Beyond the 5 Love Languages
In this episode, Libby talks about love languages and how understanding your love language and the love languages of those that you love can transform your relationships for the better and help everyone love and appreciate each other more fully.
Transcript
How do you like to show love to the people in your life? And do you know what makes each of your people feel loved? Or do you assume that all you need to do is follow the golden rule? That's what we learned when we were young, that the thing to do is show love in the way that you like to be loved. But does that always work? Maybe you run into a situation where you were trying to show love to someone and they just weren't able to receive it, or really feel it. If that's something you've experienced, then you definitely wanna tune into this episode. I'm going to explain one simple concept that can radically unlock more love in your life.
So what is this simple concept that can unlock more love in your life? Okay. Some of you probably can guess what I'm gonna say. I am talking about love languages. Love languages is a concept coined by Gary Chapman who wrote a book called the five love languages. Chapman developed this idea in his work counseling couples, as part of being a pastor in a Baptist church in Chapman's book, he states that there are five categories or languages that people employ to feel and express love. Those five love languages are one receiving gifts. Two quality time, three words of affirmation, four acts of service, and five physical touch. The book goes into exhaustive detail about all the different ways. These love languages can actually present in relationships and offers ways to figure out your partner's love language, which in the book includes the way someone you love expresses love to others and analyze what they complain about most often and what they request from you.
Most often, Chapman suggests that people tend to naturally give love in a way that they prefer to receive love. And that means you can run into trouble. If there's a mismatch of love languages between loved ones. If your partners love languages, gifts, and acts of service. When what you need is words of affirmation and physical touch. You both may be working hard to love each other, but both of you may end up in a relationship where you both feel deprived of the love that you can truly feel, but potentially you can turn all of that around by coming to an understanding of those differences. Gary Chapman has expanded this idea of love languages into not just one but five books total, including five love languages with children, with singles in the workplace and in the military personally, I don't think you need to read any of these books to use the concept of love languages in your relationships.
I also don't think you need to do a lot of exhaustive investigative work to figure out your partner's love languages. Rather, I encourage you to just sort out what your love languages are and then invite your partner to do the same and then have a conversation about it. Compare notes. A reason I, by far prefer this method is that it involves way less guesswork and mind reading. And also the truth is not everyone actually does show love in the way that they want to receive it. They may show love in a way that, that they were taught to or possibly even in the way that they are guessing that you want. So instead of getting caught up in that guesswork, I'd encourage you to spend some time reflecting on the things that others have done for you in your life, which have made you feel truly loved.
And then also think about the things that you truly like doing and with your partner, as you make the mental list, you can probably start to sort these things into these five categories and get a sense for what your primary love languages are. Remember when I talked about how my partners like to make me tea as an evening ritual, well, that's an act of service. Love languages can, can be a truly helpful concept, especially if sometimes you feel like the ways you express love, just don't land with someone you care about, or if you're not really getting shown love in the ways that you long for, for example, I really thrive on words of affirmation. However, one of my partners early on in, our relationship really wasn't any good at doing things like paying compliments or offering praise. And when I would offer those things to him, he really couldn't take them in.
Sometimes my compliments would outright embarrass him. What I used to do was get annoyed with him that he didn't take any of my compliments. And I would feel like he didn't really love me because he wasn't saying so in a way that I needed to hear it, my story was that he should know the right things to say, and that he should be able to take in the love that I was giving him. He tended to feel that words were hollow and that actions were where it really counts our positions left. Both of us feeling a bit disappointed and not really seen or understood, enter the love languages concept. And guess what? I was able to more accept that compliments and praise just, weren't a language that was easy for him to speak to me. And I was also able to see more clearly and receive better the ways that he was showing love, which was often through acts of service and physical touch.
