Understanding the language of LOVE

Love is an emotion that you feel for your spouse. It burns inside you, keeps you awake at night, and drives you to keep going. There are things your partner does for you that stirs that emotion in you, and in the same way, there are things you do for them that makes them feel your love for them. Learning to identify and focus on showing your love in the most receptive way is vital to the success of a long and happy marriage.

Love can be broken into roughly 5 different languages, of which we each have one primary language and at least one secondary language. These love languages are: Words of Affirmation, Acts of Service, Receiving Gifts, Quality Time, and Physical Touch. It is important to your relationship to identify your partners love languages so that you can show you love them and they can hear it loud and clear. The easiest way to do this is identify your own first and communicate that to your spouse. It is also important to learn to hear your partners love language too, but lets focus on one thing at a time.

An explanation of the languages of Love

To help understand how the love languages work, think of love as energy - the more energy you have, the more loved you feel - and think of each love language as a kind of energy - Blue, Purple, Red, Yellow, or Green. You can only give out and receive one kind of energy at a time, and the only way to gain energy is to receive it from others. The one side effect is, over time this energy level slowly depletes. As a result, the only way to gain energy is to give it to others so they will in turn give it back to you. Each kind of energy has a different value to each person resulting in preference of one kind over another. For example, to one person 1 Yellow energy may be worth a great 10 Total energy, or 2 Red energy may be worth only 5 Total energy.

Now you don't know why, but you gain the most Total energy from Blue energy. So to you, it is the most valuable and the easiest to give away. Naturally, when you give out energy, you give the one which is easiest to give, so you give the Blue. The problem is, even though you give your spouse 10 Blue energy, they may only gain 10 Total energy. However, if you know that your spouse values Yellow energy the most, even though it is harder to give, giving them 10 Yellow energy means they gain 100 Total energy.

What this all means is, if you communicate with your spouse using the right love language - even if it is not your primary love language or you are not very good at communicating with it - they will feel much more loved than if you were to communicate using another love language. It will take time (as most things do) to learn to remember to show the right language of love to your spouse. This can at times feel strange or uncomfortable, but the results should speak for themselves.

The love languages

There is already a large amount of resources available on the topic of the five love languages, so instead of repeating them here, please see and explanation and definitions by the five love languages, by Focus on the family.

If you are unsure of what love your love languages are, you can do a love language profile for couples, by The 5 Love Languages. At the bottom of the page is the full PDF version of the quiz to guide you though discovering your love languages.

On a related note, it is worth recognising that the love languages theory not only applies to couples but to any relationship, specifically including the parent / child relationship. There is a slightly different way to identifying the love languages of a child, but the principles are the same.

TL;DR - Show your love to your spouse in the way that they can best understand it - by their primary love language.

- Mr