One of the keys to any healthy and lasting intimate relationship is understanding how to best show your love to your partner. But this display of love and act of loving needs to be done in a way that resonates with your partner speaks to them and fulfils their needs. Learning love languages might just be the key.
Understanding the Concept of Love Languages
In his book, The Five Love Languages: How to Express Heartfelt Commitment to Your Mate, Gary Chapman has developed an extraordinary method to communicate with your partner and how to show them your affection based on their innate and unique preferences. What Gary Chapman calls Love Languages are theories based on the idea that every person has a predisposition to and identifies more heavily with one of five ways to give and receive love.
Everyone desires to be loved, to be loved equally in return, and we want the love we share with our partners to last a lifetime. And just like relationships are hard work and require attention, so too is love. When someone conveys and expresses their love to you in the love language style that speaks to you the most, you will feel that love exponentially more than if it were expressed in a different love language.
Importance of Knowing Your Love Language
So, what is your love language?
When you discover what your love languages are and begin to act upon them, the relationship you have with your partner will be better than before. When you and your partner know each other's love language, your love tanks will feel fuller than ever before. I know it sounds unbelievable, but all your wants and needs from your relationship will start to come together which will have you both happier and more content than you could ever have imagined before. By speaking the love language of your partner, you will both feel more loved.
Anyone who has been in a long-term relationship where the "honeymoon" has long since been over may find themselves no longer feeling connected and fully understanding their partner. Communication and intimacy may have even fallen away and now you are more like roommates or best friends, not lovers. Figuring out what your love languages are will fix that.
The Five Love Languages Explained
In his book, The Five Love Languages, Gary Chapman has devised five ways we can speak and understand love. Surprisingly, there are only five. What is even more surprising is that many couples don't know about the existence of love languages and can be very shocked when they learn about them for the first time.
The five love languages are:
Acts of Service
Words of Affirmation
Physical Touch
Quality Time
Receiving Gifts
Acts of Service
Acts of service are doing something for your partner that you know they would like for you to do for them. This could be cooking a meal, washing dishes, buying groceries, mowing the lawn, bathing the children, or doing something for them by relieving pressure off them when needed and without having to be asked. The person who speaks the love language acts of service loves to hear phrases such as "Let me do that for you", or "I can take care of that".
Words of Affirmation
Words of affirmation are the communication language of people who respond best to appreciative comments and verbal compliments. When you express your love this way to a person who speaks this love language, their love for you will grow stronger. This love language adores it when you show your affection through spoken appreciation, praise, or using the words "I love when you…." and "I admire how you…".
Physical Touch
People who speak love through physical touch respond best to back rubs, cuddling, holding hands, kissing, or an arm around the shoulder when you are watching movies on the couch. Physical touch, especially lack of it, can make or break any intimate relationship at the best of times. But to a person who speaks the language of physical touch above all others, the absence of touch can be devastating.
Fun Fact: Many men can often mistakenly claim this love language to be their primary language as they confuse their desire for sex (horny) to be the desire for physical touch, when in fact the two are different things.
Quality Time
The love language of quality time is all about your partner receiving your undivided attention. And this doesn't mean sitting on the couch watching TV together, or one or both of you tapping away on your phone as you sit side by side. I mean looking at each other, talking to each other, and being fully invested in your moment together with no other distractions. Quality time is all about being together and sharing experiences, verbal conversations, and physical activities. It doesn't have to be lavish international holidays, sometimes just a stroll in the local park is all that is needed to fill the love tank.
Receiving Gifts
Some people feel loved and respond best to their partners when they are given gifts. They see gifts as signs of affection, love, thoughtfulness, and effort. A lover who responds to gifts isn't necessarily shallow or materialistic, they simply appreciate the gesture because to them it shows you care. It has little to do with the actual dollar value of the gift itself. What is important is that you thought of them.
Improving Your Relationship Using Love Languages
Keeping the love tank of our partner full is important in any relationship. Humans view love as an emotional need, and we'll all have different ways of expressing and showing our love to those people we care deeply about. Our emotional needs are planted when we are young children and they follow us into adulthood, and they never go away.
Therefore, you need to understand your loved one's love language.
Words of affirmation and acts of service are my love languages. My wife's love languages are quality time and physical touch. So, as you can see, we are very different in how we each respond to and give love.
You can find out what your love language is by taking this short quiz: https://www.5lovelanguages.com/quizzes/
It is perfectly normal to take some time to fully discover and understand not only your own but also your partner's love languages. It will take much patience and practice to put those newly found expressions of love into action. But if you keep at it and push through, what you will have at the end is a relationship that is worth the effort and both of you will feel more loved and secure together.
When the use of the five love languages to communicate and express love with your partner becomes more natural, you will see how it benefits you and your relationship when it comes to managing expectations, handling conflict, and avoiding potential pitfalls.
One important takeaway from all of this is that it is not at all necessary for you and your partner to have to share the same love languages. It is rare to find a couple who speak the same love languages as most people differ.
What is essential more than anything else is being willing and able to understand your partner's love language and using that as the foundation for how you communicate and express love with them. Remember, the principles of love languages don't just apply to people with who we are intimate or are in personal relationships. Learning the love language of your children, your family members, your friends, and other significant relationships will enhance the connections that you share with all your loved ones.
When you make an effort to reach out and connect with your loved one on their level, the outcome will be overwhelmingly positive for your relationship. You will see the value for yourself when you start to apply these principles to how you communicate and express love.
You and your partner deserve to be loved by each other in the best way possible. It will pay dividends to take the time to explore and experiment with each other to discover how to connect best and express love.
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The information contained above is provided for entertainment purposes only. The contents of this article are not intended to amount to advice on your personal situation and you should not rely on any of the contents of this article. Professional advice should be obtained before taking or refraining from taking any action as a result of the contents of this article. The Writer and Shoshin Therapies disclaim all liability and responsibility arising from any reliance placed on any of the contents of this article.
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