The Five Love Languages Puns

Why would you say yes?

Why would you say no?

Have you done this and did it help? Or did it not help?

Edit I ask this because I suggested this about 9 months before our relationship failed and was told no. I think about it often that's all.

Over the next week, I'd like to discuss the first three chapters of the Five Love Languages. If you're interested in exploring this, please read along with us.

I read this book this week and it was an eye opener. I have had many failed relationships and have had a hard time figuring out what went wrong in each. I can now reflect back and see what "language" would have helped in the relationship. Going forward, I hope to use what I have learned to make my next relationship my last. I met a man the other day and he was actually the one who told me about it. I immediately read it and now understand why he seems to be such a wonderful man!

I’m stunned and amazed by the level of effort this posher put into my sale - On the one hand, I’m a flaky aquarius who can barely be bothered to scribble a thank you, Most of the time, I consider:

• timely -in the promised condition -and perfume or tissue, or sometimes a drawing I’ve done because I have no other paper…

this girl:

• sends me a handwritten note

• the whole box smells like her perfume

• the item is in shape

• and yeah. She put together a bunch of trial size things because "she knows I'm a musician and I travel a bunch." So. Frigging. Cute.

I guess I would never, ever, ever on even my best of manic days, have put that much effort into a sale. Shoot, my mom’s birthday is tomorrow and I feel so guilty. Hopefully I can pull something as cool off for her...

You know who you are, awesome posher. I'll shout it out if I'm allowed?

tl;dr: some poshers are gifted at this. I know gift giving is a love language. I should get a little more conversant, I think.

I've been wanting to post about this for a while. The post this morning about depression brought it back to my mind.

I was wondering if anyone has heard of The Five Love Languages before and if you have, did you find it useful?

I've been looking to psychology stuff for years now and the book The Five Love Languages was the first book I read that actually "clicked" for me. Everything psychology wise since then has been easier to understand. The book really helped me understand how different people think and feel in different ways. It also gave me insight into how family dynamics and the whole Freudian "Tell me about your childhood and your mother" thing really does mould who we become as adults.

The concept is fairly simple. There are five main love languages. These are basically different ways we all receive and accept love in our lives.

The idea is that if you can understand your own love languages and those of your partner and your children, it'll make emotions and love in your life so much easier.

If you understand your partners love language it's almost like a roadmap or formula that makes it easier to make them happy and vice versa for your partner.

It will also help you see what you are doing wrong, or what you could do differently to get much better results.

The Five Love Languages are:

1. Words of affirmation – using words to build up the other person. “Thanks for taking out the garbage.” Not – “It’s about time you took the garbage out. The flies were going to carry it out for you.”

2. Gifts – a gift says, “He was thinking about me. Look what he got for me.”

3. Acts of Service – Doing something for your spouse that you know they would like. Cooking a meal, washing dishes, vacuuming floors, are all acts of service.

4. Quality time – by which I mean, giving your spouse your undivided attention. Taking a walk together or sitting on the couch with the TV off – talking and listening.

5. Physical touch – holding hands, hugging, kissing, sexual intercourse, are all expressions of love.

You can have all five but typically there's a primary one and a secondary one.

In my case mine are in order of importance:

Acts of service, physical touch, quality time and words of affirmation. I didn't even score on gifting.

I definitely recommend reading the book but for those who won't there's a simple online quiz, it only takes 5 minutes or less.

https://www.5lovelanguages.com/quizzes/

I think this is going to revolutionize my relationship with my people!

In therapy I've talked a lot about how each new encounter with my parents brings up all kinds of shit for me. My therapist, like any normal person, can't understand how people couldn't love their children. I don't understand either. So she keeps trying to figure out how they show their love. It's honestly a therapeutic practice for me either way. Either I will learn that my parents do love me in some unusual way, or just further understand that they don't.

My therapist has tried determining if maybe my parents use one of the 5 love languages. Here's some of what we have discussed.

My Nmom

Physical touch: She beat me with her fists plenty of times, and other than that, we never hugged, or held hands. I got lost in tons of places from not being able to keep up, and my mom refused to hold our hands to help us keep up.

