5 love languages research

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Is There Science Behind the Five Love Languages?

Love languages—the concept coined by Baptist pastor Gary Chapman some 30 years ago—has taken the relationships world by storm. It’s often the “go-to” topic on first dates, and, for those in relationships, love languages are said to provide deep, meaningful, and reliable insights into how relationships function. Putting love languages into action is believed to increase relationship happiness.

The concept clearly has appeal. At last count, 20 million copies have been sold worldwide of Chapman’s 1992 book The 5 Love Languages: The Secret to Love That Lasts . The book has been translated into 49 languages.

There is only one catch. There is little evidence to support the idea that love languages are “a thing,” or that love languages do much of anything to help improve relationships.

What are the love languages?

According to Chapman , there are five love languages. Each of these love languages is a way to communicate your love to your romantic partner.

In his role as a Baptist pastor, Chapman had been counselling couples for years. It was through his observations of couples that the idea of love languages was born.

He believed love languages were an intuitive and simple way to teach couples about how to tune into each other’s ways of expressing love. And so, he began running seminars for husbands and wives, and the popularity of his seminars grew.

The five love languages are:

• acts of service (doing something that helps a partner, such as running an errand)
• physical touch (demonstrating physical affection, such as giving your partner a hug or kiss)
• quality time (spending time together and giving each other undivided attention)
• gifts (giving your partner a present that communicates thoughtfulness, effort, or expense)
• words of affirmation (such as expressing your admiration, or complimenting your partner).

Chapman suggests that people typically use all love languages, but that most people tend to rely on one love language most of the time. This is referred to as a person’s primary love language.

According to Chapman, people are more satisfied in their relationships when both partners match when it comes to their primary love language. However, people experience less satisfaction in their relationships when both partners do not share the same primary love language.

Another important aspect of the love languages concept is that relationships are likely to deliver the greatest satisfaction when a person can understand their partner’s love language, and act in ways that “speak to” their partner’s language. In essence, this idea is about tuning in to what a partner wants.

This is an idea that has existed across many models and theories about how relationships function well. That is, responding to a partner in a way that meets their needs and wants makes a person feel understood, validated, and cared for .

What does the evidence tell us?

Despite the popularity of the theory of love languages, only a handful of studies have been conducted and reported over the past 30 years. Research is largely inconclusive, although the balance sways more toward refuting rather than endorsing the love languages concept.

Let’s start with how love languages are assessed. In popular culture, the Love Language Quiz TM is an online questionnaire that people can complete to find out about their love languages. Despite millions of individuals having taken the quiz (according to 5lovelanguages.com), there are no published findings as to the reliability and validity of the measure.

Researchers have developed their own version of the love languages survey, but the findings did not meet the statistical thresholds to suggest the survey adequately captured the five love languages. Also, their findings did not support the idea that there are five love languages.

Furthermore, a qualitative study, in which researchers coded the written responses of undergraduate students to questions about how they express love, suggested there may be six love languages. However, the researchers reported difficulty agreeing on how some of the students’ responses neatly fitted into Chapman’s love languages, particularly in the categories of “words of affirmation” and “quality time.”

Next, let’s turn to research testing a core premise of the love language theory: that couples with matching love languages experience greater satisfaction than those who do not. Evidence for this premise is very mixed.

Three studies , including one that used Chapman’s Love Language Quiz, have found that couples with matching love languages were no more satisfied than couples who were mismatched.

However, a more recent study found that partners with matching love languages experienced greater relationship and sexual satisfaction than partners with mismatched love languages. This research also found that men who reported greater empathy and perspective taking had a love language that better matched the language of their partner.

Finally, what does the research say about whether having a better understanding of your partner’s love language is linked to higher relationship satisfaction? Only two studies have investigated this question. Both found that knowing your partner’s primary love language did predict relationship satisfaction in the present or into the future.

So, as you can see, not only is there very little research investigating love languages, but the research to date doesn’t strengthen belief in the powerful properties of love languages.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article .

About the Author

Gery Karantzas

Gery Karantzas, Ph.D. , is currently a professor and director of the Science of Adult Relationships (SoAR) Laboratory in the School of Psychology at Deakin University. He is also a couples therapist and was the former national convener of the Australian Psychological Society Psychology of Relationships Interest Group.

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I love the way you love me: Responding to partner’s love language preferences boosts satisfaction in romantic heterosexual couples

Olha Mostova

1 Doctoral School of Social Sciences, University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland

Maciej Stolarski

2 Faculty of Psychology, University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland

Gerald Matthews

3 Department of Psychology, George Mason University, Orlando, FL, United States of America

Associated Data

All relevant data are within the paper and its Supporting Information files

Chapman’s Love Languages hypothesis claims that (1) people vary in the ways they prefer to receive and express affection and (2) romantic partners who communicate their feelings congruent with their partner’s preferences experience greater relationship quality. The author proposes five distinct preferences and tendencies for expressing love, including: Acts of Service, Physical Touch, Words of Affirmation, Quality Time and Gifts. In the present study partners ( N = 100 heterosexual couples) completed measures assessing their preferences and behavioral tendencies for a) expressions of love and b) reception of signs of affection, for each of the five proposed “love languages”. Relationship satisfaction, sexual satisfaction and empathy were also assessed. The degree of the within-couple mismatch was calculated separately for each individual based on the discrepancies between the person’s felt (preferred) and their partner’s expressed love language. The joint mismatch indicator was a sum of discrepancies across the five love languages. Matching on love languages was associated with both relationship and sexual satisfaction. In particular, people who expressed their affection in the way their partners preferred to receive it, experienced greater satisfaction with their relationships and were more sexually satisfied compared to those who met their partner’s needs to lesser extent. Empathy was expected to be a critical factor for better understanding of and responding to the partner’s needs. Results provided some support for this hypothesis among male but not female participants.

Introduction

Everyone has their own preferences for expressing and receiving romantic feelings. Based on his clinical observations Chapman [ 1 ] identified five distinct ways in which people show and want to receive the signs of commitment. He labeled them ‘love languages’ (LLs) and proposed division into the following domains: 1) words of affirmation (verbal compliments, or words of appreciation), 2) quality time (time spent together implying focused attention of both partners), 3) receiving gifts (visual symbols of affection), 4) acts of service (helping mate with necessary tasks) and 5) physical touch (from holding hands to sexual intercourse).

Chapman [ 1 ] used a metaphor of a ‘love tank’, which reflected people’s emotional need to feel loved. The ‘love tank’ of both partners is filled when each of them expresses the affection in a way another one prefers to receive it. According to Chapman and Southern, “once you identify and learn to speak your spouse’s primary love language…you will have discovered the key to a long-lasting, loving marriage” [ 2 , p. 18]. Thus, the author is convinced that conducting interventions designed to foster better understanding of the partner’s LLs, as well as educating people on how to put this knowledge into practice would lead to a greater relationship maintenance and satisfaction.

People often speak and understand their primary LLs, but they may “learn a secondary love language” [ 2 , p.14]. For example, the husband may be aware of his wife’s desire to receive compliments–words of affirmation, although he himself prefers being physically touched. Therefore, LLs can be divided into those in which people tend to communicate to their partners (expressed love language) and those they prefer to receive in order to keep their emotional ‘love tank’ full (felt love language).

The assumption of basic and fundamental need for love and affection is well-established and empirically supported [ 3 – 5 ]. Multiple research findings also support the notion that human’s need for love and affection boosts both personal well-being [e.g. 6 ] and satisfaction in various types of relationships [e.g. 7 , 8 ].

Research has also addressed the effects of similarity between partners on relationship outcomes. It is well established that similarity and convergence of different types in romantic partners promotes greater relationship satisfaction. For example, similarity in communication values, such as ego support or conflict management, has been shown to promote attraction and greater relationship satisfaction in couples which described themselves as ‘seriously involved’ [ 9 ].

Gonzaga and colleagues [ 10 ] also found that similarity and convergence in the personality between partners promotes similarity in their shared emotional experiences and relationship quality. Yet another study demonstrated that romantic couples who converge in their emotional experiences manifest greater relationship cohesion, while their relationships are less likely to dissolve [ 11 ]. In another study perceived similarity in text messaging, including frequency of initiating a text message exchange and expressing affection, was associated with greater relationship satisfaction [ 12 ].

Sexual satisfaction is another broadly-studied concept in the research on couples and romantic relationships. Various studies found an association between sexual satisfaction and relationship satisfaction [ 13 , 14 ]. For instance, in a study conducted on 387 couples, sexual satisfaction and communication independently predicted the relationship satisfaction [ 14 ]. Thus, romantic partners who are having difficulties communicating, but are at the same time sexually satisfied, will experience greater marital satisfaction. Similarity in personality traits between marital partners also proved to predict sexual satisfaction [ 15 ] In another study, de Jong and Reis [ 16 ] found that complementarity, but not similarity, in sexual preferences predicted sexual satisfaction, consistent with LL hypothesis. Being aware of one’s partner’s preferences and acting accordingly may increase the couple’s sexual satisfaction.

The act of giving may potentially be more satisfying than benefiting oneself. One study [ 17 ] found that spending more of one’s income on others predicts greater happiness than spending money on themselves. Prosocial spending is positively correlated with greater happiness in both poor and rich countries and even recalling the past instance of spending money on others has a causal impact on happiness [ 18 ]. Thus, it is possible that helping others to match their needs produces a greater emotional benefit than receiving and caring for oneself. Thus, compatibility in LLs may benefit the person as a giver, as well as a receiver.

Empathy is often believed to play a crucial role in relationships of various kinds and to be a key component of effective communication. It can be defined as the “reactions of one individual to the observed experiences of another” [ 19 , p.113]. Empathy is primarily related to one’s ability to understand and share the emotional experiences of others [e.g., 20 ]. According to Davis [ 19 , 21 ], empathy can be divided into four domains, including: empathic concern, personal distress, perspective taking and fantasy.

Research demonstrates a positive relation between a partner’s empathic accuracy and their degree of relationship satisfaction [ 22 , 23 ], when it is present in mundane and nonconflictual settings. Various studies have also found that people with higher levels of empathy are better in detecting their partners’ needs and providing them with higher-quality advice and instrumental support [ 24 – 26 ]. On the other hand, subjective perceptions of empathy may be more important for relationship satisfaction than empathic accuracy [ 27 ], i.e., the objective ability to determine one’s partners views.

Empathic accuracy implies accurate perception of people’s mental states, including thoughts and feelings [ 24 ] people that are more proficient in mentalizing may also be more skillful in understanding their partner’s needs and preferences. Such an awareness may in turn increase the likelihood of fulfilling such needs and make them choose and adjust their behavior more consciously. Thus, empathy may support congruence in LLs. Although there were some attempts to examine the factors that may moderate the relationship satisfaction when partners are misaligned in their LLs [e.g. 28 ], to our knowledge, none of the previous studies have examined the potential mediators that may drive LL matching, leading to elevated satisfaction. An empathic individual may be both more effective in giving the form of love desired by the partner, and in guiding the partner towards understanding their own needs.

Despite the great popularity that Chapman’s work had gained worldwide among both clinicians and general public, the concept of LLs remains relatively unstudied. Egbert and Polk [ 29 ] developed the Love Languages Scale based on concepts found in Chapman’s [ 1 ] LLs and suggested that the five-factor LL model had some psychometric validity. A confirmatory factor analysis demonstrated significant relationship between the five LLs and Stafford, Dainton, and Haas’ [ 30 ] relational maintenance typology, thus supporting their construct validity.

In one version of the scale participants responded about how they tend to feel love. To remain consistent with the literature we followed the term ‘felt LL’ that was used in Egbert and Polk’s [ 31 ] study to infer the preferred way of receiving love from one’s partner. However, it should be noted that two forms of the LL scale provide the data on what makes people feel loved without directly examining what is being preferred, which might be a potential conceptual problem with the LL measure.

Another study utilized measures of the autonomic nervous system, such as skin conductance and respiration rate [ 32 ]. First, 89 participants were asked to complete Chapman’s LLs questionnaire. Next, their psychophysiological responses (skin conductance, heart rate and pulse rate) were measured, while they were listening to the recorded imagery scripts (imaginal exposure and guided imagery) describing each of the LLs. It was found that participant’ arousal level increased when they were listening to their dominating or preferred LL. Specifically, a significant association was found between hearing the imagery script of their primary LL and person’s heart rate and skin conductance, although no significant increase was found in the respiration rate. In addition, good internal consistency and reliability was reported for the scale measurement of the preferred LL [ 33 ].

Other aspects of Chapman’s [ 1 ] claim have not been supported. Egbert and Polk [ 31 ] tested 84 university student couples, who had been together for at least two months. The aims was to check whether partners well-matched in their reported preferences and expressions of LLs reported greater relationship quality. They were grouped into three categories including matched, mismatched and partially matched; however, no significant effect of matching on relationship quality was found. According to later research [ 28 ] sharing the same primary (expressed) LL again did not result in relationship satisfaction. However, the researchers found that female participants’ self-regulation significantly improved partners’ satisfaction when their LLs were misaligned.

Veale [ 34 ] aimed to test whether becoming aware of one’s partner’s preferred LL would result in behavioral adaptation in the absence of any identified external motivation. First, the researcher checked whether participants felt that the love expression used by their partner was correctly identified. Second, descriptions of the LL profiles and category membership were provided to each participant, and the couples were given a brief overview of the love expression behavior related to each of five categories. Additionally, the study considered whether LL expression knowledge would influence participants’ emotional state and behavior, as well as whether efforts to make behavioral accommodation would be noticed by their partners. The research found no statistically significant difference between pre- and posttest means for any of the categories, although in general respondents agreed that their LL was correctly identified. It should be noted that LLs in the study were evaluated categorically using Chapman’s Love Language Profile, which shares the assumption that people have one dominating LL that they both feel and express the most.

