The Questionable Origin of Love Languages
Are love languages just Christian propaganda?
I’ve only had one partner who talked about love languages. “My love language is gifts,” he told me before our first holiday season together. One day, we went into a very expensive store, where I tried on a beautiful dress. That Christmas, he gave it to me. I asked him how he afforded it, and he said he’d done TaskRabbit jobs all December to save up the money. It was a complete surprise, and I loved it. I, on the other hand, had asked him what he needed, since I hate nothing more than someone spending a lot of money on a present that I end up not using. He said a new bedspread. I got him the nicest one I could afford from a fancy store he liked, in my best approximation of his style. He returned it.
We had a very amicable break up about a year later and met up many years later while I was dating my now-husband. I shared that I didn’t know what to get my current partner for his upcoming birthday, and we brainstormed. I mentioned my husband boxed; my ex advised I buy him a pair of decorative antique boxing gloves.
This was the day that I realized there was a certain catch-22 aspect to love languages: it offers a veneer of scientific objectivity but is actually just another way to talk about relationship concepts that are just as subjective and changeable as if we didn’t have any framework at all. Yes, my ex rightfully prided himself on giving good gifts, but I knew for a fact that my husband would have no clue what to do with unusable antique boxing gloves (and would probably resent having to do the work of finding a way to display them). When my ex and I had been together, we tried to speak the same love language of gifts. However, I really only loved the dress he got me because I was so touched by the time and effort he put into getting it: if he had been a rich man, it wouldn’t have meant much to me at all. Likewise, my favorite present my husband has gotten me was a marble mortar and pestle because I mentioned wanting to make handmade pesto. I, apparently, love a functional present–so, of course, my bedspread-giving self was a mismatch for the antique boxing glove-type. Yes, my ex and I had ostensibly been speaking the same language, but we were clearly talking in different dialects.
While I came to this conclusion about the possibly bullshitty nature of love languages some time ago, it feels like I’m in the minority. People currently talk about love languages as just another identification or compatibility metric, like your zodiac sign, your Meyers-Briggs, or your enneagram. It’s been memed in the way that other ambiguously self-identifying concepts are. Just as we problematically got tweets like “Jennifer Lawrence is my spirit animal,” we also get “My love language is charcuterie boards” or “My love language is the 2004 cinematic masterpiece Shrek 2.” “My Love Language is…” is even a prompt on Hinge. Given the ubiquity of love languages, I found myself wondering what exactly about it seemed off to me—then I saw a TikTok claiming that the whole concept was created by a pastor to encourage women to submit to their husbands.
Sadly, this sounded completely plausible, but as I’ve learned the hard way, one cannot take TikTokkers at their factual word. So, I decided to do a deep dive into the theory and history of love languages. Are love languages actually just Christian propaganda, and whether they are or not–is there any truth to them?
The five basic love languages are simple: words of affirmation, quality time, receiving gifts, acts of service, and physical touch. While these language concepts themselves are inherently problematic, let’s start with some background. The first thing I discovered about love languages is that they were not, as many believe, the result of some sociological or psychological study; they are indeed the brainchild of Baptist minister Dr. Gary Chapman. He is a “doctor” not because he’s a psychiatrist or a doctor of psychology, but because he has a Ph.D in adult education from the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. According to the school’s website, this degree appears primarily geared toward preparation for Christian ministry. True, in his role as a minister, Chapman has counseled couples experiencing marital issues, but he notably has no actual therapeutic or research background. This counseling is what inspired him to write his 1992 book “The Five Love Languages,” published by Christian publisher Moody Publishers under the designation of “Christian Literature.”
With all that in mind, reader–I read the book.
The experience started off markedly unpromising, as one of the first pages is dedicated to clarifying which version of the bible is being used for scripture quotations, implying some heavy biblical quotation to come. The first chapter, titled “What Happens to Love After the Wedding?,” seemed equally inauspicious to me as someone who hates old-timey views about honeymoon phases and the “reality” of marriage immediately and inevitably changing your relationship (it’s 2023, and we should really know enough about each other before taking the plunge for that not to be the case). While Dr. Chapman’s ensuing views on marital difficulties do feel a bit influenced by some “men are from Mars, women are from Venus”-type ideology that seems more appropriate for the ‘60s than the ‘90s, he does in this first chapter identify the central problem of communication in many relationships, with the bonus acknowledgment of how different childhood and life experiences can lead to discrepancies in communication style. However, he then immediately claims that the truths of these macro observations can be addressed by learning the one simple hack of the five love languages–and thus begins our overly-simplistic journey into the heart of Chapman’s ideal heterosexual Christian marriage.
