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12th February 2024
04:54pm GMT
You may have heard this question before or even read someone definition of it in some terrible dating profile you've swiped left on but have you really thought about it?
In case you're one of the lucky few who has managed to avoid them, love language theory was devised by marriage counsellor Gary Chapman in 1992.
It suggests that everyone has a primary love language out of five different languages, which include:
The theory also suggests that knowing and being compatible with your partner’s love language is the key to celebrating many years of happiness together.
To find your primary love language, you simply complete a quiz, yes one of those online ones, but is there any truth to it?
Well, three scientists decided to take a good look into three aspects of the theory; that there are in fact five love languages, that everyone has a primary language, and that incompatibility in love languages causes relationship issues.
As it turns out, there's no evidence to support any of them, sorry to break it to you so close to Valentine's Day.
One of the researchers on the project, Emily Impett, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, stated that she had always been sceptical of Chapman's ideas.
This is fair enough when you realise that despite being a marriage counsellor, Chapman does not have any formal qualifications in psychology (he does have a PhD in anthropology which let's be real is no use when it comes to this topic.)
On top of this, his findings were based solely on heterosexual Christian couples.
Among other findings, Impett and the other researchers found that the quiz Chapman devised to help people 'discover' their primary love language asked people to rank acts such as holding hands or receiving gifts based on how important each is to them.
"But when researchers have asked people to independently rate the value of each expression, they tend to rate them all highly," the professor explains.
"So, in real life, when people do not actually need to make these trade-offs, they see all five ways of expressing and receiving love as important."
On top of this, the theory of love languages doesn't include providing support for your partner's goal outside of the relationship or encouraging their autonomy, things we know increase relationship satisfaction.
On top of this, it can be argued that Chapman's theories were rooted deeply in misogynistic gender norms.
Just as an example of this, men are more likely to name physical touch as their primary love language, and Chapman would use this to suggest that women need to be more sexually active with their partner.
He even went as far as to say in his book, The 5 Love Languages: How to Express Heartfelt Commitment to Your Mate, that women need to "rely heavily upon [her] faith in God" to have sex with her husband even when she doesn’t want to.
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