The present study: Aims and hypotheses

Chapman’s [ 1 ] basic claim is that people who “talk” their partner’s LL are more satisfied in their relationships, but empirical support for the LL hypothesis remains equivocal. In the present study, we aimed to extend previous findings [e.g. 31 ] by adopting a novel, continuous approach to measure match/mismatch between partners’ LLs. Treating LL mismatch as a continuous dimension may preserve information on level of mismatch that is lost by assessing it on a categorical basis, and provide a more sensitive test of its relationships with other variables. First, we aimed to check whether romantic partners who receive affection in ways consistent with their partner’s style of expressing love report higher relationship satisfaction and sexual satisfaction. We asked people separately about when they feel loved the most (i.e., preference for receiving love) and how they prefer to express affirmation of love. The aim was to assess the partner’s match not only in term of their dominant love language, but to also take into account possible that one’s preferences for receiving love may differ from one’s style of expressing and communicating love.

Second, we aimed to distinguish “actor” effects (mismatch lowers one’s own satisfaction) and “partner” effects (mismatch lowers the other person’s satisfaction). Chapman’s [ 1 ] hypothesis emphasizes the former, but there may also be a reciprocal effect, i.e., if my partner feels s/he is not receiving the love affirmations s/he wants, the partner’s deficit in feeling loved may lower my satisfaction. This approach provided a full picture of the interplay between both partners’ expressed and felt LLs, contrary to Chapman’s assumption that people give and feel only one dominating LL.

We aimed to test four hypotheses:

• Relationship satisfaction and sexual satisfaction are negatively associated with the mismatch between the person’s felt and their partner’s expressed LLs (actor effect). This is the central claim of Chapman [ 1 ]. His account of the LLs hypothesis does not imply that the importance of LLs varies for men and women, but we tested for possible gender differences on an exploratory basis.
• Relationship satisfaction and sexual satisfaction are negatively associated with the mismatch between the person’s expressed and their partner’s felt LLs (partner effect). The partner’s feelings of not being adequately loved may influence actor satisfaction.
• Matching in LLs is associated with empathy levels, given that empathy is likely to support adaptation to the partner’s needs. Given that empathy is a multifaceted construct, we hypothesized that its most adaptive facets, i.e., empathic concern (emotional empathy) and perspective taking (cognitive empathy), would be the aspects related to LLs.
• Empathy is associated with higher relationship and sexual satisfaction, as in multiple previous studies [e.g. 35 – 37 ]. We also anticipated testing the mediating role of empathy in the LL mismatch–satisfaction association, contingent on support for the third and fourth hypotheses.

Participants

The working sample consisted of 100 heterosexual couples (100 men, 100 women), who were sexually active with their partners. All the participants were in a current romantic relationship for at least 6 months. Relationship length varied between 6 months and 24 years ( M = 3.5 years). The initial sample consisted of N = 110, but data from 10 couples was discarded, as only one partner have completed the questionnaire or there was a significant amount of incomplete or missing information for one or both partners. When an individual item was not scored by the respondent, the average over available items was calculated and multiplyed with the number of items in the questionnaire to replace the missing value.

Age of the participants ranged from 17 to 58 (mean: 27.34). Among male participants age varied from 18 to 58 with a mean value of 28.58 ( SD = 9.68). Female age ranged from 17 to 57 with an average value of 25.10 ( SD = 7.89).

The sample was culturally diverse and it included representatives of 31 nationalities. The most commonly occurring nationalities were Ukrainians (N = 67), Poles (N = 24), Belgians (N = 15), Russians (N = 13), Americans (N = 12) and Swedes (N = 12). Majority of both male and female participants indicated their marital status as never married ( n = 116), followed by married ( n = 63), “other” ( n = 13) and divorced ( n = 8).

The participants were recruited using social media and personal connections. The online questionnaire was distributed to volunteers that provided written consent and reported being in the romantic relationships with their current partner for at least 6 months and were either native speakers of English and/or communicated in English to each other, or reported having sufficient fluency to freely and effortlessly communicate with native speakers (i.e., at least B2 level). The data were collected between October 2018 and March 2019. The subjects spent an average of 23 minutes responding to the questionnaire and were not rewarded. The attention check items with reverse wording were used respectively for each inventory to prevent incomplete and low-effort answers.

All participants gave their informed consent to participate in the study of “communication and satisfaction among couples” that is intended to gather information about various aspects of romantic relationships. They were also informed that their answers will not be assessed individually and that they will not receive any feedback on their results as a couple). We asked participants about the relationship’s length and the time since the first sexual intercourse with a current partner to ensure that the participants were sexually active with their current partners, as well as to eliminate the possibility of the ‘honeymoon effect’ [ 38 ]. We also asked both partners about their fluency in English language. Couples were asked not to discuss or compare their results with each other.

Materials and procedure

LLs were assessed using two methods. The first was the forced-choice method used by Egbert and Polk [ 31 ], while the second one included two forms of a LL scale (LLS) requiring independent ratings of preferences, which was developed and validated by Egbert and Polk [ 29 ].

First, participant received a forced-choice LL measure [ 31 ] including the following instructions: “I feel the most loved when my partner: (1) physically touches me (i.e., gives a hug, gives a kiss, holds my hand, touches me), (2) helps me out (i.e., running an errand, finishing a chore for me, helping me out, helping to keep things cleaned up), (3) spends quality time with me (i.e., really listening, doing something we both like, engages in quality conversation, spending free time), (4) says encouraging words (i.e., compliments, expresses appreciation for me, gives me credit for something I did, gives me positive comments), and (5) gives me gifts (i.e., a thoughtful birthday gift, a greeting card, a present for no special reason, a gift after being away)”. This item served only for the purpose of its later comparison to the two versions of LLS in order to check for the consistency of participant’s responses. Thus, this tool was not used as the main indicator of couples’ LLs in the subsequent analysis.

The LLS assessment [ 29 ] involved four behavioral indicators representing each of the ways to feel and express affection. In the first form of the LLS participants were asked to rate the extent to which they tend to express (or give ) love to their partners by engaging in the listed behaviors. The second form of the LLS included the same list of behaviors, but this time participants were asked to rate the extent to which each expression makes them feel loved by their partners. Thus, each version of LLS consisted of 20 self-report items, including four items per each of the five LLs described by Chapman [ 1 ], e.g., “I tend to express my feeling to my partner by telling that I appreciate him/her”. The items were rated using a five-point Likert-type scale to assess the extent of agreement on a scale of 1 ( strongly disagree ) to 5 ( strongly agree ). Egbert and Polk [ 29 ] reported sufficient construct validity and reliability of the questionnaire in assessing LLs.

As both partners responded to the two versions of LLS, we obtained information about how they tend to express and prefer to feel love. We could then calculate the discrepancy between these measurements. Thus, the degree to which one’s (partner) preferred to feel love (e.g., when holding hands), as rated on the Likert scale, differed from the second partner’s (actor) degree of expressing love in this way (e.g., by holding hands) served as an indicator of extent to which the respondents felt that their partners were meeting needs in terms of LLs. The sum of the discrepancy scores on the five individual LL components then reflected the degree of match or mismatch.

To remain consistent with the literature we used the term ‘felt LL’ to infer the preferred way of receiving love from one’s partner, as we were following the term used by in the previous studies. However, it should be noted that LLS measure provides the data on what makes people feel loved without directly examining what is being preferred, which might be a potential conceptual problem with the LL measure proposed by Egbert and Polk [ 29 ].

In particular, a value of 0 indicated a complete match between the way the respondent preferred to feel and how their partner expressed love (e.g., participant X rates preference for being complimented as 5, and X’s partner rates his/her expression of compliments as 5). A negative value meant that one’s partner does not express a form of love to the extent desired (e.g. participant X rates preference for being complimented as 5, and X’s partner rates his/her expression of compliments as 1). A positive value indicated that one’s partner overly expressed a form of love that the participant did not require to such an extent (e.g. participant X rates preference for being complimented as 1, and X’s partner rates his/her expression of compliments as 5). Because our interest was in overall mismatch, we converted all discrepancy scores to absolute values and computed the item-level sum of the four scores for each LL. We then summed these discrepancy scores for each individual, to provide an overall index of mismatch between one’s preferences for being loved and partner’s ways of expressing love, based on the 20 item-level discrepancy scores. Our primary outcome measure was thus overall LL mismatch; higher scores indicated greater mismatch. The internal consistency of the calculated sum of discrepancies in our study amounted to Cronbach’s α = .61 for male and α = .70 for female participants.

In addition, the internal consistency was confirmed to be acceptable or good for all of the five LLs scales before they were combined to create the discrepancy scores. In particular, the results suggested a good fit for each of the five expressed LLs: Acts of Service (α = .70), Physical Touch (α = .89), Words of Affirmation (α = .79), Quality Time (α = .78) and Gifts (α = .77). The internal consistency was also confirmed for the five felt LLs scales: Acts of service (α = .74), Physical Touch (α = .85), Words of Affirmation (α = .82), Quality Time (α = .75) and Gifts (α = .84).

Participants’ sexual satisfaction was assessed using the Index of Sexual Satisfaction questionnaire [ISS, 39 ]. The scale consists of 25-Likert-type items (e.g., “I enjoy the sex techniques that my partner likes or uses”, or “I feel that my sex life is boring”) and demonstrated high internal consistency among men (α = .91) and women (α = .92). The participants rated the statements on a 7-point Likert-type, where 1 indicated none of the time and 7 indicated all of the time . The items that implied lower sexual satisfaction (e.g., “I feel that my sex life is boring”) were reversed scored and the total score was calculated as a sum of all item scores. Higher scores indicated greater level of sexual satisfaction.

Relationship satisfaction was measured using the Relationship Assessment Scale [RAS, 40 ], one of the most frequently used questionnaires used for studying relationship quality. RAS consists of seven items measuring general relationship satisfaction (e.g., “To what extent has your relationship met your original expectations?”). Respondents are asked to rate each statement using a 5-point scale. High internal consistency of the measure was confirmed for male (α = .85) and female (α = .87) participants.

Interpersonal Reactivity Index [IRI; 19 ] was applied as a multi-dimensional assessment of empathy. This widely used self-report metric comprises 28 items. The participants are asked to rate their response on a Likert-type scale ranging from 1 (“ does not describe me well” ) to 5 (“ describes me very well” ). IRI consists of four distinct subscales, including: 1) perspective taking–the tendency to spontaneously adopt the psychological point of view of others; 2) fantasy–indicating tendencies to transpose oneself imaginatively into the feelings and actions of fictitious characters in books, movies, and plays; 3) empathic concern–assessing other-oriented feelings of sympathy and concern for unfortunate others; and 4) personal distress–measuring self-oriented feelings of personal anxiety and unease in tense interpersonal settings.

We hypothesized that perspective taking and empathic concern scales would be negatively associated with LL mismatch, and positively related to satisfaction measures. Fantasy did not appear directly relevant to LLs, whereas personal distress might be positively associated with mismatch. Internal consistencies were acceptable for all four subscales among male subjects, including perspective taking (α = .74), fantasy (α = .77), empathic concern (α = .70), and personal distress (α = .70). In female participants the indicators were acceptable for the empathic concern (α = .80) and fantasy (α = .75) subscales, but poorer for perspective taking (α = .62) and personal distress (α = .60).

Preliminary analyses

This section reports descriptive statistics for the study variables, as well as tests for gender differences. We also tested within-couple correlations to investigate “assortative mating”; the extent to which people partner with those of similar characteristics to themselves.

Table 1 shows LL preferences on the forced-choice measure. Quality time was the most frequently declared LL, followed by physical touch, acts of service, words of affirmation and receiving gifts. In accordance with prior research [ 31 ], there was no significant association between gender and participants’ responses in the forced-choice LL measurement, χ 2 (1) = 14.85, p = .25 (see Table 1 ).

Note . χ 2 (1) = 9.52, p = .25. Numbers in parentheses indicate column percentages.

Table 2 shows means and SDs for the continuous scores. The rank-ordering of means differed a little from the forced-choice data, in that Physical Touch was the highest-rated preference, in both genders, although Quality Time was also highly rated. Also, contrasting with the forced-choice data, women obtained higher mean scores in four out of five LLs dimensions–all except for acts of service. It seems that women generally preferred to receive love from their partners more intensely than men did (see Table 2 ). Table 2 also shows data for ratings of expressed love. The order of preferences was similar to that for feeling preferences. Participants tended to express love to their partners primarily by physically touching them, followed by spending quality time together, saying words of affirmation, doing acts of service and giving gifts. No significant sex difference was observed for any but one expressed LL: female participants scored slightly higher than male participants in the expression of quality time LL.

Note . E = expressed; F = felt; LLs = love languages. LL Mismatch reflects the misfit between one’s felt and their partner’s expressed love languages accumulated for all LLs; higher values indicate poorer fit. Hedges’ g is an effect size indicator endorsed for paired samples t-test (see King & Minium, 2003)

*p < .05,

**p < .01.

Table 2 shows that, despite the gender differences in felt LLs, men and women did not differ on the overall indicator of LL mismatch, i.e., inconsistency between one’s LL preferences and the partner’s ways of expressing love. The mismatch indicator does not capture directional biases; i.e., whether mismatch results from the partner providing a deficiency of acts of love, or providing more than the person wants. The raw differences were calculated by subtracting the partner’s expressed LL from the actor’s felt (preferred) level of LLs. Positive values indicate deficiency, while negative values signify excess. The analysis demonstrated that the female participants generally experienced a "lack" in terms of their preferred levels of receiving LLs, particularly in the case of Quality Time. On the other hand, male participants seemed to perceive or feel the affection to a lesser extent than their female partners reported expressing it, thus indicating an "excess". However, this was not the case for men’s Acts of Service LL.

Table 2 also shows the cross-gender correlations for LLs. Overall LL mismatch was quite substantially correlated across the couples. However, at the level of individual feelings and expressions, only two out of five LLs–acts of service and gifts–showed significant correlations (assortative mating). Thus, the least valued LLs showed assortative mating but the most valued did not, for both feelings and expressions.

Table 2 also provides descriptive statistics for the satisfaction and empathy variables. There were no significant gender differences in satisfaction, but consistent with other studies [e.g. 41 ] female participants’ advantage in empathy was observed across all the IRI dimensions. Of the IRI scales, only empathic concern showed a significant though small-magnitude correlation.