The book goes on in this vein: a constant whiplash of basic yet generally accurate observations about relationships, swiftly followed by particulate yet unsubstantiated advice relating to the very narrow “love language” framework–sometimes doing backflips to do so–with a sprinkling of downright horrible takes. A lot of it reads like the most basic advice regarding the absolute bare minimum guidelines for human interaction–i.e., “communication is good,” “don’t hit people.” However, a lot of people–let’s be real, mainly straight men–do seem to have made it pretty far in life without picking this stuff up, so you can hardly fault Chapman’s pessimism about humanity in including it. Likewise, we do need to give him credit for his concept of keeping a filled “love tank” by proactively making sure that your loved one feels loved by acknowledging their needs. I’m sure we’ve had that youthful relationship with someone who was amazed we actually wanted to interact more than just watching them play video games (thanks, high school boyfriend!), so again, while much of Chapman’s advice seems painfully basic, it might be genuinely helpful for a lot of people to hear.
Despite the ideological solidity of these overarching concepts, Chapman’s advice sadly starts to unravel when it leans too heavily on his love languages theory. We can appreciate his attempt to create a snappy, easily digestible listicle of ways to frame your marital issues, but unfortunately, relationships just aren’t that simple, and his analyses almost always miss too much context to be widely applicable. It feels like any woman on the internet today would be able to pick out a million problems from just reading the language list alone. “Receiving gifts?” Have fun telling someone that’s your love language without getting called a heartless gold-digger. “Physical touch?” As a former divorce lawyer, the number of times the accusation of “you don’t love me if you’re not having sex with me” has been levied by a husband against a wife will forever depress me. The veneer of pseudo-scientific finality of Chapman’s theory makes it ripe for unhelpful or downright abusive applications, in the same way Jonah Hill famously weaponized therapy talk to exercise coercive control over his then-girlfriend. While Chapman does emphasize the importance of speaking your spouse’s love language to make them feel cared for, he certainly doesn’t do enough to caution against how these languages can be abused, and at times actively advocates for clearly problematic applications.
An example of this is Chapman’s story about a woman named Ann, who has a husband described as extremely emotionally abusive. Their conversation starts with Ann asking Chapman if it is possible to love someone you hate (girl, RUN). Chapman responds by making Ann read bible passages about loving your enemies. After learning that Ann’s husband’s love language is sexual physical touch, Chapman tells the poor woman that to save her marriage, she has to sleep with her horrible husband twice a week. Ann replies that she finds it “hard to be sexually responsive” to someone who “ignores her”–to which Chapman responds that many women feel that way, and she must simply rely on her Christian faith to get through it. Chapman wraps up this lovely anecdote by saying that Ann took his advice and that there was a tremendous change in her husband’s attitude, with the husband swearing to his friends that Chapman is a miracle worker. We don’t hear how Ann felt about it.
This exposes the central problem with Chapman’s theory. On the surface, it’s about putting effort into communication and learning what your spouse needs. Once we get a little deeper, the advice starts devolving into reliance on scripture and an insidious but profound inability to acknowledge the gendered dynamics and issues at play in heterosexual marriages, which are, of course, the only kind he addresses. For example, let’s take one of Chapman’s many anecdotes that involve laundry (it’s truly amazing how often laundry and dishes arise as marital issues in this book without Chapman ever acknowledging issues of gendered divisions of domestic labor). A husband tells Chapman that he doesn’t like the “love tank” theory because asking his wife what he could do to fill her tank gets him answers like “help with laundry” when he expected an answer like “have sex.” Chapman responds to this man by saying that for this guy’s wife, laundry IS just as pleasurable as having sex.
