Popular Psychology through a Scientific Lens: Evaluating Love Languages from a Relationship Science Perspective

The public has something of an obsession with love languages, believing that the key to lastinglove is for partners to express love in each other’s preferred language. Despite the popularity ofChapman’s (1992) book, “The 5 Love Languages,” there is a paucity of empirical work on lovelanguages, and collectively, it does not provide strong empirical support for the book’s threecentral assumptions that: (a) each person has a preferred love language, (b) there are five lovelanguages, and (c) couples are more satisfied when partners speak one another’s preferredlanguage. We discuss potential reasons for the popularity of the love languages, including thefact that it enables people to identify important relationship needs, provides an intuitive metaphorthat resonates with people, and offers a straightforward way to improve relationships. We offeran alternative metaphor that we believe more accurately reflects a large body of empiricalresearch on relationships: love is not akin to a language one needs to learn to speak but can bemore appropriately understood as a balanced diet in which people need a full range of essentialnutrients to cultivate lasting love.