Hypotheses testing

In line with our first hypothesis, we obtained a significant negative association between relationship satisfaction and the LL mismatch indicator, in both men and women (see Table 3 ). Thus, the greater the discrepancy between preferred and felt LLs, the less satisfied the participants were with their relationships. Similar associations were observed for sexual satisfaction. The actor effects of LL mismatch were stronger in men, particularly for sexual satisfaction, for which the correlations were -.37 (men) and -.21 (women).

Note . Partner effects are shadowed in light grey. Assortative mating effects are provided in bold font.

Discrepancies in three LLs appeared to be particularly important for participants’ relationship and sexual satisfaction (see S1 Appendix ). Specifically, mismatch in Physical Touch, Words of Affirmation and Quality Time LLs separately were significantly associated with both male and female partners’ relationship satisfaction. Each of these love languages separately was also significantly associated with men’s sexual satisfaction. However, among female participants this association was only significant for the Physical Touch and Quality Time LLs, and their sexual satisfaction.

In addition, supporting the second hypothesis, partner effects proved significant–the respondent’s satisfaction with their relationship was associated with their partner’s LL mismatch. Partner effects were significant for both men and women. It may be as important to properly respond to the partner’s LL needs as to have one’s own LL preferences satisfied.

The third hypothesis was that cognitive and emotional facets of empathy would be associated with lower LL mismatch (see Table 3 ). The results indicated some significant actor effects in men. In particular, empathic concern ( r = -.27, p < . 01 ) and perspective taking ( r = -.34, p < . 01 ) components of empathy were higher in male individuals with smaller LL discrepancy, consistent with the hypothesis. However, this was not the case for female participants (see Table 3 ). Women whose partners scored higher on perspective taking ( r = -.26, p < . 01 ) and fantasy dimensions of IRI also showed lower LL mismatch. Our hypothesis regarding the links between empathy and LL matching was then only partially supported.

Contrary to the fourth hypothesis, IRI empathy dimensions proved generally unrelated to both relationship satisfaction and sexual satisfaction. The only two exceptions referred to men’s perspective taking (positive actor effect on sexual satisfaction in men) and personal distress (women’s distress was related to lower men’s relationship satisfaction). Although some scholars [e.g. 42 ] would emphasize that the absence of the association is not disqualifying the possibly of mediation, we found that in the present analysis there was no reason to test models in which empathy mediated effects of LL mismatch on satisfaction.

Finally, we compared actor and partner effects in LL mismatch–satisfaction associations (see Table 4 ). The bivariate associations suggested both effects. For example, for men, relationship satisfaction was related both to their own and the woman’s mismatch ( r s of -.40 and -.36). To conduct a more rigorous comparison, we ran regression analyses with both men and women LL mismatch as predictors, by gender and by satisfaction scale. At the first step, these analyses controlled for length of relationship, which may be a confound of satisfaction. The second step entered either men or women LL mismatch, and the final step included both mismatch variables. Such a procedure allowed to examine the added value of each step of the model and to test for the incremental validity of actor vs. partner effects. For all analyses, both men and women LL mismatch contributed significantly to the regressions when entered separately at Step 2, consistent with the bivariate results. For men, the final regressions at Step 3 showed independent effects of both mismatch variables; male relationship and sexual satisfaction depends on both actor and partner effects. For women, the final regression for relationship satisfaction was similar, but the female mismatch predictor fell just short of significance. Neither predictor was significant at Step 3 for sexual satisfaction. Women’s sexual satisfaction was more weakly predicted overall than the other outcome measures in these analyses (10% variance explained vs. 21–25%).

Note . Mismatching on LL = the degree of discrepancy between one’s preferred and partners’ expressed LL; lower values indicate a better match. RS = Relationship satisfaction, SS = Sexual Satisfaction.

† Compared with step 2a.

Overall, both actor and partner effects were found, providing further support for both the first and second hypotheses. We also tested for interactive effects of both partners’ LL matching indicators in all four analyses. No significant interaction effects were found, indicating that benefits of LL matching are additive.

In addition, we found that relationship length was more consistently associated with lower relationship satisfaction than with sexual satisfaction. However, no significant correlation between LL mismatch and relationship length was observed for both men ( r = .01, p = .90) and women ( r = .01, p = .91), which suggests that partners do not adjust their expressed LL to their counterpart’s preferences over time.

The present study sought to test empirically Chapman’s [ 1 ] hypothesis of LLs and their association with relationship and sexual satisfaction, as well as to explore whether matching on LLs is associated with empathy. This was accomplished by examining partners’ preferences for receiving and expressing love and assessing their relationship satisfaction, sexual satisfaction and four features of empathy.

Our study provides novel evidence in support of Chapman’s [ 1 ] notion that speaking one’s partner love language leads to higher quality relationships and create a positive emotional climate within the couple. In particular, the findings supported our major hypothesis that individuals whose partners express love in the way they prefer to receive it experience elevated relationship and sexual satisfaction. Previous work on sexual satisfaction has focused on discrepancies in desire as an influence on dissatisfaction [e.g. 43 ]. The present data suggest a broader role for discrepancy in displays of love that are not overtly sexual. The substantial positive correlations found between relationship and sexual satisfaction are consistent with previous research [ 44 ].

There were no significant gender differences in relationship and sexual satisfaction, nor in overall LL mismatch. However, women scored higher than men on four of the five “feeling” scales, indicating greater levels of need than men, with the largest effect sizes found for the desires for quality time and words of affirmation. This result contrasts with previous findings that men appear to rely more on their partner for social and emotional support than women do [ 45 , 46 ]. Possibly, men are more focused on fulfilling the social role of being in a committed relationship than specific affectionate behaviors, whereas women require more visible signs of love from their partner. Dykstra and Fokkema [ 46 ] suggest that women are more strongly oriented towards expressive and nurturing functions in marriage, implying greater awareness of whether their male partners is providing affirmations of love. Socialization to be emotionally independent may also contribute to men downplaying their needs for intimacy and affection [ 47 ]. Thus, the LL mismatch variable may not fully capture gender differences in the experience of relationships. Despite differences in the means of the “feeling” variables, our main predictions were supported for both male and female participants, implying that LLs function similarly in both genders.

In addition, findings supported the second hypothesis, that the actor’s satisfaction would be negatively associated with the partner’s LL mismatch. The regression analyses confirmed that both actor and LL mismatch predicted lower satisfaction. In the analyses of male respondents, both types of mismatches added significantly to the variance explained; findings in women showed a similar trend although not all effects reached significance, especially for sexual satisfaction. Partner effects tended to be slightly stronger predictors of relationship satisfaction and sexual satisfaction than the person’s own degree of matching. Previous findings in the field of positive psychology [e.g. 17 , 18 ] showing that acts of giving such as prosocial spending may potentially be more satisfying and lead to greater happiness, when compared to benefiting oneself. The partner effect is important in that it implies that LL matching is related to the actual quality of loving actions and communication between partners, and not merely individual perceptions. By contrast, higher emotional intelligence benefits the actor but not the partner, implying that this factor enhances actor perceptions of relationship quality, but it is not transmitted to the partner so that the benefit is internal to the actor [ 48 ].

Our findings were also in line with the previous research conducted with respect to other forms of behaviors that contribute to the quality of relationships. For instance, in two studies, relational maintenance strategies strongly predicted commitment, relational satisfaction, stability and loving others [ 49 , 50 ]. Among other maintenance strategies, the studies examined positivity (e.g., upbeat during conversations, avoiding criticism), assurance (e.g., expressions of love, affirming commitment), social networks (e.g., spending time with common friends) and sharing tasks (e.g., engaging in household chores), which also resemble some aspects of the Words of Affirmation, Quality Time or Acts of service LLs. In addition, romantic physical touch was previously found to be strongly correlated with the relationship and partner satisfaction [ 51 ]. Receiving gifts was yet another factor that was previously found to be positively associated with the relationship strength, perceived similarity, as well as evaluation of the relationships’ future potential [e.g. 52 , 53 ].

The regression analyses showed that LL–satisfaction associations remained robust with length of relationship controlled. Relationship length was negatively correlated with the relationship satisfaction, as in other studies [e.g. 54 , 55 ]. However, no meaningful association was observed between the length of relationship and matching on LLs, implying that people do not necessarily learn LLs of their partners with time. A focus on LLs might thus be of value in relationship counseling.

To our knowledge, this is the first study that found empirical support for LL hypothesis, contrasting with Egbert and Polk’s study [ 31 ], which found no significant association between matching on LLs and relationship satisfaction. This discrepancy in the results between the previous research and our findings may a consequence of the method used to assess LLs. In our analysis we treated felt and expressed LLs as continuous dimensional qualities rather than categorizing participants based on a single dominant LL. The method based on collapsing couple types (e.g. matched, partially matched, or mismatched) appeared to exaggerate differences in preferences for the five LLs. Dimensional assessment may be preferable to typologizing LLs. In the light of the present data, Chapman’s [ 1 ] claims that people tend to manifest one, dominant LL should be revised in favor of assessing multiple preferences for expressing and giving love using the five LLs.

We further hypothesized that empathy may be a factor that drives matching on LLs, which in turn leads to the higher relationship satisfaction and sexual satisfaction among romantic partners. We aimed to check whether people, who scored higher on empathy scale (perspective taking and empathetic concern subscales, in particular), would also be more successful in expressing love in the way their partners prefer to receive it. Nevertheless, we did not find support for this prediction. Although small significant associations between matching in LLs and some empathy subscales (namely: perspective taking and fantasy) were observed among men, analogical effects were not observed in women. It is possible that because men tend to be less empathetic than women [e.g. 56 , 57 ], the effect that high scores on empathy have on their relationships is stronger. However, the two significant associations in men did not transfer into significantly higher satisfaction among female partners.

Thus, benefits of LL matching on relationship and sexual satisfaction do not appear to be mediated by empathy. From a relationship counseling perspective, the implication is that training couples to improve matching may be addressed instrumentally as a skill to be acquired. For instance, such an intervention program could begin with measuring the level of discrepancies between partners in expressed vs. felt LLs, and providing both partners with ideas for specific behaviors that they could use to better meet the emotional needs of each other, as endorsed by Chapman [ 1 ]. Expressing love in the form desired may enhance relationship quality, even if the actor lacks cognitive and emotional insight into the partner’s needs.

There are several other strengths and limitations of the current study that should be noted. Our sample included participants from different age groups, cultural backgrounds and with various relationship duration, which might serve as an indicator of greater generalizability and external validity of the findings. On the other hand, the multicultural sample might have been a confounding variable, which has influenced the findings in an uncontrolled way. Future research could study bigger and more homogeneous samples. Although in the precent study we have controlled for relationship length, when testing our hypotheses, in the subsequent researches more could be done to examine the association between the relationship length and matching on LLs (e.g., controlling for log or inverse values of the relationship duration).

This study applied an online self-report survey method which results in several significant limitations as well as response biases related to social desirability [ 58 ]. Other potentially problematic issues associated with the present study design include increased possibility of condescending responses, participants’ self-selection, low response rate, submitting multiple responses, duration of the questionnaire, biased distribution channels as well as limited introspective ability of the respondent. At the same time, these methods could be associated with greater self-disclosure due to an online disinhibition effect [ 59 ].

The lack of suitable remuneration for the participants may have resulted in the response biases and nonprobability sampling. Other methods of assessment, as well as strategies aimed to prevent the response biases (i.e. adding several attention checks) and encouraging subjects providing reimbursement for participation are needed to eliminate the response and participation biases.

Another point that has to be addressed is the direction of causality. Even though the present results confirmed LL–satisfaction associations, future research should seek to establish the direction of causation between those factors. For instance, there is a possibility that romantic partners who are more satisfied in their current relationships are also more likely to give and appreciate LLs behaviors. Our study also did not assess other factors that might drive matching on LLs. The observed association could also be multi-directional or be mediated by another variable. For instance, emotional intelligence may contribute to romantic relationship satisfaction and quality [see 60 , 61 ]. Matching on LLs may also be a byproduct of assortative mating for personal characteristics like intelligence or personality type [ 62 ]. Other individual differences that were shown to influence relationship quality, such as time perspective or chronotype, could be also taken into account as potential mediators or confounders of the effects of LLs on relationship outcomes [e.g. 55 ; 63 ].

In conclusion, this study provides a unique contribution to the empirical literature on Chapman’s basic assumption of Five Love Languages [ 1 ]. Our findings suggest that people who better match each other’s preferences for LLs are more satisfied with their relationships and sexual life. Moreover, it appears that satisfying the needs of one’s partner has at least as strong an impact on the individual’s perceptions of relationship quality as receiving expression of love in the desired ways does. However, contrary to our hypothesis, small associations between matching on LLs and degree of empathy were observed only for some empathy subscales among male, but not female participants, and empathy was unrelated to satisfaction. Future work may explore other possible mediators of the LL matching–relationship satisfaction association.

The present findings, particularly the novel way to assess matching for LLs presented in the present paper, may be important for the subsequent research in the field of the romantic relationships. They also provide useful practical implications for marital and family counseling, as well as for laymen who aim to improve the quality of their relationship. Learning to recognize and react to one’s partners love needs may be an important skill for building relationship satisfaction in both partners.

Supporting information

S1 appendix, funding statement.

This work was supported by the University of Warsaw, from the funds awarded by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education in the form of a subsidy for the maintenance and development of research potential.

Data Availability

• PLoS One. 2022; 17(6): e0269429.

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PONE-D-21-38702I love the way you love me: Responding to partner’s love language preferences boosts satisfaction in romantic heterosexual couplesPLOS ONE

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17 May 2022

Thank you for your email dated April 5th, 2022 that addresses the points raised during the review process. We highly appreciate the Reviewer’s generous comments on the manuscript.

We have carefully reviewed them and revised the manuscript to address the following concerns, as well as the Journal Requirements.

We have addressed the editorial points as follows:

ad.1: “Provide information about the dates on which the questionnaire was applied on the average time spent on responses (discuss whether there could have been condescending responses and other response biases), and whether there were several attention checks”.

The questionnaire was applied over the period between October 2018 to March 2019. The subjects spent an average of 23 minutes responding to the questionnaire.

We have used the reverse wording items for each inventory to screen out careless respondents. No additional attention checks were used in the survey.

We are aware that self-response questionnaires tend to be affected by the response biases. We have clarified it in the Methods section and proposed an additional future research suggestion to address the potential flaws.