Quality time: you mean her on the couch watching tv and telling us to shut up or leave?

Words of affirmation: must be this one, she looooves to guilt trip, degrade, and berate us. Nothing we do is enough, and we are stupid, ugly, selfish children.

Gifts: Oh, definitely not. She spent grocery money on herself, then took out credit cards for groceries. She didn't meet our basic needs. We were also sent to Grandma's house with an extra suitcase so she could send us home with new clothes that my nmom never would buy us.

Acts of Service: Hahahaha that's a good one. My nmom, do anything, for anyone. Not a thing that happens.

My Ndad

Physical touch: I can count the number of hugs I've gotten from him on one hand. He doesn't do that.

Quality time: he tried, like once every few months to spend some time with us, but it always ended in us not feeling great about the time we spent with him. It felt more like he was forcing himself to rack up stories to show that he's a good dad. Also most of the quality time was either one on one with my brother, or all of us together. I didn't get to do anything just me and my dad.

Words of affirmation: I don't think he knows how to say nice things. His silence is how you know he doesn't completely hate you, everything he says to us is a critique or yelling.

Gifts: He only gave me things to make up for the money my nmom took out of my bank account(which was all christmas and birthday money from relatives who weren't as greedy as my parents). This doesn't really cut it for me. A gift shouldn't be repayment or have any strings attached.

Acts of service: not once did my father fix a bike, help me with

It ended up being why she dumped me, because she figured she couldn't fulfill me. I never cared about her being less into touching but I figured there might be other reasons she ended it. So with my next relationship (which could be with her if we re-kindle) how do I let the girl know it's fine if she wants to spend time alone, and that she doesn't need to be obsessed with cuddling and the like.

/u/theFlipside619's post about volunteering and charity got me thinking about "The Five Love Languages." I first heard about this in college as a community-building exercise, though it's often used among couples or with parents and their children.

As the concept goes, the Five Love Languages are the ways in which we express and experience love. They are:

• Words of Affirmation
• Quality Time
• Receiving/Giving Gifts
• Acts of Service
• Physical Touch

It's obviously not a perfect or complete guide, but I think it's just an interesting way to look at how we relate to others. Thinking about it has definitely made me understand more about myself and my relationships.

For example, I personally express love through quality time and acts of service, and experience love via quality time and words of affirmation. So while getting a gift is nice, an honest compliment will absolutely make my day and stay with me for a long time after. On the other hand, my mother is definitely a gift-giver, so I try to show appreciation when she gets me things (even if it wasn't particularly wanted/needed, haha) to let her know I recognize how much she cares.

How about you, ladies? What are your love languages?

So I'm very into the "Five Love Languages" theory right now. I have realized so much about myself, relationships I'we had earlier in life, etc. Very interesting and a big mind opener.

Also realized that I'm really having a big problem with understanding and using the "Words of Affirmation" part toward others. My boyfriend and best friend (both ENFP and with Affirmation as main language) and I find it so hard. I talked with them both, and they are pretty alike. They mainly find it very important to get response on stuff they created (like music and stuff), finds it very appealing when someone points out something about them, like showing them that they know and understands small special details about them and so on. As an INTJ I find it hard to respond to something I just been exposed to, so I feel that I cant give them the directly appropriation that they wants from me. My languages is the Acts of Service and Quality Time and I don't enjoy people telling me nice things. I find it fake and shallow. So when I try to do it, I feel fake myself.

Anyone that has some experience in this or other problems around the love languages?

I think I do, and I feel I have the higher libido in my relationship (SO thinks he might be Quality Time), so I was wondering if there was a vague correlation.

If you've not heard of it before, here's a site that explains it well.

For those who don’t know, it’s this book by Gary Chapman. Pretty interesting read.

This book was first published in 1995. If it were a person, it would be old enough to buy you a beer and then drag you off to the parking lot for some road head. How well has it stood up over time? Pretty well, as long as you realize its limitations.

