What’s Your Love Language?
Love and communication are unique and challenging. Gary Chapman popularized the idea of five love languages in his book, The Five Love Languages: How to Express Heartfelt Commitment to Your Mate to help better understand each individual’s innate desire and needs.
What are Love Languages?
Love languages describes the way in which you best express and receive love in relationships.
There are five main love languages:
Acts of Service
Receiving Gifts
Quality Time
Words of Affirmation
Physical Touch
Your love language helps you understand yourself and others at a deeper level. Each love language is unique. Although you may express and receive a combination of the five, you will often have a primary language.
The 5 Love Languages
Acts of Service
Receiving Gifts
Quality Time
Words of Affirmation
Physical Touch
The Love Languages
Acts of Service
Actions speak louder than words. Little acts of service throughout the day that make life a little easier speak volumes.
— Doing the dishes
Receiving Gifts
Gifts are seen as a meaningful symbol of the relationship.
— A surprise bundle of flowers on Monday
Quality Time
Love is felt when you spend quality time and have meaningful conversations. You feel the most content when in the company with your partner.
— Put your phone down and go for a walk together in the park
Words of Affirmation
Verbal expressions of encouragement and appreciation creates a feeling of acknowledgement and closeness. These verbal communications allow you to feel seen, heard and understood.
— “I love you”
Physical Touch
Physical intimacy creates closeness. Hugging, cuddling, kissing, etc.
— Hold hands
What is Your Love Language?
Gary Chapman has a simple love language quiz located here. By answering a few questions, you can discover your love language. Going into the quiz, I had a loose idea of what my love language preferences were. However, after taking the quiz, I was left with a few more questions so take the quiz with a grain of salt. Trust yourself and experiment with these concepts.
Applying Your Love Language
Your love language can be used in your relationship with yourself and with others. Understanding and communicating your love language ensures that you and your partner feel supported and it’s not necessary to have the same love language as your partner.
I found that I receive and express different love languages. Love is different and dependent on the relationship.
Most importantly, how can you honor your own love language in your relationship with yourself?
Relationships can be romantic or non-romantic. By learning your love language, you can develop a deeper sense of awareness and understanding of yourself, and apply this in your interactions with others so nothing gets lost in translation. It’s an interesting and useful tool and is a great starting point for communication.
Psychology has always been a fascinating subject to me and this article is a summation of my thoughts based on the writings of Gary Chapman. None of these ideas can be attributed to me. It was an informative re-discovery compiling this article. I hope you found this intriguing; until next time.