The information is now provided in the manuscript in lines 236-239, and 562-569.

ad. 2: “Clarify if there were payments to participants as a way to encourage participation”.

No, the subjects participated in the survey voluntary and were not paid for their participation. It is now clarified in the Method section and addressed as a potential limitation in the Discussion.

The information is now provided in the manuscript in lines 237-238, and 570-574.

ad. 3: “In research in which self-response questionnaires are used, there could have been condescending responses and other response biases related to the social desirability…Please provide information about this topic on methods section”.

We have provided information on the potential biases in response and participation in our survey, including the possibility of the condescending responses. It is now addressed in the Method and Discussion sections.

The information is now provided in the manuscript in lines 562-574, and addressed in 238-244.

ad. 4: “Did you have any missing data or did everyone answer all the questions? If you did have missing data, how did you treat the "missingness"?”

Yes. Ten couples were discarded from the study due to significant amount of missing information for one or both partners. When one question was missed (i.e. not scored) by the respondent, the average over available items was calculated and multiplied with the number of items in the questionnaire to replace the missing value.

The information is now provided in the manuscript in lines 215-222.

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23 May 2022

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Peer-reviewed

Research Article

I love the way you love me: Responding to partner’s love language preferences boosts satisfaction in romantic heterosexual couples

Roles Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

Affiliation Doctoral School of Social Sciences, University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland

Roles Formal analysis, Methodology, Project administration, Supervision, Writing – review & editing

* E-mail: [email protected]

Affiliation Faculty of Psychology, University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland

Roles Writing – review & editing

Affiliation Department of Psychology, George Mason University, Orlando, FL, United States of America

• Olha Mostova, 
• Maciej Stolarski, 
• Gerald Matthews

• Published: June 22, 2022
• https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0269429
• Peer Review
• Reader Comments

Chapman’s Love Languages hypothesis claims that (1) people vary in the ways they prefer to receive and express affection and (2) romantic partners who communicate their feelings congruent with their partner’s preferences experience greater relationship quality. The author proposes five distinct preferences and tendencies for expressing love, including: Acts of Service, Physical Touch, Words of Affirmation, Quality Time and Gifts. In the present study partners ( N = 100 heterosexual couples) completed measures assessing their preferences and behavioral tendencies for a) expressions of love and b) reception of signs of affection, for each of the five proposed “love languages”. Relationship satisfaction, sexual satisfaction and empathy were also assessed. The degree of the within-couple mismatch was calculated separately for each individual based on the discrepancies between the person’s felt (preferred) and their partner’s expressed love language. The joint mismatch indicator was a sum of discrepancies across the five love languages. Matching on love languages was associated with both relationship and sexual satisfaction. In particular, people who expressed their affection in the way their partners preferred to receive it, experienced greater satisfaction with their relationships and were more sexually satisfied compared to those who met their partner’s needs to lesser extent. Empathy was expected to be a critical factor for better understanding of and responding to the partner’s needs. Results provided some support for this hypothesis among male but not female participants.

Citation: Mostova O, Stolarski M, Matthews G (2022) I love the way you love me: Responding to partner’s love language preferences boosts satisfaction in romantic heterosexual couples. PLoS ONE 17(6): e0269429. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0269429

Editor: Sónia Brito-Costa, Polytechnic Institute of Coimbra: Instituto Politecnico de Coimbra, PORTUGAL

Received: December 7, 2021; Accepted: May 22, 2022; Published: June 22, 2022

Copyright: © 2022 Mostova et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Data Availability: All relevant data are within the paper and its Supporting Information files

Funding: This work was supported by the University of Warsaw, from the funds awarded by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education in the form of a subsidy for the maintenance and development of research potential.

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Introduction

Everyone has their own preferences for expressing and receiving romantic feelings. Based on his clinical observations Chapman [ 1 ] identified five distinct ways in which people show and want to receive the signs of commitment. He labeled them ‘love languages’ (LLs) and proposed division into the following domains: 1) words of affirmation (verbal compliments, or words of appreciation), 2) quality time (time spent together implying focused attention of both partners), 3) receiving gifts (visual symbols of affection), 4) acts of service (helping mate with necessary tasks) and 5) physical touch (from holding hands to sexual intercourse).

Chapman [ 1 ] used a metaphor of a ‘love tank’, which reflected people’s emotional need to feel loved. The ‘love tank’ of both partners is filled when each of them expresses the affection in a way another one prefers to receive it. According to Chapman and Southern, “once you identify and learn to speak your spouse’s primary love language…you will have discovered the key to a long-lasting, loving marriage” [ 2 , p. 18]. Thus, the author is convinced that conducting interventions designed to foster better understanding of the partner’s LLs, as well as educating people on how to put this knowledge into practice would lead to a greater relationship maintenance and satisfaction.

People often speak and understand their primary LLs, but they may “learn a secondary love language” [ 2 , p.14]. For example, the husband may be aware of his wife’s desire to receive compliments–words of affirmation, although he himself prefers being physically touched. Therefore, LLs can be divided into those in which people tend to communicate to their partners (expressed love language) and those they prefer to receive in order to keep their emotional ‘love tank’ full (felt love language).

The assumption of basic and fundamental need for love and affection is well-established and empirically supported [ 3 – 5 ]. Multiple research findings also support the notion that human’s need for love and affection boosts both personal well-being [e.g. 6 ] and satisfaction in various types of relationships [e.g. 7 , 8 ].

Research has also addressed the effects of similarity between partners on relationship outcomes. It is well established that similarity and convergence of different types in romantic partners promotes greater relationship satisfaction. For example, similarity in communication values, such as ego support or conflict management, has been shown to promote attraction and greater relationship satisfaction in couples which described themselves as ‘seriously involved’ [ 9 ].

Gonzaga and colleagues [ 10 ] also found that similarity and convergence in the personality between partners promotes similarity in their shared emotional experiences and relationship quality. Yet another study demonstrated that romantic couples who converge in their emotional experiences manifest greater relationship cohesion, while their relationships are less likely to dissolve [ 11 ]. In another study perceived similarity in text messaging, including frequency of initiating a text message exchange and expressing affection, was associated with greater relationship satisfaction [ 12 ].

Sexual satisfaction is another broadly-studied concept in the research on couples and romantic relationships. Various studies found an association between sexual satisfaction and relationship satisfaction [ 13 , 14 ]. For instance, in a study conducted on 387 couples, sexual satisfaction and communication independently predicted the relationship satisfaction [ 14 ]. Thus, romantic partners who are having difficulties communicating, but are at the same time sexually satisfied, will experience greater marital satisfaction. Similarity in personality traits between marital partners also proved to predict sexual satisfaction [ 15 ] In another study, de Jong and Reis [ 16 ] found that complementarity, but not similarity, in sexual preferences predicted sexual satisfaction, consistent with LL hypothesis. Being aware of one’s partner’s preferences and acting accordingly may increase the couple’s sexual satisfaction.

The act of giving may potentially be more satisfying than benefiting oneself. One study [ 17 ] found that spending more of one’s income on others predicts greater happiness than spending money on themselves. Prosocial spending is positively correlated with greater happiness in both poor and rich countries and even recalling the past instance of spending money on others has a causal impact on happiness [ 18 ]. Thus, it is possible that helping others to match their needs produces a greater emotional benefit than receiving and caring for oneself. Thus, compatibility in LLs may benefit the person as a giver, as well as a receiver.

Empathy is often believed to play a crucial role in relationships of various kinds and to be a key component of effective communication. It can be defined as the “reactions of one individual to the observed experiences of another” [ 19 , p.113]. Empathy is primarily related to one’s ability to understand and share the emotional experiences of others [e.g., 20 ]. According to Davis [ 19 , 21 ], empathy can be divided into four domains, including: empathic concern, personal distress, perspective taking and fantasy.

Research demonstrates a positive relation between a partner’s empathic accuracy and their degree of relationship satisfaction [ 22 , 23 ], when it is present in mundane and nonconflictual settings. Various studies have also found that people with higher levels of empathy are better in detecting their partners’ needs and providing them with higher-quality advice and instrumental support [ 24 – 26 ]. On the other hand, subjective perceptions of empathy may be more important for relationship satisfaction than empathic accuracy [ 27 ], i.e., the objective ability to determine one’s partners views.

Empathic accuracy implies accurate perception of people’s mental states, including thoughts and feelings [ 24 ] people that are more proficient in mentalizing may also be more skillful in understanding their partner’s needs and preferences. Such an awareness may in turn increase the likelihood of fulfilling such needs and make them choose and adjust their behavior more consciously. Thus, empathy may support congruence in LLs. Although there were some attempts to examine the factors that may moderate the relationship satisfaction when partners are misaligned in their LLs [e.g. 28 ], to our knowledge, none of the previous studies have examined the potential mediators that may drive LL matching, leading to elevated satisfaction. An empathic individual may be both more effective in giving the form of love desired by the partner, and in guiding the partner towards understanding their own needs.

Despite the great popularity that Chapman’s work had gained worldwide among both clinicians and general public, the concept of LLs remains relatively unstudied. Egbert and Polk [ 29 ] developed the Love Languages Scale based on concepts found in Chapman’s [ 1 ] LLs and suggested that the five-factor LL model had some psychometric validity. A confirmatory factor analysis demonstrated significant relationship between the five LLs and Stafford, Dainton, and Haas’ [ 30 ] relational maintenance typology, thus supporting their construct validity.

In one version of the scale participants responded about how they tend to feel love. To remain consistent with the literature we followed the term ‘felt LL’ that was used in Egbert and Polk’s [ 31 ] study to infer the preferred way of receiving love from one’s partner. However, it should be noted that two forms of the LL scale provide the data on what makes people feel loved without directly examining what is being preferred, which might be a potential conceptual problem with the LL measure.

Another study utilized measures of the autonomic nervous system, such as skin conductance and respiration rate [ 32 ]. First, 89 participants were asked to complete Chapman’s LLs questionnaire. Next, their psychophysiological responses (skin conductance, heart rate and pulse rate) were measured, while they were listening to the recorded imagery scripts (imaginal exposure and guided imagery) describing each of the LLs. It was found that participant’ arousal level increased when they were listening to their dominating or preferred LL. Specifically, a significant association was found between hearing the imagery script of their primary LL and person’s heart rate and skin conductance, although no significant increase was found in the respiration rate. In addition, good internal consistency and reliability was reported for the scale measurement of the preferred LL [ 33 ].

Other aspects of Chapman’s [ 1 ] claim have not been supported. Egbert and Polk [ 31 ] tested 84 university student couples, who had been together for at least two months. The aims was to check whether partners well-matched in their reported preferences and expressions of LLs reported greater relationship quality. They were grouped into three categories including matched, mismatched and partially matched; however, no significant effect of matching on relationship quality was found. According to later research [ 28 ] sharing the same primary (expressed) LL again did not result in relationship satisfaction. However, the researchers found that female participants’ self-regulation significantly improved partners’ satisfaction when their LLs were misaligned.

Veale [ 34 ] aimed to test whether becoming aware of one’s partner’s preferred LL would result in behavioral adaptation in the absence of any identified external motivation. First, the researcher checked whether participants felt that the love expression used by their partner was correctly identified. Second, descriptions of the LL profiles and category membership were provided to each participant, and the couples were given a brief overview of the love expression behavior related to each of five categories. Additionally, the study considered whether LL expression knowledge would influence participants’ emotional state and behavior, as well as whether efforts to make behavioral accommodation would be noticed by their partners. The research found no statistically significant difference between pre- and posttest means for any of the categories, although in general respondents agreed that their LL was correctly identified. It should be noted that LLs in the study were evaluated categorically using Chapman’s Love Language Profile, which shares the assumption that people have one dominating LL that they both feel and express the most.

The present study: Aims and hypotheses

Chapman’s [ 1 ] basic claim is that people who “talk” their partner’s LL are more satisfied in their relationships, but empirical support for the LL hypothesis remains equivocal. In the present study, we aimed to extend previous findings [e.g. 31 ] by adopting a novel, continuous approach to measure match/mismatch between partners’ LLs. Treating LL mismatch as a continuous dimension may preserve information on level of mismatch that is lost by assessing it on a categorical basis, and provide a more sensitive test of its relationships with other variables. First, we aimed to check whether romantic partners who receive affection in ways consistent with their partner’s style of expressing love report higher relationship satisfaction and sexual satisfaction. We asked people separately about when they feel loved the most (i.e., preference for receiving love) and how they prefer to express affirmation of love. The aim was to assess the partner’s match not only in term of their dominant love language, but to also take into account possible that one’s preferences for receiving love may differ from one’s style of expressing and communicating love.

Second, we aimed to distinguish “actor” effects (mismatch lowers one’s own satisfaction) and “partner” effects (mismatch lowers the other person’s satisfaction). Chapman’s [ 1 ] hypothesis emphasizes the former, but there may also be a reciprocal effect, i.e., if my partner feels s/he is not receiving the love affirmations s/he wants, the partner’s deficit in feeling loved may lower my satisfaction. This approach provided a full picture of the interplay between both partners’ expressed and felt LLs, contrary to Chapman’s assumption that people give and feel only one dominating LL.

We aimed to test four hypotheses:

• Relationship satisfaction and sexual satisfaction are negatively associated with the mismatch between the person’s felt and their partner’s expressed LLs (actor effect). This is the central claim of Chapman [ 1 ]. His account of the LLs hypothesis does not imply that the importance of LLs varies for men and women, but we tested for possible gender differences on an exploratory basis.
• Relationship satisfaction and sexual satisfaction are negatively associated with the mismatch between the person’s expressed and their partner’s felt LLs (partner effect). The partner’s feelings of not being adequately loved may influence actor satisfaction.
• Matching in LLs is associated with empathy levels, given that empathy is likely to support adaptation to the partner’s needs. Given that empathy is a multifaceted construct, we hypothesized that its most adaptive facets, i.e., empathic concern (emotional empathy) and perspective taking (cognitive empathy), would be the aspects related to LLs.
• Empathy is associated with higher relationship and sexual satisfaction, as in multiple previous studies [e.g. 35 – 37 ]. We also anticipated testing the mediating role of empathy in the LL mismatch–satisfaction association, contingent on support for the third and fourth hypotheses.

