Ralph Brewer examines Gary Chapman's love languages concept, arguing it's a casual observation, not science, yet widely treated as therapy gospel. He shows how preferences shift with circumstances and warns against using them to excuse bad behavior, like a husband refusing gifts because "gift-giving isn't his love language."
Chapters
Daniel asks, what are your thoughts on how love languages can change over time? Well, I guess that begs the question, what the hell's a love language? For those that don't know, and I admittedly have not read a lot on the topic, I have skimmed the Love Languages book, and I continually hear probably about it in this relationship talk sphere online. Love languages are mentioned, oh, I don't know, on a daily basis, all day, every day. It's basically, from what I understand, an evangelical guy. Of which, curious side note, one of our, uh, DSO, uh, one of our Dads Starting Over team members, a coach, actually attends church with the man who wrote the Love Languages book. He's now a way older dude, elderly dude, but he was an evangelical Christian guy who years ago uh, wrote a book on relationships that he basically said, you know, I've noticed that people express their love in different ways. I'm going to call those love languages. And for whatever reason, everybody just grabbed onto this thing— psychologists, psychiatrists, counselors, whatever— and they just preach it as gospel. And it's basically just a dude's kind of observation that people have their own little ways of doing things. That's basically it. It's kind of an interesting observation how people behave. But it's not gospel, and it's not, you are this, and oh my gosh, you just did this, you have changed. So they change over time. It's not a— you're not going to find love languages in the diagnostic— what is it called? The DSM? Why am I drawing a blank here? The book that the psychiatrist, psychologist use for, you know, for properly diagnosing people. You're not going to find love languages in there. Um, so what's interesting to me is you'll have a woman who's a very avoidant type, right? Sticking with the ladies because mostly men on here, um, doesn't like to touch. Yeah, I don't— she's not a sexual person, not a lovey-dovey person. Uh, she's very task-oriented, Type A woman. Uh, the— her and the husband go to counseling, and the counselor says, uh, let's, uh, give you each a love language test. And, uh, sits the man down, and 99.99% of the time the man says, touch, I love touch, touch love language, please touch me more. He goes to the woman, the woman says, I don't know, it ain't touch, I'll tell you that much. Acts of service are cool when people do shit for me, that's nice. And so, uh, all right, now we have to, uh, husband Mr. Anxious Guy, are you going to do some stuff for her? Because that's what she likes. And he's like, absolutely, what do you want? Well, it'd be nice if you did this thing for me, did that thing for me. And he does. And then we go to the woman and go, well, he likes touch, sex, and all other stuff. What do you say? And she's like, nah, I'm good. That's typically what happens in that thing. And, and then, you know, to her credit, she says, hey, when we're talking about touch, you're talking about use my body. And it's my body, it's my choice, and I choose not to touch and do sexual stuff and blah, blah, blah. I just don't want to do it with him. And instead of saying, all right, I guess we part ways, these anxious guys just keep trying and keep trying. But anyway, um, what's interesting is you take Miss I Hate Touch, that ain't my love language, I'm Miss Avoidant, pull her out of that relationship, throw her back on the dating market doing the old mating dance again. Trying to find a new one. And the new puppy love, new relationship chemicals spin in her brain. Somebody sure likes touching an awful lot. So that's one way in which the languages can, quote, change over time, if you will. Cliff says, I've never believed that people have just one predominant love language. From what I've seen, it makes more sense to say we all have them and that our reception to them changes depending on our circumstances. Thank you, very well put. That's always been my contention. So when I, you know, I always think it's weird. I had a guy on the TikTok the other day say, I hate gifts. I hate getting them and I hate giving them. And my wife was like, it'd be nice if you gave me a gift. And I told her, you know, go fuck you, you know I don't like giving them. I'm like, dude, what's wrong with you? Your wife like getting stuff, go get her something. Not my love language. It's like, oh Christ. Um, so it's, it's silly. It's, it's almost like an excuse for dysfunctional behavior. It's an excuse for further detaching from a person and just using that as something you could point to to say, "I don't have that love language. That's why I'm acting like a shitty human." Yeah, who wouldn't like to get stuff and give stuff to people and doing acts of service and touching? Well, kind of people that got problems wouldn't, in my opinion.