This is the kind of advice that makes you wonder if Chapman is indeed married to a human woman, or at least how much he’s been paying one to stay married to him. There is no acknowledgment of the fact that the wife in the anecdote probably can’t relax and even begin to think of things that are actually pleasurable to her until necessary chores like laundry are done. Nope, Chapman has assumed that she just really, orgasmically loves getting help with laundry–not that she needs the bare minimum level of partnership and support from her husband to keep the home running and has to put her own needs second to this. Here’s where we can see how the basic categories themselves are problematic. Can we really just say that someone’s main method of feeling affection is “acts of service” aka getting help with chores, without acknowledging that women are disproportionately tasked with necessary domestic labor? Can we genuinely analogize sexual pleasure with simply getting help from your partner in taking care of his own home and belongings?
Likewise, can we really relegate something like “quality time” to an optional category? What even is a relationship without quality time? Co-workers? Given how often the women in Chapman’s book seem to be the ones pushing for quality time from husbands who don’t see the need, it appears clear that we’re dealing with men who actually seem to view their marriages as co-worker relationships, and aren’t bothered at all by the lack of actual friendship or non-coital romance with their wives. To his credit, Chapman seems to recognize that these men are missing a fundamental level of knowledge about how to interact with their wives as people, and in the “quality time” section goes into detail on the basics of having conversations with tips like “make eye contact,” "read body language,” and “don’t interrupt.” In his usual manner, he then swings to oddly specific advice in the form of date suggestions, including the suggestion to go have a picnic at the local cemetery to “eat your sandwiches and thank God that you are still alive.” (I low-key love a good cemetery moment, but creepy as I am, I can definitely acknowledge that it’s an odd activity to present as having ubiquitous appeal.)
Chapman’s advice has many grains of truth, and it would be wrong to say otherwise. It’s true that some people need more verbal affirmation than others; many people would benefit from the basics of learning to converse; childhood does play a big role in how we learn to recognize and receive love. But again, his actual theoretical framework just doesn’t work. For example, he spends a lot of time in the “receiving gifts” section talking about “the gift of your physical presence” while explaining to a man why his wife was hurt that he played softball instead of being with her on important days like their child’s birth and her mother’s funeral. First, this is patently a bit stupid in that this idea of “the gift of your physical presence” just seems like an extension of “quality time” more than “receiving gifts." Second, the fact that this poor woman is being told to view her husband’s presence and support in the hospital during the life-threatening event that is the birth of their child as a “gift”–that her expectation is akin to wanting a new SodaStream for Hanukkah–demonstrates some classic Chapman inability to recognize 1) the disproportionate emotional and physical labor of women in heterosexual relationships, and 2) that the actions of a functioning, supportive partnership should be at the very core of a relationship–not an optional bonus activity you can engage in occasionally like a nice cemetery picnic.
To be quite frank, much of the book seems to be written with a very specific type of marriage in mind, a traditional, heterosexual one where there was absolutely no communication or real friendship, and no expectation of participation from men in domestic labor. This makes sense in the context of the book: it was written in the 90’s for Boomer couples with Greatest Generation parents. For example, Chapman talks about a couple who exchange lists of what the other could do to make them feel more loved. His included things like “have supper started when I get home”; hers had things like “I wish he would wash the car every week instead of expecting me to do it.” Chapman simply tells them that while doing each other’s lists is optional, it would help their spouse feel loved (ignoring the fact that things like changing a baby’s diapers - on her list, of course - are decidedly not optional). The husband says he’s fine with washing the car and mowing the lawn, as his father did those things, but doesn’t seem as sure about diaper changing and vacuuming. Chapman points out that while this man’s father didn’t change diapers and vacuum, it’s just what will make his wife feel loved–as though wanting a partner in completing necessary household tasks was just a whimsical caprice of this specific woman.
Maybe it was radical in the 90s to suggest that a man should be helping with diapers; the couples described in the book certainly act like this is the case. Perhaps Chapman was indeed the best husband of all the other dudes in the parish at the time. What is undeniable, though, is that this book was first popularized in the 90s, when the main marrying and married age was made up of Boomers–who are now the most divorced generation of all time. Clearly, if Chapman’s advice was a sign of the times, it didn’t cover quite enough bases to result in long-term marriages that could weather these modern times. One reason for this is that the love languages theory seems to encourage tolerance of what might be just profound incompatibility. The idea that you should save your marriage by muscling yourself into spending time with your “quality time”-loving spouse doesn’t exactly paint a picture of a couple that shares the same values and interests, or even particularly likes each other in the first place. As the trend of late-in-life divorce increases to almost epidemic proportions, it’s clear that while the same “stick it out, make it work” view on marriage that underlies Chapman’s work kept people trying for a long time, it still wasn’t enough in the end.