Participants

The working sample consisted of 100 heterosexual couples (100 men, 100 women), who were sexually active with their partners. All the participants were in a current romantic relationship for at least 6 months. Relationship length varied between 6 months and 24 years ( M = 3.5 years). The initial sample consisted of N = 110, but data from 10 couples was discarded, as only one partner have completed the questionnaire or there was a significant amount of incomplete or missing information for one or both partners. When an individual item was not scored by the respondent, the average over available items was calculated and multiplyed with the number of items in the questionnaire to replace the missing value.

Age of the participants ranged from 17 to 58 (mean: 27.34). Among male participants age varied from 18 to 58 with a mean value of 28.58 ( SD = 9.68). Female age ranged from 17 to 57 with an average value of 25.10 ( SD = 7.89).

The sample was culturally diverse and it included representatives of 31 nationalities. The most commonly occurring nationalities were Ukrainians (N = 67), Poles (N = 24), Belgians (N = 15), Russians (N = 13), Americans (N = 12) and Swedes (N = 12). Majority of both male and female participants indicated their marital status as never married ( n = 116), followed by married ( n = 63), “other” ( n = 13) and divorced ( n = 8).

The participants were recruited using social media and personal connections. The online questionnaire was distributed to volunteers that provided written consent and reported being in the romantic relationships with their current partner for at least 6 months and were either native speakers of English and/or communicated in English to each other, or reported having sufficient fluency to freely and effortlessly communicate with native speakers (i.e., at least B2 level). The data were collected between October 2018 and March 2019. The subjects spent an average of 23 minutes responding to the questionnaire and were not rewarded. The attention check items with reverse wording were used respectively for each inventory to prevent incomplete and low-effort answers.

All participants gave their informed consent to participate in the study of “communication and satisfaction among couples” that is intended to gather information about various aspects of romantic relationships. They were also informed that their answers will not be assessed individually and that they will not receive any feedback on their results as a couple). We asked participants about the relationship’s length and the time since the first sexual intercourse with a current partner to ensure that the participants were sexually active with their current partners, as well as to eliminate the possibility of the ‘honeymoon effect’ [ 38 ]. We also asked both partners about their fluency in English language. Couples were asked not to discuss or compare their results with each other.

Materials and procedure

LLs were assessed using two methods. The first was the forced-choice method used by Egbert and Polk [ 31 ], while the second one included two forms of a LL scale (LLS) requiring independent ratings of preferences, which was developed and validated by Egbert and Polk [ 29 ].

First, participant received a forced-choice LL measure [ 31 ] including the following instructions: “I feel the most loved when my partner: (1) physically touches me (i.e., gives a hug, gives a kiss, holds my hand, touches me), (2) helps me out (i.e., running an errand, finishing a chore for me, helping me out, helping to keep things cleaned up), (3) spends quality time with me (i.e., really listening, doing something we both like, engages in quality conversation, spending free time), (4) says encouraging words (i.e., compliments, expresses appreciation for me, gives me credit for something I did, gives me positive comments), and (5) gives me gifts (i.e., a thoughtful birthday gift, a greeting card, a present for no special reason, a gift after being away)”. This item served only for the purpose of its later comparison to the two versions of LLS in order to check for the consistency of participant’s responses. Thus, this tool was not used as the main indicator of couples’ LLs in the subsequent analysis.

The LLS assessment [ 29 ] involved four behavioral indicators representing each of the ways to feel and express affection. In the first form of the LLS participants were asked to rate the extent to which they tend to express (or give ) love to their partners by engaging in the listed behaviors. The second form of the LLS included the same list of behaviors, but this time participants were asked to rate the extent to which each expression makes them feel loved by their partners. Thus, each version of LLS consisted of 20 self-report items, including four items per each of the five LLs described by Chapman [ 1 ], e.g., “I tend to express my feeling to my partner by telling that I appreciate him/her”. The items were rated using a five-point Likert-type scale to assess the extent of agreement on a scale of 1 ( strongly disagree ) to 5 ( strongly agree ). Egbert and Polk [ 29 ] reported sufficient construct validity and reliability of the questionnaire in assessing LLs.

As both partners responded to the two versions of LLS, we obtained information about how they tend to express and prefer to feel love. We could then calculate the discrepancy between these measurements. Thus, the degree to which one’s (partner) preferred to feel love (e.g., when holding hands), as rated on the Likert scale, differed from the second partner’s (actor) degree of expressing love in this way (e.g., by holding hands) served as an indicator of extent to which the respondents felt that their partners were meeting needs in terms of LLs. The sum of the discrepancy scores on the five individual LL components then reflected the degree of match or mismatch.

To remain consistent with the literature we used the term ‘felt LL’ to infer the preferred way of receiving love from one’s partner, as we were following the term used by in the previous studies. However, it should be noted that LLS measure provides the data on what makes people feel loved without directly examining what is being preferred, which might be a potential conceptual problem with the LL measure proposed by Egbert and Polk [ 29 ].

In particular, a value of 0 indicated a complete match between the way the respondent preferred to feel and how their partner expressed love (e.g., participant X rates preference for being complimented as 5, and X’s partner rates his/her expression of compliments as 5). A negative value meant that one’s partner does not express a form of love to the extent desired (e.g. participant X rates preference for being complimented as 5, and X’s partner rates his/her expression of compliments as 1). A positive value indicated that one’s partner overly expressed a form of love that the participant did not require to such an extent (e.g. participant X rates preference for being complimented as 1, and X’s partner rates his/her expression of compliments as 5). Because our interest was in overall mismatch, we converted all discrepancy scores to absolute values and computed the item-level sum of the four scores for each LL. We then summed these discrepancy scores for each individual, to provide an overall index of mismatch between one’s preferences for being loved and partner’s ways of expressing love, based on the 20 item-level discrepancy scores. Our primary outcome measure was thus overall LL mismatch; higher scores indicated greater mismatch. The internal consistency of the calculated sum of discrepancies in our study amounted to Cronbach’s α = .61 for male and α = .70 for female participants.

In addition, the internal consistency was confirmed to be acceptable or good for all of the five LLs scales before they were combined to create the discrepancy scores. In particular, the results suggested a good fit for each of the five expressed LLs: Acts of Service (α = .70), Physical Touch (α = .89), Words of Affirmation (α = .79), Quality Time (α = .78) and Gifts (α = .77). The internal consistency was also confirmed for the five felt LLs scales: Acts of service (α = .74), Physical Touch (α = .85), Words of Affirmation (α = .82), Quality Time (α = .75) and Gifts (α = .84).

Participants’ sexual satisfaction was assessed using the Index of Sexual Satisfaction questionnaire [ISS, 39 ]. The scale consists of 25-Likert-type items (e.g., “I enjoy the sex techniques that my partner likes or uses”, or “I feel that my sex life is boring”) and demonstrated high internal consistency among men (α = .91) and women (α = .92). The participants rated the statements on a 7-point Likert-type, where 1 indicated none of the time and 7 indicated all of the time . The items that implied lower sexual satisfaction (e.g., “I feel that my sex life is boring”) were reversed scored and the total score was calculated as a sum of all item scores. Higher scores indicated greater level of sexual satisfaction.

Relationship satisfaction was measured using the Relationship Assessment Scale [RAS, 40 ], one of the most frequently used questionnaires used for studying relationship quality. RAS consists of seven items measuring general relationship satisfaction (e.g., “To what extent has your relationship met your original expectations?”). Respondents are asked to rate each statement using a 5-point scale. High internal consistency of the measure was confirmed for male (α = .85) and female (α = .87) participants.

Interpersonal Reactivity Index [IRI; 19 ] was applied as a multi-dimensional assessment of empathy. This widely used self-report metric comprises 28 items. The participants are asked to rate their response on a Likert-type scale ranging from 1 (“ does not describe me well” ) to 5 (“ describes me very well” ). IRI consists of four distinct subscales, including: 1) perspective taking–the tendency to spontaneously adopt the psychological point of view of others; 2) fantasy–indicating tendencies to transpose oneself imaginatively into the feelings and actions of fictitious characters in books, movies, and plays; 3) empathic concern–assessing other-oriented feelings of sympathy and concern for unfortunate others; and 4) personal distress–measuring self-oriented feelings of personal anxiety and unease in tense interpersonal settings.

We hypothesized that perspective taking and empathic concern scales would be negatively associated with LL mismatch, and positively related to satisfaction measures. Fantasy did not appear directly relevant to LLs, whereas personal distress might be positively associated with mismatch. Internal consistencies were acceptable for all four subscales among male subjects, including perspective taking (α = .74), fantasy (α = .77), empathic concern (α = .70), and personal distress (α = .70). In female participants the indicators were acceptable for the empathic concern (α = .80) and fantasy (α = .75) subscales, but poorer for perspective taking (α = .62) and personal distress (α = .60).

Preliminary analyses

This section reports descriptive statistics for the study variables, as well as tests for gender differences. We also tested within-couple correlations to investigate “assortative mating”; the extent to which people partner with those of similar characteristics to themselves.

Table 1 shows LL preferences on the forced-choice measure. Quality time was the most frequently declared LL, followed by physical touch, acts of service, words of affirmation and receiving gifts. In accordance with prior research [ 31 ], there was no significant association between gender and participants’ responses in the forced-choice LL measurement, χ 2 (1) = 14.85, p = .25 (see Table 1 ).

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Table 2 shows means and SDs for the continuous scores. The rank-ordering of means differed a little from the forced-choice data, in that Physical Touch was the highest-rated preference, in both genders, although Quality Time was also highly rated. Also, contrasting with the forced-choice data, women obtained higher mean scores in four out of five LLs dimensions–all except for acts of service. It seems that women generally preferred to receive love from their partners more intensely than men did (see Table 2 ). Table 2 also shows data for ratings of expressed love. The order of preferences was similar to that for feeling preferences. Participants tended to express love to their partners primarily by physically touching them, followed by spending quality time together, saying words of affirmation, doing acts of service and giving gifts. No significant sex difference was observed for any but one expressed LL: female participants scored slightly higher than male participants in the expression of quality time LL.

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Table 2 shows that, despite the gender differences in felt LLs, men and women did not differ on the overall indicator of LL mismatch, i.e., inconsistency between one’s LL preferences and the partner’s ways of expressing love. The mismatch indicator does not capture directional biases; i.e., whether mismatch results from the partner providing a deficiency of acts of love, or providing more than the person wants. The raw differences were calculated by subtracting the partner’s expressed LL from the actor’s felt (preferred) level of LLs. Positive values indicate deficiency, while negative values signify excess. The analysis demonstrated that the female participants generally experienced a "lack" in terms of their preferred levels of receiving LLs, particularly in the case of Quality Time. On the other hand, male participants seemed to perceive or feel the affection to a lesser extent than their female partners reported expressing it, thus indicating an "excess". However, this was not the case for men’s Acts of Service LL.

Table 2 also shows the cross-gender correlations for LLs. Overall LL mismatch was quite substantially correlated across the couples. However, at the level of individual feelings and expressions, only two out of five LLs–acts of service and gifts–showed significant correlations (assortative mating). Thus, the least valued LLs showed assortative mating but the most valued did not, for both feelings and expressions.

Table 2 also provides descriptive statistics for the satisfaction and empathy variables. There were no significant gender differences in satisfaction, but consistent with other studies [e.g. 41 ] female participants’ advantage in empathy was observed across all the IRI dimensions. Of the IRI scales, only empathic concern showed a significant though small-magnitude correlation.

Hypotheses testing

In line with our first hypothesis, we obtained a significant negative association between relationship satisfaction and the LL mismatch indicator, in both men and women (see Table 3 ). Thus, the greater the discrepancy between preferred and felt LLs, the less satisfied the participants were with their relationships. Similar associations were observed for sexual satisfaction. The actor effects of LL mismatch were stronger in men, particularly for sexual satisfaction, for which the correlations were -.37 (men) and -.21 (women).

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Discrepancies in three LLs appeared to be particularly important for participants’ relationship and sexual satisfaction (see S1 Appendix ). Specifically, mismatch in Physical Touch, Words of Affirmation and Quality Time LLs separately were significantly associated with both male and female partners’ relationship satisfaction. Each of these love languages separately was also significantly associated with men’s sexual satisfaction. However, among female participants this association was only significant for the Physical Touch and Quality Time LLs, and their sexual satisfaction.

In addition, supporting the second hypothesis, partner effects proved significant–the respondent’s satisfaction with their relationship was associated with their partner’s LL mismatch. Partner effects were significant for both men and women. It may be as important to properly respond to the partner’s LL needs as to have one’s own LL preferences satisfied.

The third hypothesis was that cognitive and emotional facets of empathy would be associated with lower LL mismatch (see Table 3 ). The results indicated some significant actor effects in men. In particular, empathic concern ( r = -.27, p < . 01 ) and perspective taking ( r = -.34, p < . 01 ) components of empathy were higher in male individuals with smaller LL discrepancy, consistent with the hypothesis. However, this was not the case for female participants (see Table 3 ). Women whose partners scored higher on perspective taking ( r = -.26, p < . 01 ) and fantasy dimensions of IRI also showed lower LL mismatch. Our hypothesis regarding the links between empathy and LL matching was then only partially supported.

Contrary to the fourth hypothesis, IRI empathy dimensions proved generally unrelated to both relationship satisfaction and sexual satisfaction. The only two exceptions referred to men’s perspective taking (positive actor effect on sexual satisfaction in men) and personal distress (women’s distress was related to lower men’s relationship satisfaction). Although some scholars [e.g. 42 ] would emphasize that the absence of the association is not disqualifying the possibly of mediation, we found that in the present analysis there was no reason to test models in which empathy mediated effects of LL mismatch on satisfaction.