And he was able to understand how deeply important words of affirmation were for me. And so he worked on both receiving the words I had for him and understanding how much that meant to me and on how to give better compliments and verbal acknowledgment and praise when I needed it. Our relationship has dramatically improved as a result. It wasn't without work and effort, but it's been really worth it. What really helped was not only that, we were able to identify our love languages and tell each other, and be able to acknowledge where we had those differences and learn to accept each other's love languages better, but we were also willing to hear and make adjustments to our own behavior so that we were loving each other more in the way that the other felt it so often with love, we tend to just simply accept what's being offered to us rather than asking for something that suits us better.
Many of us are indoctrinated with this concept that giving our partner information about how to love us better is at best needy and at worst demanding, or somehow like cheating that our partner is just supposed to or be able to figure it out. But how often have you been in a situation where you felt like you, you were sure you were letting someone down and you just wished they would just tell you what they really wanted and tell you what you're doing. Right. And tell you what you're doing wrong. But then I can't tell you how many times I've heard, someone's say, well, it doesn't count that she did what I wanted because I had to ask, this is such a wild concept to me. I personally love doing things for people that I know they actually want. It feels so good for me to be asked for something and then do it and then receive the gratitude for having done it.
But so many of us just don't like to ask, I have a lot more to say on this topic, but I'll leave it for another episode. Just suffice to say that love languages can be a really useful concept that sort of gives you permission to ask, because really if you don't clue your partner into your love languages, they may not be able to figure it out because they're speaking a totally different language. Now, for those of you, for whom love languages are not a totally new concept. I wanna offer you some deeper stuff to consider in practice. First of all, Chapman wants us all to identify just one primary love language, and then maybe one secondary one. And what I see a lot of people doing when they talk about their love languages is to talk about it as though it's like a fixed trait about them.
I really want to encourage you to expand your thinking on this, because I don't think that love languages are something that are fixed about us. I, I do still thrive on words of affirmation, but as I've grown in my relationships with the people I love and learned how to receive the ways in which they most like to show love and speak back to them in the ways they like to receive it, I've become multilingual as it were. And I not only find it easier to accept the differences that I've discovered between me and those I care about, but I also truly enjoy speaking those other languages. And the main point of it all for me is that I really want my love for my partners to be received as love. And it has begun to matter a whole lot less to me, whether I'm speaking in my primary language or theirs, as long as they're able to really feel it, because that's the part that brings me the joy and fulfillment.
Similarly, if I can hear my partner's language, when they're speaking it to me, then, then I'm receiving the love. And that's the thing we really need, right? It's not that we always need it to be packaged correctly. We just need to be able to recognize it and have it acknowledged. I also think the five categories are a good jumping-off point and maybe an easy way to wrap your arms around this idea of love languages. But I also think they're both a bit too broad and a bit limited. I think they're a bit too broad because while your love language might be a particular category, the things that really do it for you within that category are often really specific. For instance, it may be that one of the ways I like to give and receive love is through physical touch, but the kind of physical touch also matters.
Not all physical touch is enjoyable to me also, even though touch is an important love language for me, certainly not all physical touch is a language that I have with all of the different people that I love. The kind of touch I want with someone is often very specific to the particular relationship I'm in. And that's not just because the relationship is or isn't sexual. There are so many different kinds of touch. There's holding hands there's cuddling, there's hugs. One big one for me is just holding and being held. And yes, this shows up in my romantic relationships also shows up in my relationships with my children. Every morning and before bed, my children expect a cuddle from me and we always hug. Hello, and we always hug goodbye. And I suppose in this case, that kind of touch that we share. Isn't just a love language that we speak to each other.
It's also a ritual of connection, but ritual are where love languages can often show up and have a big significance. And there are some people whom I love very much and certain languages like touch just are not love languages for us. It might be because they just don't speak it well, or it might just be that it isn't a fit for our relationship. And so we find and other ways to show love. And there are also certain things that can fall into the category of love languages that are just spoken between me and one other person, something really special just between us. And it's not because I've made some rule about that and that we're trying to make each other feel special and that it's not allowed to be spoken with others or something, but just that this particular way of showing love to each other is just what makes that relationship, what it is.
