Intimacy Beyond the 5 Love Languages: Learn the Unique Language of Your Relationship
Learning how to express love can be a lifelong adventure, beginning with understanding the type of love language you speak. Even better, knowing your partner’s love language can give you new ideas for expressing love. (Especially since mismatched love languages are common.) Read on and see if you recognize yourself, or your mate, in the love language descriptions below.
In this article, we’ve included a list of the five love languages, along with examples and a link to The 5 Love Languages test so you can find out your own love language. We also explore the benefits and shortcomings of Gary Chapman’s The 5 Love Languages model.
Most importantly, we show you how to move beyond the limited framework of The Five Love Languages to discover the unique love language of your relationship.
If Google searches and book sales tell us anything, it’s that we’re hungry for information about how to express and receive love in our intimate relationships.
According to Google’s Romance Report, half a million people search for information on love languages each month. (As a side note, the question, “What is love?” is the number one Google search of all time.)
While French is often called the language of love because of its melodic sound, in the context of relationships, the term “love languages” was popularized by Gary Chapman, Baptist pastor and author of the 1995 book The 5 Love Languages: How to Express Heartfelt Commitment to Your Mate.
Translated into 50 languages and with 20 million copies sold, the popularity of The 5 Love Languages speaks to our deep human need to give and receive love.
Beginning at the moment of birth and lasting our entire lives, our need for love and connection is a vital part of what makes us human.
Expressing love in ways that help your partner feel loved will enrich your relationship in many ways. Good communication is essential for healthy relationships, and knowing how to express love well is part of that.
And if you’re curious to know more about your style in relationships, check out our Relationship Archetypes quiz.
The 5 Love Languages: Summary
Gary Chapman’s basic premise is that there are five different ways people express love or feel loved by others.
In order to have a healthy relationship, we need to understand what makes our partner feel loved and learn how to communicate love in ways that it can be received.
Relationship problems are explained as partners speaking mismatched love languages, which causes love to get lost in translation.
Chapman identifies five specific love languages: words of affirmation, physical touch, quality time, acts of service, and gifts. He believes that each of us has a primary love language and a secondary love language.
According to Chapman, if we don’t understand our partner’s love language, we tend to communicate love in our own love language.
We communicate love in the way we want to receive it, instead of communicating love in the way our partner wants to receive it.
You can see how this can cause problems in relationships.
If, for example. your love language is physical touch and your partner’s love language is acts of service, expressing love through touch isn’t going to be received as love by your partner…who may be wondering why you’re giving a back rub instead of taking out the trash.
Of course, this example of miscommunication is a bit oversimplified. Below, we’ll explain each of the love languages in more detail and give some examples.
If you’re curious what your love language is, you can take the Five Love Languages free quiz.
The five Love Languages: Definitions
Words of Affirmation
People with words of affirmation as their love language thrive on hearing verbal expressions of care, appreciation, and love from a partner. When they express love, they do it verbally through compliments, affirmations, and saying “I love you.”
Physical Touch
Those who have physical touch as their primary love language want to be in close physical contact with their loved one. While this love language is sometimes misunderstood as only relating to sexual expressions of love, Chapman is clear that physical touch extends beyond sexual touch to include all kinds of loving touch and physical closeness, including cuddling on the couch, hugs and kisses, and holding hands.
Quality Time
People whose love language is quality time feel loved when they spend meaningful time with a partner and have their partner’s undivided attention. This means time spent engaged in an activity together or sharing an experience without distractions. When quality time is your primary love language, sharing interests and activities with a partner help you feel loved.
Acts of Service
This love language is all about expressing love through actions that are designed to be helpful to your loved one. Acts of service can include dropping off the kids at school when a partner has a busy morning, taking out the garbage or doing other household chores, and cooking special meals for a loved one. In our experience, people who are oriented to acts of service as a love language are most likely to have their expressions of love misunderstood as "just taking care of business."
Gifts
As you might expect with this one, those who have gifts as their love language express their love through the giving of thoughtful gifts to their partner and feel loved when they receive gifts that are personally meaningful and demonstrate care. Gifts aren’t perfunctory but rather are seen as tangible tokens of love and connection.
What We Like About The 5 Love Languages
While it may seem obvious that each of us expresses and receives love in different ways, we value Chapman’s insight that mismatched expressions of love in a relationship can leave both partners feeling unappreciated and unloved.