Finally, we compared actor and partner effects in LL mismatch–satisfaction associations (see Table 4 ). The bivariate associations suggested both effects. For example, for men, relationship satisfaction was related both to their own and the woman’s mismatch ( r s of -.40 and -.36). To conduct a more rigorous comparison, we ran regression analyses with both men and women LL mismatch as predictors, by gender and by satisfaction scale. At the first step, these analyses controlled for length of relationship, which may be a confound of satisfaction. The second step entered either men or women LL mismatch, and the final step included both mismatch variables. Such a procedure allowed to examine the added value of each step of the model and to test for the incremental validity of actor vs. partner effects. For all analyses, both men and women LL mismatch contributed significantly to the regressions when entered separately at Step 2, consistent with the bivariate results. For men, the final regressions at Step 3 showed independent effects of both mismatch variables; male relationship and sexual satisfaction depends on both actor and partner effects. For women, the final regression for relationship satisfaction was similar, but the female mismatch predictor fell just short of significance. Neither predictor was significant at Step 3 for sexual satisfaction. Women’s sexual satisfaction was more weakly predicted overall than the other outcome measures in these analyses (10% variance explained vs. 21–25%).

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Overall, both actor and partner effects were found, providing further support for both the first and second hypotheses. We also tested for interactive effects of both partners’ LL matching indicators in all four analyses. No significant interaction effects were found, indicating that benefits of LL matching are additive.

In addition, we found that relationship length was more consistently associated with lower relationship satisfaction than with sexual satisfaction. However, no significant correlation between LL mismatch and relationship length was observed for both men ( r = .01, p = .90) and women ( r = .01, p = .91), which suggests that partners do not adjust their expressed LL to their counterpart’s preferences over time.

The present study sought to test empirically Chapman’s [ 1 ] hypothesis of LLs and their association with relationship and sexual satisfaction, as well as to explore whether matching on LLs is associated with empathy. This was accomplished by examining partners’ preferences for receiving and expressing love and assessing their relationship satisfaction, sexual satisfaction and four features of empathy.

Our study provides novel evidence in support of Chapman’s [ 1 ] notion that speaking one’s partner love language leads to higher quality relationships and create a positive emotional climate within the couple. In particular, the findings supported our major hypothesis that individuals whose partners express love in the way they prefer to receive it experience elevated relationship and sexual satisfaction. Previous work on sexual satisfaction has focused on discrepancies in desire as an influence on dissatisfaction [e.g. 43 ]. The present data suggest a broader role for discrepancy in displays of love that are not overtly sexual. The substantial positive correlations found between relationship and sexual satisfaction are consistent with previous research [ 44 ].

There were no significant gender differences in relationship and sexual satisfaction, nor in overall LL mismatch. However, women scored higher than men on four of the five “feeling” scales, indicating greater levels of need than men, with the largest effect sizes found for the desires for quality time and words of affirmation. This result contrasts with previous findings that men appear to rely more on their partner for social and emotional support than women do [ 45 , 46 ]. Possibly, men are more focused on fulfilling the social role of being in a committed relationship than specific affectionate behaviors, whereas women require more visible signs of love from their partner. Dykstra and Fokkema [ 46 ] suggest that women are more strongly oriented towards expressive and nurturing functions in marriage, implying greater awareness of whether their male partners is providing affirmations of love. Socialization to be emotionally independent may also contribute to men downplaying their needs for intimacy and affection [ 47 ]. Thus, the LL mismatch variable may not fully capture gender differences in the experience of relationships. Despite differences in the means of the “feeling” variables, our main predictions were supported for both male and female participants, implying that LLs function similarly in both genders.

In addition, findings supported the second hypothesis, that the actor’s satisfaction would be negatively associated with the partner’s LL mismatch. The regression analyses confirmed that both actor and LL mismatch predicted lower satisfaction. In the analyses of male respondents, both types of mismatches added significantly to the variance explained; findings in women showed a similar trend although not all effects reached significance, especially for sexual satisfaction. Partner effects tended to be slightly stronger predictors of relationship satisfaction and sexual satisfaction than the person’s own degree of matching. Previous findings in the field of positive psychology [e.g. 17 , 18 ] showing that acts of giving such as prosocial spending may potentially be more satisfying and lead to greater happiness, when compared to benefiting oneself. The partner effect is important in that it implies that LL matching is related to the actual quality of loving actions and communication between partners, and not merely individual perceptions. By contrast, higher emotional intelligence benefits the actor but not the partner, implying that this factor enhances actor perceptions of relationship quality, but it is not transmitted to the partner so that the benefit is internal to the actor [ 48 ].

Our findings were also in line with the previous research conducted with respect to other forms of behaviors that contribute to the quality of relationships. For instance, in two studies, relational maintenance strategies strongly predicted commitment, relational satisfaction, stability and loving others [ 49 , 50 ]. Among other maintenance strategies, the studies examined positivity (e.g., upbeat during conversations, avoiding criticism), assurance (e.g., expressions of love, affirming commitment), social networks (e.g., spending time with common friends) and sharing tasks (e.g., engaging in household chores), which also resemble some aspects of the Words of Affirmation, Quality Time or Acts of service LLs. In addition, romantic physical touch was previously found to be strongly correlated with the relationship and partner satisfaction [ 51 ]. Receiving gifts was yet another factor that was previously found to be positively associated with the relationship strength, perceived similarity, as well as evaluation of the relationships’ future potential [e.g. 52 , 53 ].

The regression analyses showed that LL–satisfaction associations remained robust with length of relationship controlled. Relationship length was negatively correlated with the relationship satisfaction, as in other studies [e.g. 54 , 55 ]. However, no meaningful association was observed between the length of relationship and matching on LLs, implying that people do not necessarily learn LLs of their partners with time. A focus on LLs might thus be of value in relationship counseling.

To our knowledge, this is the first study that found empirical support for LL hypothesis, contrasting with Egbert and Polk’s study [ 31 ], which found no significant association between matching on LLs and relationship satisfaction. This discrepancy in the results between the previous research and our findings may a consequence of the method used to assess LLs. In our analysis we treated felt and expressed LLs as continuous dimensional qualities rather than categorizing participants based on a single dominant LL. The method based on collapsing couple types (e.g. matched, partially matched, or mismatched) appeared to exaggerate differences in preferences for the five LLs. Dimensional assessment may be preferable to typologizing LLs. In the light of the present data, Chapman’s [ 1 ] claims that people tend to manifest one, dominant LL should be revised in favor of assessing multiple preferences for expressing and giving love using the five LLs.

We further hypothesized that empathy may be a factor that drives matching on LLs, which in turn leads to the higher relationship satisfaction and sexual satisfaction among romantic partners. We aimed to check whether people, who scored higher on empathy scale (perspective taking and empathetic concern subscales, in particular), would also be more successful in expressing love in the way their partners prefer to receive it. Nevertheless, we did not find support for this prediction. Although small significant associations between matching in LLs and some empathy subscales (namely: perspective taking and fantasy) were observed among men, analogical effects were not observed in women. It is possible that because men tend to be less empathetic than women [e.g. 56 , 57 ], the effect that high scores on empathy have on their relationships is stronger. However, the two significant associations in men did not transfer into significantly higher satisfaction among female partners.

Thus, benefits of LL matching on relationship and sexual satisfaction do not appear to be mediated by empathy. From a relationship counseling perspective, the implication is that training couples to improve matching may be addressed instrumentally as a skill to be acquired. For instance, such an intervention program could begin with measuring the level of discrepancies between partners in expressed vs. felt LLs, and providing both partners with ideas for specific behaviors that they could use to better meet the emotional needs of each other, as endorsed by Chapman [ 1 ]. Expressing love in the form desired may enhance relationship quality, even if the actor lacks cognitive and emotional insight into the partner’s needs.

There are several other strengths and limitations of the current study that should be noted. Our sample included participants from different age groups, cultural backgrounds and with various relationship duration, which might serve as an indicator of greater generalizability and external validity of the findings. On the other hand, the multicultural sample might have been a confounding variable, which has influenced the findings in an uncontrolled way. Future research could study bigger and more homogeneous samples. Although in the precent study we have controlled for relationship length, when testing our hypotheses, in the subsequent researches more could be done to examine the association between the relationship length and matching on LLs (e.g., controlling for log or inverse values of the relationship duration).

This study applied an online self-report survey method which results in several significant limitations as well as response biases related to social desirability [ 58 ]. Other potentially problematic issues associated with the present study design include increased possibility of condescending responses, participants’ self-selection, low response rate, submitting multiple responses, duration of the questionnaire, biased distribution channels as well as limited introspective ability of the respondent. At the same time, these methods could be associated with greater self-disclosure due to an online disinhibition effect [ 59 ].

The lack of suitable remuneration for the participants may have resulted in the response biases and nonprobability sampling. Other methods of assessment, as well as strategies aimed to prevent the response biases (i.e. adding several attention checks) and encouraging subjects providing reimbursement for participation are needed to eliminate the response and participation biases.

Another point that has to be addressed is the direction of causality. Even though the present results confirmed LL–satisfaction associations, future research should seek to establish the direction of causation between those factors. For instance, there is a possibility that romantic partners who are more satisfied in their current relationships are also more likely to give and appreciate LLs behaviors. Our study also did not assess other factors that might drive matching on LLs. The observed association could also be multi-directional or be mediated by another variable. For instance, emotional intelligence may contribute to romantic relationship satisfaction and quality [see 60 , 61 ]. Matching on LLs may also be a byproduct of assortative mating for personal characteristics like intelligence or personality type [ 62 ]. Other individual differences that were shown to influence relationship quality, such as time perspective or chronotype, could be also taken into account as potential mediators or confounders of the effects of LLs on relationship outcomes [e.g. 55 ; 63 ].

In conclusion, this study provides a unique contribution to the empirical literature on Chapman’s basic assumption of Five Love Languages [ 1 ]. Our findings suggest that people who better match each other’s preferences for LLs are more satisfied with their relationships and sexual life. Moreover, it appears that satisfying the needs of one’s partner has at least as strong an impact on the individual’s perceptions of relationship quality as receiving expression of love in the desired ways does. However, contrary to our hypothesis, small associations between matching on LLs and degree of empathy were observed only for some empathy subscales among male, but not female participants, and empathy was unrelated to satisfaction. Future work may explore other possible mediators of the LL matching–relationship satisfaction association.

The present findings, particularly the novel way to assess matching for LLs presented in the present paper, may be important for the subsequent research in the field of the romantic relationships. They also provide useful practical implications for marital and family counseling, as well as for laymen who aim to improve the quality of their relationship. Learning to recognize and react to one’s partners love needs may be an important skill for building relationship satisfaction in both partners.

Supporting information

S1 appendix..

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0269429.s001

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0269429.s002

S1 File. Variables’ names and abbreviations.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0269429.s003

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What the 5 love languages get right, and what they get very wrong

Don’t think of love as a language. Experts say to think of love as a balanced diet instead.

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As Meyers-Briggs quizzes are to corporate bonding retreats, love languages are to Hinge profiles. They show up again and again on dating sites, and on relationship advice forums and social media memes and debunking podcasts. There is something about the idea of love languages that seems to make people feel very passionately: My love language is words of affirmation. My love language is clean sheets. My boyfriend says he doesn’t have a love language, and I don’t know how to express my love to him. Love languages are bull crap. My love language is hating on love languages .

These agents of provocation emerged from the mind of Baptist pastor Gary Chapman, author of the 1992 book The 5 Love Languages . Chapman developed his theory of love languages while he was offering pastoral care to couples who came to his church looking for support in their marriages. As Chapman sees it, the reason married people fight is that they are each trying to express their love in ways the other person doesn’t understand. It is as if, he explains, they are speaking different languages.

Chapman’s initial modest offering has developed into a full-fledged media universe: The 5 Love Languages of Children , The 5 Love Languages Singles Edition , The 5 Love Languages for Men , The 5 Love Languages of Teenagers , The 5 Love Languages Military Edition . There is an app . There are Chapman-hosted podcasts .

The basic premise of the Chapman universe, however, has a pleasing Hogwarts house-style simplicity. Chapman cataloged five love languages, which he says are all the same for everybody: quality time, physical touch, receiving gifts, acts of service, and words of affirmation. You get one love language as your primary and another as your secondary, like being on the cusp in astrology. You aren’t allowed to have more than that. Ideally, you and your partner should have at least one in common. To pick your language, you take the personality quiz at the back of the book, now available online .

For true believers, the love languages are the key to relationship communication. Say one person feels loved when they’re cuddling (physical touch), while their partner considers cleaning the house (acts of service) to be the ultimate expression of their affection. Both of them might feel as though they’re putting in all the work for the relationship and as though the other person is neglecting them. Chapman’s love language concept gives both parties a way of talking about what they’re missing from one another without accusations.

Critics, however, point to Chapman’s rigid and conservative gender politics (most prominent in the earliest editions of the book) and the lack of scientific basis for his theories. Love languages, they warn, can be too inflexible to be practical.

“If someone identifies their primary love language as ‘gifts,’ they might unconsciously downplay the significance of spending quality time, being physically affectionate, engaging in deep conversations, and so on,” says Gideon Park, a co-author of a recent psychology paper examining the academic research on love languages. “This could create a narrow understanding of what constitutes love, hindering the richness and diversity of emotional connections.”

In the name of richness and diversity, let’s take a close look at the concept of love languages. Here’s what they get right, and what they get very wrong.

The scientific research into love languages is mixed at best

The paper Park worked on under lead author Emily Impett lays out three foundational tenets of The 5 Love Languages , which the researchers then checked against existing relationship science research. The three tenets are the basis of Chapman’s argument: There are exactly five love languages, everyone has exactly one primary love language, and when you match languages with your partner, you’re happier. According to the literature review from Impett et al., there does not seem to be empirical evidence for any of these three principles.

The paper finds few consistent results between studies about how people experience love. Still, when researchers ask people about what makes them feel loved, the reasons they list don’t necessarily have to do with ideas like “words of affirmation” or “acts of service.” One study in 2013 found that their subjects listed acts that sorted themselves into categories of sacrificial, intimate, quality time, supportive, and comforting love. Another study in 2010 found that subjects thought it was important when their partners made an effort to get to know their friends and talked about the best ways to deal with fights.

Impett et al. argue that it’s a losing battle to try to fit the way people love into preexisting categories. “A more comprehensive understanding of how people communicate love,” they write, “would require a bottom-up approach.” A good researcher would let people tell them what they thought love languages looked like, rather than imposing their own categories on their subjects.

