How does the Love Languages quiz improve relationships?
Hello and nice to meet you! I’m Camille with Camille A. Saunders Therapy Services and I am a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist Associate seeing clients over telehealth in Washington state.
Today I’m going to talk about an intervention I use with almost all of the couples that I see in therapy called the Love Languages.
The 5 Love Languages is a book written by Dr. Gary Chapman published in 1992 detailing five general ways that romantic partners express and experience love. The 5 Love Languages he describes are as follows:
Words of Affirmation (like hearing I love you, love notes, or a handwritten card)
Quality Time (spending time in the same space, doing things together intentionally like going on a walk or talking about your family’s long term goals)
Receiving Gifts (this one feels self-explanatory)
Acts of Services (like emptying the dishwasher for your partner when usually that’s their chore, or making them breakfast on a day when they don’t have time to do it themselves)
Physical Touch (like hugging, holding hands, rubbing your partner’s shoulders if you know they like that)
You can pick up his book and check it out if you’d like to read more in depth about his research into the love languages or you can take a quiz online to figure out your love languages ranking at www.5lovelanguages.com.
If you go online to take the quiz you will get asked questions like: do you prefer to be hugged or to receive an encouraging note; do you prefer people give you gifts or do you like leisurely visits with friends and loved ones. You will go through and answer the questions picking one or the other until you reach the end. Then if you read the book or have a printed out copy of the quiz you will tally up your responses and look at which one of your love languages has the highest number and that is your top love language meaning how you like to receive love. If you go online and take the quiz it will do the math for you and come up with a list of your highest to lowest ranked love languages.
As I said earlier, the score you receive with your highest ranked love languages are the top ways that you like to RECEIVE love. For example, if your highest ranked Love Language is Physical Touch that probably means you value hugs, maybe holding hands, and being physically close to your partner. But that doesn’t mean that you don’t love to give gifts or do acts of service for others. The reason that I like to use the Love Languages when I do couples therapy work is because often each person has a different top love language than their partner. Conflict can come up if one person really values quality time and the other person prefers receiving gifts. This is where fights sometimes happen or frustration comes up. Often the way that our brains work is that we assume that our loved ones like to receive love the same way we do, and that is often not the case.
It can be really helpful to fill out the Love Languages quiz with your partner and then use this to open up a conversation about similarities, differences, and times when you may have missed the mark. It can be uncomfortable to realize that maybe you had no idea that your partner’s top way they feel love is with words of affirmation and you’ve been giving them gifts expecting that would make them feel loved!
Gift giving in particular often comes up as something people love or hate. I think our society in the United States puts a lot of expectations on loved ones for holidays, birthdays, anniversaries, etc. to find the perfect gift. Just think of those jewelry and diamond commercials that you see on tv around valentine’s day! Many people get stressed out and overwhelmed by gift giving and that can lead to negative thoughts and feelings about people who like to receive gifts.
Please do not shame your loved ones if they like giving and receiving gifts! It is just as valid of a love language as the other ones and usually if we are feeling shame around gifts and gift giving it means that we worry that in the past we failed to give the perfect gift and meet our loved ones expectations. That’s okay! You can use your new knowledge of the love languages to talk about past struggles and open up a conversation about how you can show your love in the future. Maybe your partner’s second top love language is Acts of Service and that one feels easier for you to offer to them. In this sense I recommend working smarter, not harder.
I hope this has been a helpful introduction to the Love Languages if you haven’t heard of them before. Although author Chapman originally wrote about the Love Languages as a way for partner’s to better understand each other now the Love Languages can be more broadly applied to any of your meaningful relationships. If you go to the website www.5lovelanguages.com, you will see that they encourage everyone in your family to take the quiz or you can select to take the quiz for your kiddo if they are too young to read or answer the questions.
If you’d like to work with me one on one for therapy services or want to reach out to talk about the Love Languages I’d love to hear from you. I can be reached at 253-339-6871, by email at camilleastherapy@gmail.com, or you can fill out the contact form below and I will reach out to you.