And it would be weird to say that it's essential to me or essential to them. Instead, it's a language that was created by the combination of the two of us together in relationship. One of my partners and I, we really just connect amazingly on music and we share music back and forth with each other. We make each other playlists. We share tracks that make us think of the other one. And it's really a language that we're speaking to each other, but it's a language that is unique to our relationship in terms of love languages, feeling too narrow to me, Chapman states that his five love languages are exhaustive. There that's all the love languages. There are, it encompasses all the ways that someone can give and receive love. And I'm not so sure. And honestly, I'm not even sure that it matters which category something fits into one love language that I've identified for myself that I think is huge for me and huge for many other people is the language of accepting influence.
I'm gonna do a whole separate podcast about accepting influence, but basically, I feel a tremendous jolt of love when I offer someone, I love an idea or a suggestion or some advice, and they take it and incorporate it. Is this a gift? Is this an act of service? It's not that because the feeling of love isn't actually in what I do, what I'm giving them, but that they take it, that they actually take what I give and actually use it and incorporate into their life. And I think it means so much to me because it shows that they trust me and value my judgment. And it also means that I have had an impact on their life have become woven into who they are. And that just, oh, that just really gets to me. I posted about this on my Facebook page several weeks ago, one of my partners was wanting a simple way to track their migraines and they were getting really frustrated with the apps that were available to do that.
And, and to the point where they really wanting to figure out a way to design their own app. And they're not really an app designer kind of person. And when they told me what they needed the app to do and not to do, I suggested an app that I had used in the past to track my moods. It seemed to have most of the features they needed and they could easily custom to track what they were hoping to track. A little while later, I got a message saying that they had begun to use the app and that it was working really well for them and my heart just swelled three sizes. And I felt fantastic. So now here's the part where I offer you some ways that you can apply some of these concepts into your own life. So here are some action steps for you first, if you think it'd be useful and fun, go ahead and go over to Gary Chapman's website and take the love languages quiz.
There's gonna be a link in the show description for that. So it should be real easy to find. This can be a really good first step to understanding yourself under your love languages and just getting a handle on the concept. And if there are people you want to understand better as well, you can invite them to take the quiz and then you can share your results with each other. However, if you've already done, done that, or you don't think you need to do that because you can already tell which love languages resonate most with you here is the next level. Think about someone in your life, who you deeply value and would like to create more love between you. This might be someone you can see just doesn't always understand the love you're showing, or you isn't always loving you the way you most want to be loved, or maybe you just wanna do better with each other.
It might be one of your romantic partners where things are drifting, or maybe your connection isn't as strong as it once was. Or maybe it's someone with whom you've been struggling with some difficulties together. Sometimes it can be useful to focus on working up the knots, your take in, but it's equally important to strengthen the loving practices between you just focusing on problems alone can make it feel like that's all you have. And that work is all you're doing. So think about this person and think about all the things they have done for you, with you, to you that have made feel truly deeply loved as best you can think about very specific behaviors. Like for example, one of my partners told me that one thing I do that just bowls him over is when I just sit on the floor next to him, sitting on the couch, and put my head on his lap.
Another partner really loves to hear when I say nice things about them to other people, it can really be that specific. And this is distinct. I want to say from things that turn you on, because we're really thinking about things that make you sigh or swoon, or makes your heart swell. Maybe not the other parts of you. So what I want you to do is write down a list of all these behaviors that you can think of. And they can be like really tiny things. Like you just text me in the middle of the day, when you're thinking of me, or you send me those silly memes all the time, or you share funny tweets with me, or we sit down and we watch a YouTube video together, and it doesn't matter if it's something they do often or something that they've only done once.
If it made you feel loved, if it blew your mind, write it down next. Think about the things that you really love doing for, to, or with your partner that bring you to, I found that some people find this concept a little harder to grasp because you're doing the giving, but it's also about your enjoyment. It's ways of showing love that feel good to you to specific to this partner, again, be as specific and behavioral as you can, and just write down whatever you think of. And last, if you can think of anything that you really wish your partner did, that they don't currently do that you know, would make you feel super duper loved, make a list of those things too. And again, try to stay specific and focused on behavior. Once you have these three lists, there are a few different next steps you can take one sort of more formal and involved thing you could do is invite that partner or other loved one that you have made the lists for to make a similar list.
