It wasn’t always like that. There was a time when the words “love” and “language” were rarely used together, and certainly not as a locution. Then, three decades ago, Gary Chapman, a 50-year-old Baptist pastor with a doctorate in adult education, introduced the concept to the world with his seminal book “The Five Love Languages: The Secret of Enduring Love.”
Chapman explained that people have different ways of expressing and understanding love. To make your other half feel loved, you simply need to speak their language. As the book’s introduction notes:
“Your emotional love language and your spouse’s language may differ as much as Chinese from English. No matter how hard you try to express love in English, if your xx only understands Chinese, the two of you will never understand how much you love each other. “
Chapman based the five love languages on empirical evidence he discovered while working as a marriage counselor for more than 20 years at his church.
Languages are words of affirmation (verbal praise), quality time (doing something together and being mindful of the moment), receiving gifts (anything from a bouquet of flowers to more meaningful gifts), giving service (helping your partner with chores or preparing a meal) and physical touch (holding hands, having sex and cuddling).
In the years since the book was published, the term “love language” has come to be used so freely that it has cut itself off from its creator. It became a cultural phenomenon and was introduced as an indication of anything that brings a person joy.
“As much as I knew about love languages, I didn’t know the person behind them,” commented comedian Kasey Borger, who, with her fiancé James Folta, co-wrote a satirical list of new love languages for the website. McSweeney’s humor (example: “talk about getting to work”). “I didn’t even know her name.”
The cultural explosion was unexpected for Chapman, who is now 80 years old. “I’m just as surprised as you are,” he said in a recent interview. But despite all his enthusiasm, he doesn’t think anyone has discovered a sixth love language.
To him, all memes sound like “dialects,” or versions, of the five original languages. “I’ve seen some of the ideas proposed: you know, ‘the sixth love language is tacos’, and one guy said ‘the sixth love language is chocolate’. Well, if the person bought it, it’s a gift. It’s an act of service. I’m not dogmatic, but I think most ways to express love fall into one of these five options.”
“How did you know that about me?”
A year after graduating from Wheaton College in 1960, Chapman married Karolyn, who grew up in China Grove, North Carolina, like him, and attended the same church. When they first met, Chapman was dating her best friend.
In 1967 the couple moved to Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where he became a pastor and began teaching adult education classes covering practical advice on topics such as financial planning. In these courses, he talked about marriage and family, and many couples who were struggling came to him for advice, he said.
“I was kind of pushed to give counseling,” he said. “That wasn’t even part of my duties when I became a pastor.”
Chapman said that while in his professional life he helped other couples, his own marriage was going through difficult times. He and Karolyn argued furiously about unimportant things. Karolyn, for example, never closed drawers and closet doors, and that irritated him. And she expected him to do his fair share of the housework, which Chapman didn’t. “We didn’t know anything about conflict resolution,” he said.
“I told Karolyn that she looked beautiful, that I appreciated everything she did. I kept saying ‘I love you, I love you, I love you,'” he said. “But one night she said to me, ‘You keep saying you love me, but if you really love me, why don’t you help me?’
That was the “eureka” moment: Chapman realized that what he appreciated in a relationship was receiving praise (or words of affirmation), which he said he received from his parents as a child. This was not as important to his wife: she valued acts of service.
“Much of what I’ve written and the advice I give has been shaped by our life experience,” he said.
Chapman noticed that couples who sought his help at church seemed to have the same problem: they didn’t know how to express love in a way that the other person would appreciate. In one of the examples he included in the book, a woman came to his office frustrated because her husband kept putting off painting their bedroom walls.
He then suggested, “Next time your husband does anything nice, give him a verbal compliment. If he takes out the trash, for example, say, ‘Dan, I want you to know that I really appreciate you taking the garbage out.'” Three weeks later the woman returned to tell Chapman that the plan had worked. Her husband’s love language was kind words and positive affirmations.
The Baptist pastor was gathering his notes over time and looking for repeating patterns. He found that the things most people said they wanted from their partners fell into the five broad categories he would write about in his book. And in October 1992, “The Five Love Languages” was born.
The book made little publicity that first year, selling only about 8,400 copies. But little by little, more and more people started to buy it. “My publisher told me the book sells more copies with each passing year,” Chapman commented. According to the publisher, Moody Publishers, the book has sold over 20 million copies (including print, electronic and audio versions).
