Does Your Partner Need to Speak Your Love Language?

Partner communication is clearly an important factor in relationship success. A popular theory goes so far as to claim that to be happy, you and your partner must speak the same primary “love language.” According to Gary Chapman’s book The Five Love Languages, there are five ways to show you love your partner: helping your partner (service), giving presents (gifts), touching sexually and nonsexually (physical touch), complimenting or expressing affection (words of affirmation), and spending time in mutually enjoyable activities (quality time). The ideal scenario between partners occurs, according to this proposal, when each expresses love to their partner in the language the partner most prefers to hear.

Perhaps you’ve heard about this approach or even used it as a framework for understanding relationships. Not only has the love language theory struck a resonant chord with the public (as gauged by the book’s best-seller status), but it is also widely adopted as a tool in couples counseling. Even if you’ve never heard of this theory specifically, it all might make sense to you. How many times have you felt your partner’s efforts failed to resonate with your own wishes and preferences? Did your partner try to make up with you after an argument by buying you a present rather than simply giving you a hug or offering to spend an evening together?

Taking a Closer Look at Love Language

Given the popularity of the love language model, along with its commonsense nature, it might come as a surprise that the entire approach has remained largely unsupported. Think about how you feel when you learn that a common medical treatment turned out to lack scientific data to back it up, such as when a drug is recalled from the market. Therefore, if you were on the love language bandwagon, you’d want to know why it remains used as the basis for helping couples improve their relationships.

According to Sharon Flicker of California State University, Sacramento, and Flavia Sancier-Barbosa of Colorado College (2024), five previous studies tried to establish love language’s validity, and five previous studies have, for the most part, failed. However, these previous studies may not have given the approach a fair shake because each used different ways to translate it into research terms, as the authors note.

Flicker and Sancier-Barbosa, in proposing that love language behavior should, if valid, positively relate to relationship satisfaction, realized that they needed to begin by turning the specific types of love language into measurable terms, a task that has not previously been accomplished by earlier researchers. From there, they intended to go on to test specific hypotheses that could substantiate, or not, the theory’s basic principles.

Measuring Love Language’s Five Modes

The authors took on the task of turning love language into a quantifiable measure by recruiting an online sample of nearly 700 adults (average age 44 years) who had been together for at least one year (average 15 years). They received the Love Languages Scale (below), an overall satisfaction rating scale, and one item asking how loved the individual felt by their partner. The original Love Languages Scale had 64 items, which was reduced after statistical testing (on one-half the sample) to 25 that made the final cut.

You can now see how you would do on items from that final version of the Love Languages Scale. Rate each item with the following two prompts:

• Preferred love language: Your partner may or may not do each of these actions, but if they did, how loved would it make you feel? (rate from 1 to 5, not at all to very)
• Satisfaction with partner’s behavior regarding preferred love language: Please rate how satisfied you are with how often your partner does the following: (rate from 1 to 5, extremely dissatisfied to extremely satisfied).

Now, use these two prompts to rate these sample items (these represent the top two from each of the five subscales):

1. Physical touch:

• Secretly touching me in public
• Touching me a lot throughout the day

2. Acts of service:

• Finishing a chore for me when I don’t have time to do it
• Doing more than their share of the tasks to run the household when they know that I am overwhelmed

3. Words of affirmation:

• Speaking positively of me when I am not around
• Telling me that I am important to them

4. Quality time:

• Spending time doing things we both like
• Going places with me

5. Gifts:

• Giving me a surprise present when there’s no special occasion
• Giving me a small present when they come home from a trip

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The overall findings showed that, consistent with the study’s hypothesis, people who were satisfied with their partner’s behavior with respect to their love language (the second prompt) were also more satisfied with the relationship and also felt more loved. However, there was no specific beneficial effect to relationship satisfaction or feeling loved attributed to the partner matching the participant in which love language they used.

Making matters worse for the theory, over half the sample had no primary love language. As the authors concluded, “Participants find all five love languages important to feeling loved.” Those participants who did have a primary love language, furthermore, were less satisfied than participants who did not. As the authors concluded, “There is little evidence to support the validity of Chapman's theory.”

The primary language did not matter, then, for relationship satisfaction. However, one analysis revealed that people with higher scores on perceived overall affirmation and quality time scales were most likely to be satisfied with their partners. The “language of love” appears, then, to take the form of a desire to communicate positively with your partner and also to rearrange your time to prioritize doing what your partner likes to do.

Finding the Right Language of Love

There are several take-home messages from this comprehensive study. First, there is the general conclusion about the importance of ensuring that any advice you follow has a solid research base. Look for the data demonstrating the value of a method that you plan to adopt to improve your life even if the method has achieved widespread popularity in the media. Second, when you examine the items on the Love Language Scale itself, you can see that many of them translate into specific behaviors. The two scales with the most support do appear to have the most value as relationship enhancing strategies. You can also get some ideas from these items about ways you could show your partner how much you care. Take stock and see whether there is some room for improvement in those daily chores (service) or occasional surprise presents (gifts).

The findings also provide you with some concrete ways to initiate conversations about areas that both of you could work on. Are there times you failed to show how much you support your partner, or did you commit the cardinal sin of talking about your partner behind their back (only to have them find out)?

To sum up, your partner may have more than one preferred way for you to show your love. Worry less about finding that one channel of communication than about, as the authors conclude, being able to give and receive the “expression of love across a range of languages.”

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