When Katie Frugé and her husband, Lafayette, decided to get married in 2007, they were 21 and didn’t know what they didn’t know.
“We were too young to get married and too young really to care,” said Frugé, who’s now director of the Center for Cultural Engagement for the Baptist General Convention of Texas.
For guidance, the young couple turned to The Five Love Languages, a preferred book by North Carolina writer and pastor Gary Chapman. First published in 1992, the book explores other ways people express love—words of affirmation, physical touch, quality time, acts of service and giving gifts—in hopes of helping couples find happiness.
The book claims understanding one another’s love language can assist create healthy marriages. Frugé recalls considering the book held the important thing to a vivid future.
“We thought, we’ll just learn one another’s love languages and all the things’s going be hunky-dory,” she said. “We’re not going to ever have any fights and we’re each going to feel fully satisfied on a regular basis.”
Married life proved more complicated.
Frugé said she and her husband are still happily married 17 years later but there have been lots of bumps, including several health crises—“We had the sickness and health part,” she said. And they needed more love along the way in which than a formula could provide.
“When I’m diagnosed with cancer, I don’t need my husband to exit and buy me a present at that moment,” she said.
Once popular mostly in evangelical Christian circles, the Five Love Languages have exploded right into a popular culture phenomenon. The dating app Bumble offers a Five Love Languages quiz, the concept has been featured on The Bachelorette and in major media outlets, while the Five Love Languages channel on TikTok has attracted tens of hundreds of thousands of views. Chapman has sold greater than 20 million copies of his books and launched a cottage industry of conferences, related books and an internet quiz taken tens of hundreds of thousands of times.
All of that spotlight has led researchers akin to Emily Impett, a psychology professor and director of the Relationships and Well-Being Laboratory on the University of Toronto Mississauga, to ask if the claims of the Five Love Languages get up to scientific scrutiny, and maybe nearly as necessary—what can scholars learn from the recognition of Chapman’s work?
A recent paper in “Current Directions in Psychological Science” suggests Chapman’s theory about how love works doesn’t quite add up. For the paper, Impett and a pair of colleagues checked out a series of studies that attempted to check three key ideas concerning the Five Love Languages: that individuals have a primary love language, that five love languages exist and that individuals are happier with a partner who speaks their primary love language.
The studies, said Impett and her colleagues, don’t support that theory.
For example, people will select a preferred language if forced to in a quiz. However, researchers found that if asked about all five love languages on a person basis—people rate all of them highly. The researchers also found that some necessary ideas, akin to supporting a partner’s or spouse’s goals, don’t fit within the five love language model and that individuals who’ve the identical love languages aren’t happier than other couples.
“Love will not be akin to a language one must learn to talk but might be more appropriately understood as a balanced eating regimen during which people need a full range of essential nutrients to cultivate lasting love,” Impett and her colleagues wrote.
They did suggest Chapman’s book has filled a necessity for couples in that “it provides partners a chance to reflect on, discuss, and respond to 1 one other’s need.”
In a follow-up email, Impett said that reading the love languages book—which incorporates examples of find out how to practice showing love in other ways—is way more helpful than using the web quiz. That’s partially since the give attention to finding a partner’s primary love language might be too restrictive and finally ends up putting people right into a box.
Instead, she told Religion News Service in an email, “all the behaviors Chapman identified are necessary.”
“We are usually not suggesting that individuals necessarily are multilingual (expert in any respect five behaviors) but that they need to learn to be for the reason that five behaviors that Chapman identifies are really necessary things people can do to keep up their relationships.”
On that time, Chapman agrees.
The 86-year-old writer, who recently stepped down after 50 years on the staff of Calvary Baptist Church in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, said all the love languages matter.
“There is totally absolute confidence that what makes one person feel loved doesn’t necessarily make one other person feel loved,” he said in an interview. “But I don’t wish to communicate that you simply only speak the person’s primary love language.”
Chapman, who still travels and speaks at marriage conferences and other events, said he was surprised by a few of the paper’s findings but appreciates researchers taking his work seriously. The more research, he said, the higher.
He said he continues to be surprised at how popular the concept of affection languages has been. Chapman developed the concept for the book while counseling troubled couples at his church. Those couples, he said, were often at their wit’s ends, because each partner thought they were acting in loving ways, but the opposite partner felt unloved.
A master storyteller, Chapman recalled one husband saying he cooked dinner most nights, shared within the home tasks and lawn work, and did all he could to support the family. But his wife felt distant because he was so busy helping out at home that they never had time to speak.
Looking over his counseling notes, Chapman began to search for patterns and eventually got here up with the five love languages.
“It’s a straightforward concept,” he said. “But I knew from my counseling and dealing with couples—it might help people in the event that they could get that idea. In all of my writing, I’ve tried to place the cookies on the underside shelf, so people can understand it easily.”
That approach is something researchers say they’ll learn from.
In their paper concerning the love languages, they said Chapman’s book has connected with people since it uses “intuitive metaphors, which can resonate with people and convey an easily digestible message freed from scientific jargon.”
Impett also said the give attention to finding a primary love language can overshadow the explanation why so many individuals find Chapman’s book helpful. The book, she said in an email, “gets people to discover any currently unmet needs (areas of improvement) of their relationship and opens up lines of communication to deal with those needs.”
Chapman, who has been married 62 years, said that’s the purpose. He said love begins with emotion but is sustained by having the correct attitude and by acting in ways in which put your spouse or romantic partner first.
That right attitude, he said, might be summed up this fashion: “I would like to do anything and all the things I can do to assist you grow to be the individual that you must be. I would like to do all the things that will be good for you.”
Meleah Smith of Chattanooga, Tennessee, who coaches “brands and bands” on marketing, said the concept of 5 love languages never really connected along with her. She knows the book has worked for other people, but for her, it’s too simplistic, said the 40-something, who described herself as “single as a Pringle.”
Smith said she has plenty of affection in her life, with friends, her church and her family—she helps manage her brother’s band—but no romantic relationship. She said the love languages might be too easy at times—tempting people to avoid the labor of attending to know someone and taking note of them.
“If I actually have to present you a listing of things you could have to do for me—possibly we are usually not a very good match,” she said.
After 17 years of marriage, Frugé had some advice for those using the five love languages. Remember that individuals need all types of affection, not only one kind. Pay attention to them—relatively than running to a book for all of the answers.
Sometimes the answers you wish are right in front of you.
“Thriving relationships occur when you could have a partner who understands and knows you, sees what your need is and meets you in that moment.”