Probably the most charitable view of Chapman’s work is that it was an easily understood marital framework for a generation that didn’t have much of a model for real partnerships. Boomers were more likely to have Betty-and-Don-Draper parents who rarely existed in the same societal sphere. When Boomers grew up, and their households were more likely to have working co-parents, Chapman’s fundamental basics were likely pretty necessary lessons. Today, this isn’t the case, and we can look a bit more critically at Chapman’s work. He has no psychiatry, psychology, or therapy degrees or experience. Love languages have no scientific backing and have been time and again refuted by science as any kind of metric for relationship compatibility. Chapman is extremely religious and anti-LGBTQ+, having stated in a Q&A that any pairing outside of man and woman is “outside of [the] primary design of God.” His vast oeuvre following his first book has the distinctive stench of cashing out: The 5 Languages of Appreciation in the Workplace, The 5 Love Languages of Singles,The 5 Love Languages of Teenagers, The 5 Love Languages - Military Edition, and on and on. Given that the closest he’s gotten to therapeutic experience is informal Christian marriage counseling, it’s difficult to see how he has the credentials to be writing about workplaces and teenagers. At least most of his other books have stayed within his only real area of expertise, aka Christianity. However, one specific religion is hardly a worldview that is applicable to all human experience, so it’s hard to believe that his comparatively secular books wouldn’t reflect his most fundamental viewpoints. He even has a book called Covenant Marriage that guides couples on how to view marriage as an unbreakable contract above all–containing, I’m assuming, the exact kind of advice he was doling out to poor, abused Ann, who probably just needed a divorce.
Overall, it’s hard not to conclude that whatever the author’s intentions, love languages are not the overarching, silver-bullet framework people act like they are. For example, in putting concepts like “receiving gifts” and “quality time”--which he himself defines as encompassing such basic things as “meaningful conversation”--on the same plane, his framework trivializes non-optional basics for a fulfilling and functional relationship. Equating helping with chores or listening to your partner to giving gifts or compliments is simply not a correct way to view the hierarchy of necessary relationship behaviors. Likewise, although Chapman makes a point to say that saying your love language is physical touch because you enjoy sex is a false equivalency, this has done nothing to affect the love languages’ legacy, of hordes of men on Hinge listing their love language as “physical touch” for explicitly sexual reasons (and unfortunately, possibly weaponizing it in relationships just as Chapman did against Ann).
The good news is, even though we might not have left the “love language” language in the past, we might be leaving behind the problematic aspects of its original iteration. By far, the most popular love language on Hinge is “quality time,” which seems to show the younger generation’s acknowledgment that a relationship should involve some element of spending time together instead of simply existing under the same roof for procreation purposes. Nevertheless, we should all remain aware of the realities of that original iteration and the man who propounded it. While I can’t find any evidence that Chapman wrote the book with the intention of encouraging women to submit, as TikTok was claiming, his personal beliefs–and massive blind spot about the realities of marriage for women–are enough for me to personally not be able to take his theories very seriously. However, most people who have used the phrase “love language” have no awareness of the above, and I don’t condemn them for this. Clearly, given how much society at large has resonated and run with Chapman’s concept, there was a hole in our vernacular for describing discrete methods of expressing and receiving affection. And just as you don’t need to believe in astrology to find zodiac signs a fun and useful shorthand for describing personality types, love languages can simply be a colloquial addition to our constant quest for better communication.
This is where I’ve landed: If recognizing the concept of love languages helps you feel more love and improves your communication, go for it. If someone is using the concept to make you feel like you’re failing, to control you, to gaslight you, or any other negative scenario–reject that as bullshit. Take what serves you, listen to your gut, and use whatever language you want–just make sure it’s one that leads towards love marked by partnership, respect, and friendship, not just mid-century grudging tolerance.