And then you can exchange your lists. I've done this with many of my partners. We've mostly shared this electronically rather than having a lengthy discussion about it because a list like this can actually be maybe a little overwhelming to take in the moment, but it can be easier to digest in written form. Some folks I know create lists like these as part of a personal user manual or a care and feeding document that they share with others and creating a list like this is part of what I do in my mapping your love workshop. Another way you can use the lists that you've made is just to get clear on the things for yourself that make you feel loved, and then use that knowledge to give more ongoing feedback to your partners about specifically what's working and what they're doing. Well, my partners and I regularly tell each other when one of us does something that makes the other feel really loved so that we all know what landed and how, and for me, whenever I hear that something I did made somebody I love feel good.
I mean, it, it just makes me wanna do it more. And similarly, with the list of things that you particularly like to do to show love, you can make clear to your partner that this is a way of showing love, and it's really giving you joy to give it, which can help them be in the right frame of mind to receive it as a gift to you rather than being about them. This can be a tricky thing, but I mean, sometimes just being willing to receive what someone's giving you is a gift for them. And obviously getting clear on what you'd like more of from the people you love can help you figure out what you'd like to request from them. If you haven't listened to last Tuesday's episode on rocking the boat. In that episode, I talk about how to make requests in a way that isn't either a complaint nor a demand.
So if you're unsure how to ask or uncomfortable about asking for something that your partner's not giving, I suggest you check out that episode. Speaking of framing requests as demands, it's really important to approach this practice of getting clear on what feels good to you and telling your partner as helping them out, not as giving them a list of demands or a heap of feedback about how they're doing it wrong. The goal here is not to lay your love languages at your partner's feet and say, this is how you must love me. And this is how you must receive my love, but rather, Hey, if you're looking for what is really working for me, here's some useful feedback about that. And if you're looking for what would make me feel even better, then here's some feedback about that. And what you really need to do is lay this information out to your partner and really approach it as something to help them out and assume that they want to give it to you.
Once you've offered it to them, you do have to step back and let it go and detach from what they choose to do with it. If you are receiving this kind of information from your partner, it's important to approach it with curiosity and openness, rather than like they're trying to control you, or they're giving you a list of demands, or they're trying to give you some criticism about how you're doing it wrong. And if something that your partner is asking for, isn't something you can give with a whole heart. You don't have to, you are not required to meet all of your partners needs or speak all of their love languages perfectly. You should only give what you truly want to give. And if it's something you don't feel competent at yet. And so it's scary to try to give it to your partner.
As was the case with my partner who felt like he was bad at compliments, be upfront that you do wanna work on that, but that it's a growing edge for you. And if your partner is making an attempt to give you what you want, you have to remember that first. You'd wanna assume that they're trying, even if they're not succeeding yet, you also wanna appreciate what you're getting and offer encouragement and help them out by letting them know when they're getting warmer. And when they're getting cooler and also avoid making them feel like they're being tested or blasting them when they fail the test. What we really want to be doing here is giving carrots not sticks. The overall goal of learning, how to love each other better is to create more opportunities for positive interactions that have the potential to reverse negative feedback loops that you can sometimes get trapped in with people that you love, this practice of paying attention to and amplifying.
The ways that you feel loved in your relationships can especially help if you're struggling if you're in a rough place, or if you're just feeling adrift with someone uncertain, how to really make them happy, it can be enormously helpful to take a break from focusing on trying to fix problems that may be gridlocked, and instead to grow Goodwill and generate more positive interactions that can increase and reinforce your love. But that's why love languages are so important because if you want to be creating more love a partner it's really, really useful to both understand what love languages they speak, what things really land with them, and also make sure that you're communicating with them, how they can really love you.