Chapman's basic theory is simple. Different people perceive love in different ways. He posits that there are five "love languages":

• Gifts
• Quality time
• Words of affirmation
• Acts of service
• Physical touch

This seems straightforward enough. Some people want their lovers to lavish them with praise and support; others feel loved when someone goes out of their way to do something for them, or to put aside other demands and spend high-quality time. The bulk of the book is dedicated to giving examples of these five languages ("I feel really loved when my husband skips playing golf and spends time with me instead" might be an example used for quality time) and short quizzes to help you figure out what your language is, and what your partner's might be.

His claim is that in many relationships, problems arise when person A is putting out a love language that isn't important to person B. If you're a gift giver, and your lover feels love when you speak affirming or praiseful words... you see the problem, right? You get mad because you're giving all these great gifts that he doesn't give a shit about, and he's mad because why doesn't she know I want her support and affirmation and not all this crap from the Radio Shack closeout sale? OK, but seriously, all men would want stuff from Radio Shack but I digress.

Happiness, then, comes from understanding what your lover's language is and then "speaking" it. Doesn't seem that hard, but as with most other routes to happiness, the devil is in the details.

First detail: in his world, everyone has a primary love language, and maybe a touch of a secondary. My experience differs though (and I'd love to know what readers on this sub thing). Most of the people I know don't have a clear single language that is much more important than the rest. They may have a few that are less important though. Let me use my friend Serial as an example (just a friend, you fuckhounds! settle down!) She absolutely doesn't give a shit about gifts and couldn't care less about acts of service.. strong, independent woman, y'know. But her "primary" language floats between the other 3: affirmation, touch, and quality time. Sometimes one is way more important than others, and other times

The idea of "love languages" may be helpful as a starting place for some people to handle and more intimately experience a relationship, but for many people the "Five Love Languages" act as a catchall phrase/idea to give an unfounded sense of confidence that yes, there are love languages my partner and I have, and yes, we are different and I can see that now. It provides no further depth than that, and I find stopping there to be disdainful and shallow. Loving someone more because you both fit categorically within some idea is gross, disingenuous behavior, and inhibits a genuine connection between people. If you talk about how much you love Jesus all the time, do you really love Jesus or do you love subverting yourself and identifying as (and thereby gaining the approval of) a community? g r o s s

Took the suggestion in the sidebar on this sub and downloaded the book last night. Finished it today and I can honestly say that it's given me a lot of insight and a different way of looking at things. I've concluded that I'm pretty sure my love language is words of affirmation/physical touch, and that my wife's is acts of service. I printed off one of the questionnaires for her to fill out to confirm what her love language is. Anyone have any recommendations surrounding following the advice in this book, and how I can approach asking her to participate in this? I'm wondering what kind of response I'll get to asking her to fill out the questionnaire, whether she'll see it as a "sex thing" or not.

Because of its reputation, I recently read the book The Five Love Languages.

I was disappointed with the author's nonscientific approach to psychology and, especially, his weird anecdote at the end of the book about him encouraging a woman to have sex she didn't want with a partner who said he hated her (hoping that 'speaking his love language' in this way would make him love her).

The book boils down to "Find out what makes your partner happy and do that." This is good advice and there are some relevant insights in the book. But it's entirely based on the author's own experiences and there are only one or two citations, one of which is to a Bible verse.

I looked up Gary Chapman, the author, and found that he also makes appearances on Focus On The Family, a politically active Christian fundamentalist media organization founded by James Dobson. This was also disappointing.

From what I've heard, "The Five Love Languages" seems like the most popular book of romantic advice for couples out there.

Is there a different book covering the same topic that references peer-reviewed psychological research?

It seems like there's got to be something else out there more deserving of the top spot.

For those curious, link. The book is about how we all communicate love in different ways, which could also be different from how we like others to show their love to us. Curious if anyone has tried to apply it to their marriage and had it actually make a difference or if it didn't even matter.

"Gifts, quality time, words of affirmation, acts of service, and physical touch" are the five languages of love. There is also a debated 6th love language, which is food.

Wiki article here