#Sorry for getting a bit heated I have a lot of rage for gary chapman

[swamp-world]

Not OP but! the five love languages are a concept developed by Baptist minister and marriage counsellor Gary Chapman with the primary goal being to keep married couples together, and then eventually to sell his book and counselling services rather than out of an actual research-informed practice. While he has since expanded to writing additional books on different environments of different love languages ("Five Love Languages of Children", "Five Languages of Appreciation in the Workplace", "Five Love Languages for Singles", and particularly awfully, a special "Military Edition" of the original), the original concept is designed to be a way to quickly sort the "issues" of married couples into easy boxes and to behave as if it's simply misunderstanding or miscommunication between them.

In an article from the University of Toronto:

“We were very skeptical about the love languages idea, so we decided to review the existing studies on it,” says Emily Impett, a professor in the UTM department of psychology who collaborated with UTM graduate student Gideon Park and York University Assistant Professor Amy Muise. “None of the 10 studies supported Chapman’s claims.” Their findings have been published in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Current Directions in Psychological Science.  

When it comes to the number of love languages, the studies found inconsistent evidence for the five languages Chapman identifies, while other relationship research shows there are additional ways of expressing and receiving love. “One key thing to remember is that Chapman developed the five love languages by working with a sample of white, religious, mixed-gender, traditional couples,” says Impett. “There are certain things that are left out, such as affirming a partner’s personal goals outside of the relationship, which might be significant to couples with more egalitarian values.”  Most importantly, Impett and her team found no scientific evidence for Chapman’s central contention that people who choose partners that speak their love language, or learn to speak it, will have more successful relationships. “There’s no support for this matching effect,” says Impett. “People are basically happier in relationships when they receive any of these expressions of love.”  

The other problem with the model of the five love languages is that, while it's a useful communication tool, it's a terrible categorization tool that stems from a fundamentalist, heteropatriarchal worldview. Chapman's goal as a marriage counsellor seems less, in his descriptions of case studies, about actually resolving the conflicts and issues between married couples, and more about keeping them from divorcing, which is a terribly un-Christian thing to do. On multiple occasions in his book, he advises women to stay in abusive relationships and to work on adjusting their behaviour; he seems to functionally equate "physical touch" with "the husband's sexual desires needing to be fulfilled at all times"; he is the kind of minister who preaches to "hate the sin but love the sinner" of gay children. From this angle, the idea of "five love languages" which are simply mismatched between individuals becomes much more sinister: it is a deliberate attempt to paper over the structural issues and abuses which occur in interpersonal relationships, and creates an over-simplified way for people to focus on one issue of communication by attaching their identities to one of five clean-cut boxes, instead of treating these as matters of behaviour, power balances, and actual dynamic and balanced relationships.

I've seen a lot of people discuss "queering the love languages" and adding in more or different love languages, but I think that that still fails to address the core issues of it: that love languages are a convenient way to talk about needs, but have been created and used instead as personality types in a strict and formulaic way, which is not reflected in how human beings as living breathing dynamic creatures actually behave.

(Disclaimer that it's been a few years since I read the book but it was just...revolting in so many ways to hear the advice he gave.)

i am always the bitch who's like. that's actually not true :) your brain does not stop developing at 25 or ever :) love languages can be a useful vocabulary but is not real :) a lot of the personality disorders you villainize are responses to immense pain and fear :) stop trying to sort the complexity of human experience into HARRY POTTER HOUSES pleaseee think critically abt what u are being told and who's telling u this. why would someone want u to believe that u aren't fully capable of decision making until 25? psych has been a tool to oppress since it was created, don't buy into it!