In our work with couples who’ve been in this situation for years or even decades, it’s quite touching when a conversation about love languages helps partners see the ways in which they’ve overlooked and misunderstood expressions of love from their partner that have been there all along.
I still remember a moment in a therapy session with a couple when one of them realized the other’s daily habit of taking out the garbage was a genuine expression of love. Once she realized that, the resentment she’d been carrying because her partner never told her he loved her fell away and, in that moment, she saw him and their relationship in a new light.
Meanwhile, he came to understand that the problem wasn’t that nothing he did “was ever good enough,” as he’d insisted repeatedly, but rather that he’d failed to communicate loving care in ways his partner could recognize as love.
“People tend to criticize their spouse most loudly in the area where they themselves have the deepest emotional need.” Gary Chapman
From our perspective, the best part about the 5 love languages is that it gives couples an invitation to pay more attention to your relationship.
And it invites both partners to reflect on what helps them feel loved and what helps their partner feel loved.
How The 5 Love Languages Falls Short
Despite the immense popularity of The 5 Love Languages (which has spawned an entire series of Love Languages books for kids, teens, military families and the workplace) . . .
research doesn’t support the idea that there are five distinct love languages.
We’re not at all surprised that research doesn’t validate this idea.
The notion that there are only five love languages that can neatly categorize human relationships and provide a formula for giving and receiving love in a relationship is too simplistic.
It fails to capture the exquisite diversity of humans in relationship with each other.
What The 5 Love Languages model offers is a clear starting point. What it lacks is nuance and depth.
It’s a cookie cutter approach to understanding love and relationships.
The beautiful complexities of human relationships are lost and, as many of the critical reviews of the book note, the recommendations for expressing love via the five love languages can feel superficial and formulaic.
This ends up creating more disconnection in the relationship as couples start to wonder what they’re doing wrong.
Research also shows that some “love languages,” like quality time, are actually essential features of all healthy relationships, not just those in which one partner’s love language is quality time.
We believe the more couples are able to blend all five of these of these love languages into their lives together, the happier they’ll be.
As the belief in love languages has grown exponentially in the last decade, it’s gradually transformed from Chapman’s original focus on learning how to speak a partner’s love language to focusing on one’s own love language and the quest for getting partners to communicate love in the preferred way.
This focus on getting your partner to speak your love language has roots in The 5 Love Languages book when Chapman introduces us to the idea of the "empty love tank."
An empty love tank happens when our partner consistently fails to communicate love in our love language.
Once a partner’s love tank is empty, increased relationship conflict follows. The implication is that it’s our partner’s job to fill our empty love tank. (The book doesn’t address ways we could potentially fill our own love tanks).
Linking relationship satisfaction to couples filling each other’s love tanks endorses a transactional relationship between partners: “If you watch this movie with me, I’ll give you a foot massage.”
Applying an exchange model to your love relationship creates frustration and resentment when it seems like you’re doing more acts of service for your partner than they’re giving words of affirmation in return.
The reason this approach is doomed to fail is because it applies quantitative standards (measuring how much each person has done for the other) to the qualitative experience of love between two people.
And when it comes to physical touch as a love language, things get even murkier.
If my love language is physical touch, what happens when my love tank is empty? Is it my partner’s job to give me some physical intimacy, even if they don’t want to be physically intimate?
Sadly, this is more than just a theoretical question. In the book, Chapman gives a case example in which he tells a wife to be more sexually available for her husband, who’s been treating her poorly, in the hopes that this will change his behavior toward her.
What can we take from this?
The enduring popularity of the book, despite its flaws, illuminates our deep craving to love and be loved in ways that feel meaningful.
At the heart of The 5 Love Languages is the belief that people can learn how to communicate love in ways that deeply touch their partners.
It’s a valuable starting place because it reminds us that whatever love language we speak, what makes it a love language is its ability to communicate a loving feeling.
In truth, any expression that flows from what the heart genuinely feels is a love language.
So, What’s Your Love Language?
For couples, love language tests hold out the promise of a truly fulfilling relationship. Many people rank the quality of their relationship as a top priority, an essential part of what makes life meaningful.
Because the ability to express love nurtures a strong connection, and because we aren’t often given good examples or tools for effective communication (especially when it comes to conflict), it makes sense there’s a desperate desire to learn how to communicate love more effectively.
Once you escape the confines of The 5 Love Languages, you can begin the adventure of discovering the unique love language of your relationship.
One of the most amazing things about a long-term relationship is how it enriches your communication in ways that are unique to the shared world of your daily life and your history together.
