{"id":21053,"date":"2024-04-03T16:48:02","date_gmt":"2024-04-03T23:48:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/?p=21053"},"modified":"2024-04-03T16:49:53","modified_gmt":"2024-04-03T23:49:53","slug":"more-about-love-languages","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2024\/04\/03\/more-about-love-languages\/","title":{"rendered":"More about love languages"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

I\u2019ve seen a few criticisms of the \u201clove languages\u201d concept recently, mostly in the form of people taking for granted that it\u2019s a bad and useless concept.<\/p>\r\n

And that keeps puzzling me, because the idea that different people have different modes and approaches that make them feel valued seems straightforwardly and obviously true to me.<\/p>\r\n

I think that a lot of the disconnect is that when people criticize love languages, they\u2019re often specifically criticizing the original version<\/a> that Gary Chapman came up with and continues to promote, in which there are exactly five love languages, and everyone has exactly one primary love language, and an online quiz can tell you which one is your primary one, and so on.<\/p>\r\n

But to me, the details of the Chapman model aren\u2019t at all the important or interesting part. I\u2019m fine with saying that Chapman\u2019s model is wrong; I just think that the focus on Chapman\u2019s model being wrong results in discarding the interesting and useful aspects of what I see as the core idea.<\/p>\r\n

I elaborated on some of this in a 2019 blog post<\/a> in which I listed a couple dozen kinds of interactions that I speculated could be seen as \u201cvalue languages\u201d\u2014things that make someone feel valued.<\/p>\r\n

I\u2019m now looking at some articles from the past couple of years (links below) that talk about scientific studies refuting the idea of love languages. But here, too, what the studies are testing and refuting are mostly specific to Chapman\u2019s model.<\/p>\r\n

The one thing that I find really surprising about the studies is that at least some of them apparently indicate that most people rate all five of Chapman\u2019s love languages equally. Part of why the \u201clove languages\u201d concept resonated so much for me when I first heard about it is that I do<\/em> strongly feel that some of them are much more important to me than others. (For example, I actively dislike receiving gifts. Whereas physical touch is hugely important to me, and no, that\u2019s not just a euphemism for sex.) And that\u2019s been true of most friends who I\u2019ve talked with about this stuff, too\u2014my experience has been that different people tend to feel significantly more valued by some kinds of interaction than by other kinds.<\/p>\r\n

So if it\u2019s really true that most people rate all forms of interaction as equally important in making them feel loved\/valued, then I guess I\u2019m just an outlier. But I\u2019m inclined to suspect that that\u2019s not really true, and that what\u2019s really going on in the research is that Chapman\u2019s set of five is phrased so generally that different people interpret the category labels differently.<\/p>\r\n

At any rate, one of the critics of the love languages concept, John Gottman, is quoted in one of the articles as saying that the important question is really this: \u201cWhat can I do to make you feel more loved now, and help me understand where you are right now?\u201d<\/p>\r\n

But to me, the underlying idea of these love\/value languages is just a generalization of that question\u2014it\u2019s asking \u201cWhat kinds of things tend in general to make you feel loved\/valued,\u201d which I feel can provide useful patterns and guidance to avoid having to ask the more-specific \u201cright now\u201d version of the question all the time.<\/p>\r\n

(Note: This topic is a little tense-making for me, and I feel a little defensive about it, because I brought it up in couples therapy shortly before Mary Anne broke up with me. So please try to be gentle in your comments here, especially if you feel the need to criticize the ideas I\u2019m talking about or this post.)<\/p>\r\n

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Links:<\/p>\r\n