Against Love Languages

This doesn’t really feel counter to the Love Language ontology to me. The point in my mind is not that there are 5 specific languages, the 5 languages are mostly useful for breaking through the naive conception that all love languages are the same. (I think this may be different from what the creator of the 5 languages intended, but when I first saw the love languages book I thought ‘here’s a model that’s wrong but useful and makes the correct, important meta point’)

And it feels like the ‘being seen’ thing is a) maybe something that’s a unique language or frame of its own, b) I think most of the original 5 language are spoken most strongly when they convey a clear sense of seen ness)

I don't think the acts described in love languages are meant to be equally effective independent of feelings. The common use case is "I X for my partner all the time and they never X for me, why don't they care about me?" Love languages explains why not doing X/having to be prompted is not inconsistent with loving you. This comes up on r/relationships a lot.

I've also found it useful when love languages are actively opposed. An example: I show I value people by only making appointments with them I know I can keep and be present for. A good friend shows she values people by squeezing them in when she doesn't really have time, making her late and grouchy. My reaction to this was to feel unvalued at best, deliberately insulted at worse. From her perspective, I was taking this token of of her love and spitting on it. We will probably never be as close as we would be if we didn't have this inconsistency, but there were many fewer hurt feelings after I realized this is what was going on, that her actions didn't symbolize disrespect.

I want to preface my comments by saying that I haven't actually read the book or otherwise deeply studied the concept and my view is likely superficial.

When I read your summary I feel like the analysis misses the point. When you bring the examples of giving the compliements you talk about the first order effect of the compliment. The example on the other hand doesn't talk about the second order effect of what effect the fact that the compliment was given has on the relationship.

To use more LW language, the fact that you give someone a compliment has the second order effect that involves signaling. People not only go through the world trying to signal high status but they also go through the world wanting to signal other things.

Irrespectively of the direct value that a person gets out of the relationship with their romantic partner, most people care about whether their partner loving them at a very primal level. Whether or not another person loves me isn't something about which I have direct knowledge and I might very well get value out of an relationship with a person who doesn't love me.

The only way I can know whether or not another person truly loves me is to look at what their behavior signals. Correspondingly, the only way I can prove to my partner that I love them is to engage in the correct signals.

This signaling game runs into huge problems when we have different ideas of what the signals are supposed to mean and that's the core idea of the 5 love languages as far as I understand i.

The other day, a friend on facebook shared a post on love languages and asked their friends what their's were. I said that this did not fit my ontology for affection in a deep romantic relationship

It's not called "languages of affection" but "love languages". It might be a valuable exercise for the reader to figure out why the name is one and not the other.

I read the book almost 2 years ago. I also remember struggling to pinpoint what language would fit the way I want to experience love. For me, I want mental intimacy. "Being seen" is maybe a way of saying something similar, but I don't know for sure if you mean the same thing.

For me this means:

• Ability to discuss anything. Nothing is off the table.
• Feeling comfortable revealing the things you normally mask for the rest of the world.
• Interest in ideas the other has and their mental processes.
• The desire to actually talk about things.
• No knee jerk reactions of disgust, i.e. there aren't assumptions that something unexpected the other person says is incredibly stupid or weird or wrong before discussing it more.
• The ability to give honest feedback to each other.
• Showing respect and appreciation for the other's views and their willingness to share them.

The love languages book really seems to conflate intimacy with physical touch in its descriptions. And it misses something to say that "deep conversations" would be purely a form of quality time. And that bit about respect and appreciation in my last bullet would fall under words of affirmation...

So for me, it's a book with a model that’s wrong. I really wanted it to be useful. It made the point that people have different expectations for love. But it left me with no clear sense of my own "love language," and I've also found that attempts to categorize past partners hasn't been any easier than categorizing myself.

Wow. That's almost exactly the same as what I offerered in a discussion about the love languages. I also couldn't relate to either of the 5 strongly. I all see all of them of kind of having their place. But I was also missing point 6: making an effort to understand the other person. At least that was I have been desperately missing for most of my life and which I got mostly from basically one (male) friend only. Except for recently when a date turned out to not be a partner but the person being able to give me the feeling of bein understood and related to closely.

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