Long-term couples who know each other well often develop a shared vocabulary of particular words, phrases, glances, and ways of touching each other that have meaning only they can understand fully.
For example, the most meaningful gift Daniel has ever given me is a playlist he made for my birthday the first year we were dating. I realized as I was writing this article that my birthday playlist is a perfect example of how people communicate love in deeply meaningful ways that don’t fit into The 5 Love Languages framework.
When I took the love languages quiz in the early 2000s, my top two love languages were words of affirmation and quality time. Yet neither of these can explain why this playlist ranks as one of my most treasured gifts of all time.
The reason I treasure it is because it showed me that he really got me. He saw me. And because of that, he created a playlist that was somehow more me than any playlist I’ve ever created for myself.
Finding the Shared Language of Your Love
Each person’s love language is different because each of us is different. What makes each person a miracle, including you, is that we each exist only once in this singular and special form.
No one else shares your exact experiences, thoughts, preferences, or perspective on life. No one loves exactly the way you do.
Think about that for a moment. No one else in the world expresses love the same way you do.
That’s true for your partner as well. There’s no one else like them.
The magic of your relationship is the joining together of two entirely unique people to create an entirely unique relationship— one that has never existed before and will never exist again.
That’s why trying to pick the one or two love languages from the five options listed in a book will, at best, only point you in a general direction you can start exploring together.
On the other hand, learning the love language of your relationship could become an adventure that lasts a lifetime.
True love and intimacy are experiences shared between people. This means paying attention to how open, present, and receptive you are in your relationship.
These moments when both people are paying attention to each other— without distraction— are moments of attuned connection. They’re the times when we really feel alive and they’re at the heart of love and intimacy. They’re relationship gold.
Whatever is expressed during this time (words or touch), or as a reminder of this time (gifts or acts of service), is the language of your love.
Love invites us to become vulnerable, and that’s why relationships can be scary. We don’t want to get hurt and sometimes, in trying to protect ourselves from being hurt, we close up.
We believe we can’t get hurt if we’re not open. This is something we see again and again with couples, who discover that despite not being open to their partner, they’re still fully capable of being hurt by them. The only difference is that they’ve closed themselves off to being able to express and fully receive love.
Trying to make yourself invulnerable to being hurt by your partner doesn't prevent getting hurt, but it does prevent connection.
Love requires knowing each other...knowing likes and dislikes, knowing each other’s history and experiences, knowing each other’s thoughts and hopes and dreams.
In essence, love requires having access to each other’s inner worlds and knowing where to watch your step and tread with care over the tender spots.
Letting someone know you this way requires courage. Being open feels risky because it asks that we let our guard down in order to be known and understood.
It is a risk, and it’s also an opportunity . . . because it’s the only way to love and be loved fully.
It’s the only way to learn the language of your relationship. Choosing to stay open, looking for opportunities to share expressions of love, helps your relationship develop its own unique vocabulary and rhythm.
The more you share, the better you know each other. You understand how you fit together in your unique relationship.
Here’s the thing: love isn’t something you give or are given. It’s something you experience.
This is why being in the present moment matters so much. It’s the only way we can share an experience with another person, who is right there with us.
Intimacy is choosing to stay in the moment, to experience whatever occurs, together.
Humans are born with the instinct to love: vulnerable, open, and reaching out to connect. As we mature, we develop our capacity to communicate more clearly. Our words and gestures let us move toward each other. In some ways, falling in love leaves us wordless and grasping, once again like infants.
Connected to the one we love, we develop a shared language created through our experience together. Speaking our shared language, we can move together toward a fulfilling future.
Conclusion
At Alchemy of Love, we think of relationships as a journey a couple takes together.
It’s a journey of self-discovery as well as an adventure of coming to know another person intimately.
As you journey together, the language of the love you share grows.
It deepens and evolves and starts to express itself as living poetry . . . in the time you spend together and how you talk, the ways you touch each other, the things you do for one another, and the thoughtful gifts that show all the ways you care.
Want to take a journey with us? sign up for The Communication Cure, our free class to improve communication and create more intimacy in your relationship.
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About Us
We help those with painful childhood experiences to heal your relationship with yourself, deeply connect with others, and learn the skills for having fulfilling relationships.
Fulfilling relationships are an essential part of living a good life and yet, many of us (perhaps even most of us) have core wounds from childhood experiences that affect our ability to have the kinds of intimate relationships in adulthood that we long to have.
