own language, so whatever language you use the most to try to show love is probably your language.

And of course, even more important than getting an understanding of your own language is identifying that of your romantic partner. If you can learn how to speak their language, you may take your relationship to the next level.

last 3 mins of episode ads some extra juice if needed (look for what hurts you most if it’s missing, looking for the negative, think about what you ASK most often and nag them about, think about what you express the most)