When researchers do work with Chapman’s five categories, they tend to find that people aren’t willing to confine themselves to one primary love language. When people are asked to rate the importance of each love language on a scale of 1 to 5, they tend to give all 4s and 5s. If you try to force their hand by designing a test that makes them choose one, the same person will end up with a different answer depending on how you administer the test.

Finally, researchers consistently find that there’s no correlation between matching love languages with your partner and reporting higher relationship satisfaction. It simply doesn’t seem to matter whether you and your partner are native speakers of the same love language.

What does seem to matter is whether you and your partners are willing to learn each other’s languages. Two different studies have found that when you perceive your partner as speaking your love language well, your relationship satisfaction goes up. Although Impett et al. critique the methodology of those studies, they seem to point to a pretty basic conclusion: If you and your partner have thought about how to express affection for one another, and you do it on a regular basis, you’re likely to be pretty happy. Used well, Chapman’s love languages can be an effective tool for getting there.

Chapman’s gender and sexual politics are pretty worrisome

Chapman has never claimed that the love languages are based on any kind of scientifically rigorous process. They have always been an impressionistic tool that comes from the observations he made during his time as a pastor, counseling couples at his Baptist church in North Carolina in the ’80s and ’90s. That’s a specific political and cultural context, and it informs the way the theory of the love languages developed.

In the 1992 edition of The 5 Love Languages , Chapman is explicit about the demographics of the couples he worked with. They are white, heterosexual, conservative Christian couples. The book is structured under the assumption that the wife will stay at home and care for the house and children while the husband goes to work to provide for her. It is a thoroughly heterosexual, monogamous book that chooses not to acknowledge the existence of queer people, to say nothing of poly or trans people.

As the debunking podcast If Books Could Kill laid out in April 2023, most of the couple fights Chapman uses as examples tend to involve wives nagging their husbands to take care of chores. In one case, Chapman explains to a henpecked husband that while he thinks the best way to express love is through sex (physical touch), his wife only experiences love if he helps her with vacuuming (acts of service). If the husband would just help out with vacuuming once in a while, Chapman goes on, the wife will feel just as loved as the husband does when they have sex. The idea that the wife might be interested in sex but can’t focus on it while never-ending housework piles up all around her is not one Chapman engages with.

The most infamous of these examples comes with the case study of Ann, who goes to Chapman for guidance in dealing with her husband’s cruelty. “Is it possible to love someone you hate?” she asks Chapman. In response, he gives her Bible passages about loving one’s enemies and tells her that her husband’s love language is probably physical touch. In order to save the marriage, he advises her, she should stop all complaints about her husband and start initiating sex at least twice a week.

Ann tells Chapman that sex with her husband is difficult for her because she feels so estranged from her husband. When they’re intimate, she says, she feels “used rather than loved.” Lots of women feel this way, Chapman tells her. Her Christian faith will help her through it. Ann does as Chapman tells her to, and the marriage is saved.

In later editions, Chapman revised this case study. ( He told the Washington Post that “physical abuse today is far more evident and apparent than it was when I wrote the book.”) In the new version, Chapman tells Ann to be more physically affectionate with her husband — ruffle his hair, kiss him on the cheek — and perhaps consider working her way up to initiating sex when their relationship has recovered some.

The new advice is less blatantly misogynistic than the advice of the first edition, but both contain the same underlying logic: If a woman’s husband is emotionally abusive toward her, it is her responsibility to coddle him and mollify him until he decides to treat her better. In real life, however, the only person who can control the behavior of an abuser is the abuser themselves.

Some of this ideology has made its way into the structure of the love language model. In their paper, Impett et al. note that some studies associate high relationship satisfaction with high respect for each other’s autonomy and personal goals outside of the relationship. Such egalitarian goals do not appear anywhere in Chapman’s models.

Instead of the love languages, consider aiming for a love diet

The love languages might be a flawed concept, but they speak deeply to thousands of people. Partly, that’s because people love a personality quiz, and the love languages come with one. But Chapman also had a key insight that he was able to express with the straightforward and intuitive metaphor of different languages: The way that you express and experience love might be different from the way your partner expresses and experiences love . That’s a valuable idea.

“If I had to pick one reason why I think many couples find Chapman’s book to be helpful,” says Park, “it is not because they learned their own or their partner’s love language but because it gets people to identify any currently unmet needs in their relationship and opens up lines of communication to address those needs.”

Still, the research suggests that adhering rigidly to the love language model won’t serve you well over time, in large part because it doesn’t match how human relationships work. We love in many ways, not just one.

“It is very likely that in one situation, someone might need a certain type of love or support,” says Park. “Perhaps after losing out on a promotion, you just need your partner to listen and provide you with words of affirmation. Maybe on an anniversary dinner, affection makes you feel special. Or during a particularly stressful time at work, having a partner take on extra household tasks is the best way to support you.”

In their paper, Impett et al. suggest replacing the metaphor of the love languages with a new one: the love diet.

“People should make sure they have a nutritionally balanced relationship,” they argue.

Under this metaphor, choosing one primary love language is something like a crash diet where you eat nothing but fruit, even though your body also needs carbs and fats and proteins to survive. For Impett et al., healthy relationships should prioritize quality time and physical touch, compliments and presents and helping each other out, plus all the other categories of love that don’t fit into Chapman’s model. “If they feel that something is missing,” the paper continues, “they could discuss that imbalance (unmet need) with their partner.”

Gary Chapman’s five love languages taught a lot of people how to start talking about their needs. It might be time for the conversation to evolve — perhaps over dinner.

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Love Languages And Other Relationship Myths, Debunked

Area florists prepare for Valentine's Day, one of the nation's busiest days for florists. Spencer Platt/Getty Images hide caption

Area florists prepare for Valentine's Day, one of the nation's busiest days for florists.

What's your love language? Acts of service, words of affirmation, physical touch, gifts, or quality time?

The concept has been around since the early 1990s. Gary Chapman, a Baptist pastor, came up with the idea after counseling couples. Chapman published a book in 1992 called, "The Five Love Languages: Secrets to Love That Lasts." It's sold more than 20 million copies, was translated into 49 languages, and has only become more popular through online self-help articles and dating app prompts.

But new research is debunking the popular love languages theory. And there's little evidence linking it to happier partnerships. For Valentine's Day, we speak with a researcher and relationship experts about what really makes for healthy relationships.

Find more of our programs online . Listen to 1A sponsor-free by signing up for 1A+ at plus.npr.org/the1a

It Isn’t About Your Love Language; It’s About Your Partner’s

A framework meant to help people become more attuned to their partners now gets treated like a personality test.

The idea that there are five distinct “love languages” may be as familiar to some people today as the idea that there are seven continents, four seasons, or three Stooges—which is a pretty spectacular showing, all told, for a concept that was introduced in a 1992 book by a Southern Baptist pastor that was aimed mostly at married Christian couples. The author, Gary Chapman, based his theory that everyone has a primary love language (that is, a category of behaviors that they most immediately associate with affection) on his own observations as a counselor. Enumerated in the book and now well known to millions, the five love languages are quality time, physical touch, acts of service, giving and receiving gifts, and words of affirmation.

Clearly, the theory resonated: If you were to search for the phrase love language on Twitter, perhaps late on a Wednesday morning, you’d likely find more than 50 tweets from the past hour containing the phrase. Some would be jokes: Brunch is my love language. Downtempo experimental bass is my love language. Listening to Dave Ramsey’s podcast together is my love language. Weed, music, avocado tzatziki—all have been cited as at least one person’s self-described love language. Other tweets would be earnest and self-appraising: Hanging out on the couch with him this weekend made me so happy—guess my love language is quality time. Almost all of them would also identify or explain the person’s own love language.

Elsewhere on the internet, such as on Reddit’s popular relationship-advice forum, r/relationships, the concept of love languages is equally ubiquitous , though taken a little more seriously. Advice-seekers frequently write in with dilemmas that are variations on a small handful of themes: “My partner and I don’t share the same love language,” “I’m failing to ‘speak’ my partner’s love language,” and “My partner is failing to speak mine.” Over the years, the idea has gotten high-profile exposure from celebrities like the “Millionaire Matchmaker” Patti Stanger and been discussed on TV shows like The Real Housewives of Orange County.

Read: Why are Millennials so into astrology?

Today, people often trot out their self-identified love languages as shorthand to indicate how they behave in relationships, in the same casual and convenient way they might refer to their astrological sign or Myers-Briggs type (or Enneagram type, or Hogwarts house ). In a recent Vice story about how the love-languages theory got so popular, for example, the author used zodiac terminology to talk about her love language, identifying herself as “an ‘acts of service,’ with a ‘words of affirmation’ rising.”

This self-focused way of discussing love languages is very different from what the concept’s inventor seems to have intended. As the idea has grown ever more ingrained in the popular consciousness (and ever more disconnected from the text that introduced it), Chapman’s consistent urging toward learning other people’s love languages and modifying one’s own behavior accordingly has been de-emphasized. In its place has emerged a notion that the point of knowing your love language is to find a partner with the same one, or to request that others learn to “speak” it. And as a result, at least according to some researchers, the real value of love languages as a relationship tool may be getting lost in a large-scale cultural game of telephone.

In 1992, Moody Publishers had “high hopes” for its release of Gary Chapman’s The Five Love Languages . A pastor at Calvary Baptist Church in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Chapman had been counseling couples for years, and he had recently been teaching the love-languages theory to seminars full of husbands and wives. Now he was putting his ideas into print.

Moody ordered about 8,000 copies of The Five Love Languages in its first run, according to Janis Todd, a publicity manager for the publishing house who has been working with Chapman’s book for 20 years. It enjoyed robust sales for a few years, she told me—and then sometime around 1999 or 2000, “the trajectory for sales began to almost just go straight up.” The book, a long-standing New York Times best seller, has now sold more than 12 million copies and been printed in 50 languages. Chapman’s The Five Love Languages has also spawned five special editions (for parents of small children, parents of teenagers, singles, men, and members of the military), an app called Love Nudge for couples, and a popular website launched in 2010 , where more than 30 million people have taken a quiz designed to help individuals identify their own love languages.

Todd is well aware that the idea—that there are five love languages and everyone has a primary one—has eclipsed in popularity the book that introduced it. “People are using the phraseology of ‘love languages,’ and not even realizing it’s coming from this book,” she told me. At this point, she added, “it sort of has a life of its own.” (Indeed, as the Vice story noted, some therapists even impart the idea of love languages to their couples-therapy clients without having read the book: One therapist told the author she knew enough to know it was “a vehicle for people to communicate about yourself to someone else. It’s a way to ask for what you need.”)

But people who become familiar with the concept without reading the book often think, Todd noted, that people should simply express love in the way that feels natural to them and then explain to their partners that that’s their love language—or that the point is to know your own love language solely for the purpose of telling your partner what you want. Certainly, Todd emphasized, it’s good to know your own love language, and it’s healthy to communicate to your partner what makes you feel appreciated and what doesn’t do much for you. But Chapman’s advice, she pointed out, doesn’t stop there so much as it starts there.

If you sit down and read Chapman’s book, it’s clear that the love language you’re meant to think about isn’t your own, but your partner’s. The first chapter concludes by hammering home that the pathway to a more fulfilling relationship is to tailor your own expressions of love to what makes your partner feel loved: “We cannot rely on our native tongue if our spouse does not understand it,” Chapman writes. “If we want them to feel the love we are trying to communicate, we must express it in their primary love language.”

Chapman then devotes five chapters to identifying each of the love languages in a partner, just one to identifying your own love language, and the better part of six chapters—essentially the rest of the book—to specific strategies for adapting your behavior to your partner’s love language. In other words, what often gets lost in the discourse is that The Five Love Languages encourages attentiveness and behavioral self-regulation above all else.

Which, if you ask some relationship researchers, is a shame—because that’s the part that holds the most promise.

When the love-languages concept entered the cultural lexicon, it soon attracted the interest of a handful of relationship and marriage researchers who wanted to test Chapman’s claims as scientific hypotheses. Their findings have been mixed, but some researchers have found its attentiveness-plus-behavioral-change formula worthwhile. One study determined, for instance, that Chapman’s advice was likely to produce certain established “relational maintenance” behaviors that research had previously linked to higher rates of love, satisfaction, commitment, and equity in relationships. So in theory, it was certainly possible that a couple who applied the principles of The Five Love Languages to their day-to-day lives could end up with higher levels of relationship satisfaction. Another study found that love-language alignment (or two halves of a couple identifying as having the same love language) was a somewhat weak predictor of relationship satisfaction, especially when compared with self-regulating one’s behavior according to a partner’s wants and needs.

Julie Gottman—who co-founded the Gottman Institute for marriage and relationship research and therapy with her husband, the love and relationship researcher John Gottman, in 1996—told me she started getting questions about the love-languages idea about a decade ago. Often, the questions came from attendees at the couples workshops she hosts with her husband. Usually they were about whether they endorsed Chapman’s philosophy, and came from couples who had found the advice helpful.

“In workshops like that, you don’t want to invalidate somebody’s liking of a particular theory,” Gottman said.

Like other researchers in her field, Gottman harbors some doubts about the notion of love languages. For one thing, she’s not so sure about the idea that everyone has one primary language of affection; rather, she says, expressions of affection can vary in significance according to context. In some situations, an act of service or a word of affirmation will be especially meaningful to people even if they don’t believe their love language to be either of those things, for example, and “gifts” folks can encounter moments in which a well-intentioned gesture feels inadequate. Identifying a primary love language can also have a pigeonholing effect, she noted: Partners may begin to express affection in only one way, regardless of context, or recognize only one kind of act as an act of love. Plus, Gottman told me, some elements of a relationship that are framed as “love languages” in Chapman’s theory should be considered necessary ingredients in any healthy relationship—like quality time.

Read: Dear Therapist, I don’t understand why my girlfriend dumped me

And when partners use the concept of love languages only as a way to talk about how they themselves instinctively express affection or what makes them personally feel loved, Gottman noted, the idea can actively cause trouble in relationships. Some survivors of combat or sexual-abuse trauma, or some people with autism-spectrum disorders, for example, won’t respond well to partners who insist on physical touch as the way they want to give and receive affection. (“Occasionally, I have encountered a researcher who doesn’t agree with my findings, and I’m okay with that. I welcome the results they discover in their own research,” Chapman said. He added that he likes to learn about other researchers’ models and sample sizes and learn how they arrived at the conclusion that the love-languages theory doesn’t apply.)