Today there are half a dozen versions aimed at diverse audiences, including “The Five Love Languages for Men”, “The Five Love Languages for Children”, “The 5 Love Languages Military Edition” in Portuguese) and even “The 5 Languages of Appreciation in the Workplace”.
Chapman hosts a weekly hour-long podcast and “Marriage Conferences,” one-day seminars held at churches across the United States to help couples understand the basics of love languages. About 1,000 people attended his most recent conference, which took place in Winston-Salem in April of this year.
He created a simple multiple-choice quiz to help people understand their own love language and that of their partners. Oprah Winfrey took the live quiz when he attended “Oprah’s Lifeclass” in 2013. Asked if she would appreciate it if her partner helped her clean the house, Oprah Winfrey stopped to think. And then she said to Chapman, who was sitting next to her and was amused by the answer, “I think cleaning the house is number one, two and three of the preliminaries.”
After a few more questions, Winfrey’s love language was revealed: words of affirmation. “Kind, encouraging, positive words are truly life-giving. This is so true. How did you know that about me?” she asked Chapman, apparently echoing what many couples have thought when they took the quiz themselves.
Arming couples with words
Among other prominent marital therapists, opinions about Chapman’s work are divided. Julie Gottman, a clinical psychologist and co-founder of the Gottman Institute in Seattle, said Chapman’s book “assumes that people are not able to learn different ways to express love.”
“The categories are shallow and rigid,” she said. “People are much more flexible than ‘The Five Love Languages’ assumes they are.”
Gottman used physical touch as an example. If a person is uncomfortable with intimacy, she said it would be important to understand why it makes the person uncomfortable.
“Maybe she was touched too little physically in early childhood or maybe she was touched too much,” she said. “Perhaps she was physically or sexually abused.”
However, she said, there are ways to introduce someone to physical contact that she feels are safe, affectionate and warm. Physical touch may not have been that person’s love language, but it can become their language. People can evolve in terms of how they express and receive love. The five languages are not immutable.
Another criticism leveled at Chapman’s work is that it is based entirely on observation of couples who have come to him for help. So far there is little scientific evidence to support his work. And her academic background and her doctorate are in anthropology and adult education, not psychology. “That’s what pisses me off,” Gottman said.
For Orna Guralnik, the lead psychologist on the “Couples Therapy” series, the lack of scientific evidence is not a deciding factor. “It’s what we call concrete validity: if it wasn’t useful to people, if it didn’t reflect something that matters, it would be gone already,” she said.
Many of the couples who come to Guralnik for therapy have read Chapman’s book or have a cursory understanding of his theory, she said. But for her, love languages are a MacGuffin: a device, usually an unimportant or seemingly random object, used in fiction to move the plot forward.
The five categories are not as important as what the theory as a whole communicates to people: that “the way they apprehend something themselves is not the way their partner processes things.”
Although the specialized literature is not robust, some researchers are beginning to analyze Chapman’s books and publish their studies in peer-reviewed journals.
A study published in 2006 concluded that the concept of five love languages is not simple to confirm if the languages are disconnected from each other. The study suggested, instead, that individuals are more likely to employ all five languages to varying degrees, rather than just one or the other.
In another study published this year, researchers at the University of Warsaw in Poland recruited 100 couples ages 17 to 58 who had been together for at least six months and asked them to rank their preferences among the five languages (rather than just identify one of the languages as their favorite) and their satisfaction with the relationship.
The researchers found that couples who appeared to speak each other’s love languages — that is, people who preferred to express love in ways their partners preferred to receive — reported feeling greater relationship satisfaction.
They also found that not only do people want their partners to communicate with them in their own love languages, but also that when you speak your partner’s love language, it “makes you feel more happiness in the relationship,” according to Maciej. Stolarski, one of the authors of the article.
Last August the Chapmans celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary. They went to dinner at the same restaurant in Winston-Salem they go to every year — an upscale steakhouse where they usually order their favorite dishes.
It took them just two years, Chapman said, to figure out how to get over their early marital problems. Today, although Karolyn still often leaves her drawers open, she is Chapman’s unofficial editor – she proofreads and corrects his manuscripts before he sends them out for publication. And she helps him keep his feet on the ground.
“I tell people, ‘Don’t tell him he’s famous,'” he explained.
And Chapman learned to do more housework, including cleaning up the kitchen after dinner, his wife said. “He’s great at it. These days I just leave it up to him.”
Translation by Clara Allain
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