The 5 Love Languages is a great little book by Gary Chapman. Chapman goes into a lot of detail about various aspects of relationships, with a special focus on communication and “love languages”. According to Chapman, a love language is a method of showing and receiving love. The love languages discussed in the book are words of affirmation, quality time, receiving gifts, acts of service, and physical touch.
Everyone has one primary as well as one secondary love language. When someone regularly receives love via their primary love language, they will feel appreciated and their “love tank”, as Chapman calls it, will be overflowing. This is easy to do when couples share the same primary love language. In those cases, they will communicate and receive their love for each other just as easily as two people who share the same native language communicate.
However, if someone one goes for an extended period of time without receiving love via their primary love language, they will feel upset and unloved; their love tank is empty. This can happen unintentionally when couples have different primary love languages. Someone who primarily receives love through affirming words may not feel loved (or not feel nearly as much love) if their partner primarily shows love them love through acts of service. Figuring out which primary love languages you and your partner have and learning to “speak” to each other in those languages (which Chapman explains how to do in the book) is helpful for avoiding this situation and reviving dying relationships.
Although The 5 Love Languages is primarily about romantic relationships, the wisdom it contains can be applied to all types of relationships. Learning how to best show love to your family members, friends, and anyone else close to you can help make bad relationships good and good ones great. I’ve used a lot of information from the book to learn more about myself and improve my interactions with those close to me. My primary love language is words of affirmation and my secondary love language is physical touch. This makes perfect sense, considering I love warm hugs and saying uplifting things to others. Further, whenever I go for a while without receiving either of those, I begin to feel unappreciated. I never noticed those aspects of myself before I read this book, and those are just a couple of useful things I’ve learned from it. Everyone interacts with other people at some point and The 5 Love Languages offers a lot of great insight on how to make those interactions count. I highly recommend checking out this book. I think you’ll love it.