When I told Gottman, though, about the research that linked the self-regulating piece of Chapman’s original love-languages idea to actual improvements in relationship satisfaction, I believe her response can fairly be paraphrased as, Well, yeah. Is it any wonder that paying attention to a partner’s needs and wants and acting accordingly results in a better relationship?

In more than two decades of working together, Julie and John Gottman have developed their own model for building successful relationships. Called the Sound Relationship House Theory, the Gottmans’ model imagines a house with seven levels, and the base level of the house—the foundation, if you will—is labeled on the Gottmans’ diagram as “Build Love Maps.” To build a love map of any particular partner, Gottman told me, is to ask yourself, “How well do you know your partner’s internal world? How well do you know what their needs are? Their values, their preferences, their childhood experiences, their history and other relationships, what their current stresses are? What their hopes and aspirations are? How well do you know the person that you’re relating to—how well do you really know them, all the way down?”

If there’s any room at all for the concept of love languages inside the Gottmans’ theory, it’s here—at the base level that’s about “knowing who this person is, and knowing them really well.” Learning your partner’s love language—that is, paying attention to what gestures of affection he or she appreciates and responding accordingly—could be one small part of that. Only after that foundation is laid, Gottman noted, can couples move on to building the next six levels of the house, which include things such as developing the habit of affirming a partner’s bids for your attention and learning how to effectively manage conflict .

The real value of the love-languages theory, then, seems to be that when applied as Chapman advised, it encourages people to simply be more attentive to their partners: to ask questions about how they like to be treated, to consciously express affection and support, to check in about what, as Chapman likes to say, “makes their love tank feel full.” Perhaps what people misunderstand about the love-languages theory is similar to what they often misunderstand about love itself: that considering the needs and wants of the other person first and then adjusting your own behavior—and not expecting it to work the other way around—is what makes the whole thing work.

• Relationships

The Case for the Five Love Languages

Yes, there are more ways to feel loved but it's a good place to start..

Posted February 15, 2024 | Reviewed by Michelle Quirk

• Why Relationships Matter
• Find a therapist to strengthen relationships
• New research suggests that Gary Chapman's principles of "love languages" are flawed.
• My years of experience with couples belies the new study's results.
• Understanding the underlying principles of love languages can have a profoundly positive effect.

If you haven’t heard about the hot-off-the-press study by Emily Impett et al. that debunks the basic principles upon which Gary Chapman's wildly popular book The Five Love Languages is based, believe me, you will. After all, challenging long-standing beliefs and conventional wisdom is the stuff sexy, newsworthy media is all about.

In short, the authors found that many of the book's basic tenets are flawed and that applying its principles will not lead to increased relationship satisfaction.

Not so fast

After four decades of specializing in work with couples, however, my clinical experience belies these findings and suggests that many relationships are completely transformed when people grasp and apply the main tenets of Chapman's book. Furthermore, I feel certain that the new study's authors have missed the point, and, hence, the value, of The Five Love Languages .

Impett and her colleagues have many concerns about Chapman’s decades-old concept of love. Here are their top 3 criticisms:

• There are only five love languages: The researchers believe that there are more than five ways that people feel loved and that the book's claim can limit the way couples conceptualize love.
• Everyone has only one primary and one secondary love language: The researchers feel that people are forced into choosing one or two love languages when most have highly diverse ways of feeling loved.
• Speaking each other’s language leads to more relationship satisfaction: The researchers worry that people have a false belief that if they find someone who shares their love language, their relationship will be happier and healthier.

After many years of helping thousands of couples have healthier and happier relationships, I believe that the authors' concerns have been cultivated in ivory-tower Petri dishes rather than in the real world of couples therapy .

Here’s why:

Real-world value

First, the beauty of The Five Love Languages is that it teaches couples that everyone feels loved differently . What touches one person’s heart has no meaning at all to another. And the problem is, people don’t know this. People tend to show love in the way they like to receive it and are then surprised when their efforts aren’t appreciated.

So, understanding that your partner feels connected to you in unique and idiosyncratic ways is a simple but powerful idea. Many people actually think their partners are faking it when they hear their partners’ love languages. It’s hard for them to believe that their spouses are actually oriented differently and that their needs are just as legitimate.

Having a deeper understanding of what makes our partners feel loved—and then doing it—is at the core of magical relationships.

Second, are there more than five ways to feel loved? Of course there are. I talk to couples about this all the time. But offering people simple categories to start thinking about their own and their partner’s love languages is a great start. When seasoned therapists integrate The Five Love Languages into their work with couples, do they “force” them to pick their primary love language and downplay the importance of other ways to feel loved? They do not. That would be absurd.

I have found that while many people enjoy experiencing love via all the love languages, they tend to favor one or two of them and feel short-changed when their partners fail to “speak" those languages. Demonstration of secondary love languages often falls into the take-it-or-leave category: nice, but not absolutely necessary.

The most misunderstood principle

The third criticism is the most misguided, in my opinion. It states that there is no correlation between having similar love languages and relationship satisfaction. This notion is based on a major misunderstanding of Chapman’s work. Unfortunately, Impett and her team are not alone in their misinterpretations; many couples fail to grasp an element that I believe is key to understanding the power of love languages: It goes without saying that people will not be happier if they find a mate who shares their love languages. For example, even if two people share touch as a primary love language, one might yearn for frequent sexual encounters, while the other simply desires affectionate touch—hugs and cuddling. The differences in these needs can easily lead to the same challenges as in couples with different love languages.

Research suggests that people in long-term, happy marriages are no more similar than those who divorce . But the one thing that is different in couples who love each other and stay together is that they learn how to deal with their differences!

And that brings me back full circle to the value of understanding the love languages. I hear countless people talk about how they like to express love to their partners, often in ways that have little to do with their partners’ preferences. A caller to an NPR radio show discussing Impett’s research said, "I like to show love to people by cooking them things, bringing it to them, making special meals…" and so on. But what if the receiver of her acts of service values independence and sees her “gifts” as an intrusion?

Once people truly understand what makes their partner’s hearts soar and begin taking action—whether they understand, agree with, or like it, or not (that's the important part)—that is when relationships flourish. And they flourish because this sort of intelligent “giving” tends to be reciprocal. One good deed begets another…and another…and another.

When Chapman was contacted for his comments on Impett’s research, he confidently said, “20 million people couldn’t all be wrong.” Twenty million readers, he meant. And from one professional in the trenches with couples, I couldn’t agree more.

Facebook image: antoniodiaz/Shutterstock

Emily A. Impett, Park, G. and Muise, A., (2024) Popular Psychology Through a Scientific Lens: Evaluating Love Languages From a Relationship Science Perspective. Current Directions in Psychological Science. 1–6. DOI: 10.1177/09637214231217663

Michele Weiner-Davis , MSW, is the Director of The Divorce Busting Center in Boulder, Colorado and Woodstock, Illinois and founder of divorcebusting.com.

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What Are the 5 Love Languages®?

The premise of The 5 Love Languages® book is quite simple: different people with different personalities give and receive love in different ways. By learning to recognize these preferences in yourself and in your loved ones, you can learn to identify the root of your conflicts, connect more profoundly, and truly begin to grow closer.

Acts of Service™

For these people, actions speak louder than words.

Receiving Gifts™

For some people, receiving a heartfelt gift is what makes them feel most loved.

Quality Time™

This language is all about giving the other person your undivided attention.

Words of Affirmation™

This language uses words to affirm other people.

Physical Touch™

To this person, nothing speaks more deeply than appropriate physical touch.

Meet Dr. Gary Chapman

Gary Chapman, Ph.D.—author, speaker, and counselor—has a passion for people, and for helping them form lasting relationships.

Chapman is a well-known marriage counselor and director of marriage seminars. The 5 Love Languages® is one of Chapman’s most popular titles, topping various bestseller charts for years, selling over twenty million copies and has been on the New York Times bestsellers list since 2007. Chapman has been directly involved in real-life family counseling since the beginning of his ministry years, and his nationally-syndicated radio programs air nationally on Moody Radio Network and over 400 affiliate stations.

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"What Are The 5 Love Languages®?"

They love each other, right? Then why do they always feel like they're not on the same page?

The most common issue in any relationship is the communication barrier. Everyone experiences love differently, and it's easy to miss the mark when it comes to showing that you care.

In his early years as a marriage counselor, Dr. Gary Chapman noticed that over and over, couples voiced similar complaints regarding their marriage.

One spouse would say something like, "I feel like he doesn't love me."

And the other would protest, "I don't know what else to do. I'm doing everything I should be doing."

Recognizing this pattern and remembering the rocky start in his own marriage, Dr. Chapman pored three years of session notes.

He asked himself, "When someone's saying, 'I feel like my spouse doesn't love me,' what did they want?"

Surprisingly, their answers fell into five different categories, revealing a unique approach for how to effectively love another person.

The premise is simple: Different people, with different personalities, give and receive love in different ways. Dr. Chapman called these ways of expressing and receiving love "The 5 Love Languages®." He even wrote a best-selling book about it.

This revolutionary concept has improved millions of relationships across the globe.

These Love Languages don't only apply to couples, the concept holds true for friends, siblings, parents and their children, and relationships of every kind. Each individual has at least one primary love language that they prefer above the others and that is where it really starts to get interesting.

Want to intentionally strengthen and improve your relationships? You can start right now, by taking The 5 Love Languages® quiz to find out how you prefer to give and receive love.

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What Are the 5 Love Languages? Understanding Them Might Help Your Relationship

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Who hasn’t had an argument that boiled down to a partner ultimately not understanding that “words of affirmation” are essential to your sense of trust in a relationship, or that what you appreciate most, over gift-giving, is your partner doing an act of service and emptying the dishwasher for you. Even if you haven’t taken the “What is your love language?” quiz at some point, many of the concepts have real-life applications that may have shown up in your personal relationships. The phrase has been ubiquitous since Dr. Gary Chapman released his best-selling relationship book, The Five Love Languages: The Secret to Love That Lasts , in 2015. The first in a series that now spans 11 books, the five love languages has given people a practical way to stay connected — and stay in love by respecting and nurturing your partners’ (and friends’, and other loved ones’) love languages.

But what are the five “love languages,” exactly — and how does understanding them help our relationships ? It’s all about knowing what it takes for a person to feel loved and affirmed, Chapman tells SheKnows.

After many years of counseling couples in crisis, Chapman says, “It became apparent to me that what makes one person feel loved isn’t always the same for their spouse or partner,” he explains. “I discovered every person understands and receives love in a specific language, one of five to be precise. The other four are just as important and offer [other] ways to express love to each other.”

Dr. Tina B. Tessina, a psychotherapist and the author of Dr. Romance’s Guide to Finding Love Toda y , also sees the value of using the five love languages to demonstrate love. “Understanding your own ways of expressing love, and your partner’s, and understanding how your expressions of love are different or similar means you know when you’re loving your partner the way you want to and when you’re loving your partner in his or her favorite way,” she tells SheKnows. “You can understand better why some things work between you and others don’t . You can learn to recognize when your partner is sending you love, even if it’s not the way you’re used to.”

According to Chapman, taking the time to learn and really understand your partner’s primary love language, which is often different from your own , can improve communication and strengthen your bond.

What Are The 5 Love Languages?

But what are the five different love languages — and what do they look like in practice? Here’s what you need to know.

Words of affirmation

According to Chapman, people with this love language need to hear their partner say “I love you.” Even better: including the reasons behind the love through leaving them a voice message or a written note or talking to them directly with sincere words of kindness and affirmation.

Other examples from Tessina include saying things like: “Thank you,” “That was nice of you,” or “I appreciate what you did.” Affirming both your love and their efforts is much appreciated. 

Quality time

If quality time is your partner’s love language, it’s all about giving your partner your undivided attention and being fully present when you’re with them, says Chapman. That means no TV, no chores, no scrolling through Instagram or TikTok on your phone — just giving each other your undivided attention. Take time every day to do this.

“Spending time with your partner is about being together, paying attention to each other, sharing something meaningful together, and listening and communicating,” adds Tessina. Other examples include preparing dinner together and talking while preparing and eating it, sharing plans for the future, making love, or creating something together.

Receiving gifts

The person who loves this language is not necessarily materialistic (that’s a misnomer), but thrives on the love, thoughtfulness, and effort behind the gift. 

“The thing that works best is picking the right gift that shows you understand your partner and the effort you made to express love,” says Chapman. “Think about finding a gift that your partner has been asking for or would enjoy receiving and plan for a special way of giving it; make it a surprise.”

The act of giving a gift tells your partner you cared enough to think about them in advance and go out of your way to get something to make your partner smile, says Tessina.

Acts of service

This language includes anything you do to ease the burden of responsibility, like vacuuming the floors, going grocery shopping, or sending thank-you notes. Stumped as to what your partner needs? Chapman suggests actually asking your partner to give ideas for things they’d like you to do that would make their life easier, and make a schedule to get them done. That alone, the asking, can feel like an act of service because it communicates the intention. 

Simple things like making breakfast in bed or walking the dog demonstrate you care about your partner and your life together, says Tessina. “It says you want to make your home and relationship more livable and you want to ease your partner’s burden,” she adds. To that point, simply being observant about what your partner actually does on a daily basis that makes your life together more comfortable can be a good way to figure out what acts of service you can do for them, without actually having to ask (which, let’s be honest, can be annoying!). 

Physical touch

People who speak this love language thrive on any type of physical touch and may have difficulty spending large stretches of time away from their partner or other loved ones. “Be intentional about finding ways to express your love using physical touch: giving hugs, touching their arm or hand during a conversation; offer to give a neck or back rub,” says Chapman.

According to Tessina, physical touch is the most direct way to communicate love. “As long as it’s done in an atmosphere which is loving and not oppressive, physical touch can be the most effective of the love languages. It calms, heals, and reassures,” she explains.

The bottom line is that n ot everyone expresses their love in the same way , so being aware of the different love languages can help you understand your relationship better.

A version of this story was published in January 2019.

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