Have you heard of The 5 Love Languages by Gary Chapman, PhD? It’s not a new release, but I only just stumbled over the concepts of this book in this recent article.
According to therapist Chapman, people speak different “love languages” through which we express love and receive love in different ways. Even if we appreciate gestures from all the languages, most of us have one chief language, and perhaps a strong runner-up. And if these are different than the dominant language(s) of our family and friends, our gestures of affection may not be well received or even recognized, resulting in relationship strain. The cure for such love ills is to gain fluency in all five languages, so you can properly interpret the actions of the people around you.
So what exactly are these 5 love languages?
1. Words of Affirmation, or to be verbally acknowledged
2. Quality Time, or to enjoy companionship
3. Receiving Gifts, or to be given tokens of love
4. Acts of Service, or to have their partners do tasks for them
5. Physical Touch, to be in contact via the body (to be clear, this isn’t your love language just because you like sex, unless you also like holding hands, massages, and hugs).
To identify your own love language and that of others, Chapman suggests 3 basic questions:
1. How does the person express love most often?
2. What does the person complain about most often?
3. What does the person request most often?
From there, you can start to hone in on a dominant love language (or two), now armed with critical insight into how to improve your relationships.
This week, 4Mothers writes about the concept of 5 love languages: whether they exist, what they are, what they help us learn, what they can’t help with. Do the 5 love languages resonate with you? Join us this week while we talk about it.
4 Mothers 
I remember reading this book a few years ago, it totally makes so much sense that we would all need different types of love to feel fulfilled. It really helped me when it came to my husband and accepting that hes a more physical lover and Im more of a words. 🙂
I loved how it did the same for me, to help recognize and accept/appreciate different forms of affection from my husband and others… I’ll be writing about this more later in the week!
I’m looking forward to these posts!
Different love languages are a relatively new topic to me. The idea makes a ton of sense, but I haven’t read the book yet and I think I have a lot to learn about them 🙂
I haven’t read it either, but even the synopsis in the magazine article made me think about it and apply it… I should grab the book too.
its a good book. i had it, couldn’t finish reading it. A friend borrowed it, and that was it… Thanks for the post…
Makes me think I really should read it too…
You should…