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Love Languages
These days, it seems as if everything is a love language.
For some, it’s iced coffee.
For others, it’s sarcasm.
Or a mechanized mattress.
Representative Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts once declared that policy was her love language.
For Drew Barrymore, it’s Giphy, the gif search engine.
In the third season of the popular Netflix series “You,” the murderous yet charming stalker Joe Goldberg realizes that violence is his love language.
For some, Stanley Tucci is an entire love language.
Ariana Grande sang a whole song about her love language.
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The author of the seminal book on love languages is surprised that the concept has become a cultural phenomenon. But he still wants couples to heed his advice.
Illustrations by Luis Mazón
It wasn’t always this way; there was a time when the words “love” and “language” were rarely combined and certainly not used as a stand-alone noun. Then, three decades ago, Gary Chapman, a 50-year-old Southern Baptist pastor with a doctorate in adult education, introduced the concept to the world with his seminal book, “The 5 Love Languages: The Secret to Love That Lasts.” People have different ways of expressing and understanding love, Dr. Chapman explained, and in order to make your partner feel loved, you simply need to speak that person’s language. As the book’s introduction notes:
Your emotional love language and the language of your spouse may be as different as Chinese from English. No matter how hard you try to express love in English, if your spouse understands only Chinese, you will never understand how to love each other.
Dr. Chapman based the five love languages on anecdotal evidence he found while working as a marriage counselor at his church for more than 20 years. They are words of affirmation (verbal compliments), quality time (doing something together and being focused in that moment), receiving gifts (anything from a spontaneous bouquet of flowers to more significant presents), acts of service (helping your partner with chores or cooking a meal) and physical touch (holding hands, sex and everything in between).
In the years since the book was published, the term “love languages” has been tossed around with such abandon that it has become disconnected from its creator. It has evolved into a cultural phenomenon and shorthand for anything that brings a person joy.
“As much as I knew about the love languages, I did not know the person behind it,” said Kasey Borger, a comedian who, with her fiancé, James Folta, co-wrote a satirical list of new love languages for the humor website McSweeney’s (sample entry: “talking about your commute”). “I didn’t even know his name,” she said.
The cultural explosion was also unexpected for Dr. Chapman, who is now 80. “I’m as surprised as you are,” he said in a recent interview. Despite the enthusiasm, though, he doesn’t think anyone has discovered a sixth love language.
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