You and I Are Way Too Old to Still Believe in Five Love Languages
Too Old for This Sh*t: How to Take Your Life Back from an Ageist Society
WARNING! Sacred Cow murder ahead!
Anyone who ever got a copy of the book The Five Love Languages probably felt, as did I, FINALLY here’s THE ANSWER.
The all caps are on purpose. That was the response so many of us had to the simplistic idea that all our love issues could be sorted out just like that. Marriages saved, partnerships renewed.
Blah blah.
Well, if you were like me, you asked your various partner-of-the-moment to read the damned book, as though that was going to fix everything. Read it, I said, and it will fix everything.
As if, right?
While there is some vague truth to the love languages, recent stories, one of which came out, natch, on Valentine’s Day, put the book’s primacy to rest.
Here’s the NPR broadcast that I caught as I was heading out to the coast.
Look, part of me was genuinely sad that all love couldn’t be fixed five different ways, but after a lifetime of failures in that camp, I’d already learned that. Lived it. Didn’t matter one whit if my most recent ex was solely motivated by sex (he was), he didn’t care what motivated me or moved me.
To wit: the only thing I valued from him was quality time. In the fifteen years I knew him the ONLY thing he withheld from me was…wait for it,
QUALITY TIME.
I explained the five languages. So? I told him what I needed. So? What he wanted, and got, was a pickle-tickle and a sprint home.
He didn’t give a damn.
One of my love languages is gifts. So I gave gifts to him, I won’t even go there, there were so many. My retirement fund would look a great deal different had I not… but I digress. Water under the bridge.
The only thing I wanted from him at Christmas, wait for it, was quality time.
What I got was a four-hour spa day. I hate spas. I can’t stand having a stranger who is not a medical professional touch me, the result of too many sexual assaults which, sadly, included women.
I told the ex this. Then another Christmas, years later, wait for it, he gave me another spa day.
It’s funny in that way that repeatedly slamming your head into a sequoia tree is funny.
You could make all kinds of convenient arguments that he wasn’t committed (well, to one body part he was, there’s that) and you could make all kinds of other arguments that he also did about work, being busy, all that…until you saw photos of him playing in the snow with other people. He made it sound like he was slaving over a hot computer every waking moment.
Okay.
Yeah, there’s that. No amount of forcing a Love Languages book at anyone is going to fix a bad relationship. The simplistic nature of this kind of thinking, and I fell hard for it myself, is what gets us in trouble.
This is another article which delves into the same thing about Chapman’s book.
From that article:
…the limited research that has been conducted does not support the idea that speaking someone’s preferred love language yields greater relationship satisfaction or success. Partners who share the same primary language are no more content. Moreover, in one highly controlled study, when partners expressed various forms of love to each other, all expressions were equally valued, regardless of the other person’s love language. (author bolded)
Chapman’s book was based a little too much on his counseling practice which most assuredly didn’t cover all the bases of how love looks in today’s gender-fluid world, polyamory and so much more.
It was dead on arrival, but it sure sold a lot of copies. Mine included. Boy did I want an easy fix.
As with most things love, there isn’t one.
You and I are WAY Too Old to believe in the five love languages.
All love is its own language. Perhaps the real trick is, as with MBTI, DISC, Social Styles and all the other profiles which push and shove us into neat little boxes (which we don’t ever fit) is to recognize that all such work provides little more than signposts. That’s all.
We still have to take out the machete, the weed whacker, lace up our hiking boots, zip up the gaiters and wade into the weeds of learning to be in relationship with another human being.
If it were this simple, we’d all be doing it well.
Because it isn’t this simple, we aren’t.
Hell. We hardly listen to our own needs, much less those of another, except as a way to get them to love us in ways we really truly need to learn to love ourselves.
Always seems to come right back to that.
What’s MY love language to myself?
Chapman didn’t write that one.
Likely because as with most things human, there are some eight billion different versions, and they don’t fit into a handy-dandy paperbook in the self-help section.
The love languages book created conversation. For that alone it was wonderful. But it wasn’t a fix. There isn’t one.
We are all constantly-changing works in progress learning to love other constantly-changing works in progress.
Let’s start with the one in the mirror.
Let’s play.
Thank you for spending some lighthearted time with me today. I hope you got value and are inspired. If so please consider
Please kindly keep in mind that this is how I pay my bills. If it serves you to toss pennies on my deck I would be deeply grateful.
If you know someone who needs to get a gentle nudge about love and self love, please also consider
Above all, have a gorgeous day.
It' striking that your piece arrives in my inbox the same day I subscribed to Elizabeth Gilbert's "Letters From Love" substack — which is all about the practice (sadly radical in our wonky culture) of loving oneself unconditionally.
There’s a book called 5 Steps to Lasting Love by Anne Marie Taylor in the UK. You can currently read it for free on Amazon. This book doesn’t go into the kinds of love, but it does explain HOW I’ve been successfully married for 30 years.
The thing she talks about is “bids for attention.” For example, I come to give my wife a hug and say good morning, or I ask her if she wants a glass of water when I get up to get a drink.
She has a choice. She can respond positively, neutrally (not respond) or negatively.
The key to our thirty years? We respond positively to almost all bids for attention. And that takes effort. The other thing is, we make those bids for attention regularly.
Maybe we don’t respond exactly the way each other wants, but we don’t ignore and we don’t use anger or disdain as a response. In other words, we are there for each other.
I’m not sure what the love languages are about, but I’m extremely affectionate and want to cuddle but don’t care about material things, and Nicole is more of a “he would look good in this” giving kind of person. Doesn’t matter.
Do the work and you can make it work.