Do you know your preferred love language(s)? In my experience, this question seems to be asked more and more often when couples are first getting to know each other—or when they’ve landed in couples therapy.
Gary Chapman’s book The 5 Love Languages is a longstanding bestseller for a reason: It simply and intuitively organizes the ways romantic partners demonstrate care for each other. Words of affirmation, physical touch, quality time, gifts, and acts of service: we have all noticed what these different behaviors mean to us when our partners do them, and vice versa.
Given the popularity of the love languages, you might be surprised to hear that the notion rests on shaky scientific ground. In a recent article, relationship scientists reviewed efforts to demonstrate that Chapman (1992)’s claims about love languages are true. Impett and colleagues (2024) found that only minimal evidence supports Chapman’s three central claims: that we each have a preferred love language, that there are five love languages, and that relationships are happier when partners speak each other’s preferred love languages.
The idea of love languages, while appealing—who doesn’t want to take a fun quiz to find out what their love language is?—might cause us to undervalue certain loving behaviors and lose sight of how no single love language can fully meet our emotional needs (Impett et al., 2024). They propose a different metaphor for expressions of love: the love you receive is like your diet, and you are healthiest when your diet is rich and varied. In this sense, the five love languages are more like fruits, vegetables, and dairy than they are a superfood that meets all your nutritional needs.
If you like this metaphor, you might be thinking, OK, but not all foods are created equal, right? An even more recent study compared the effects on relationship satisfaction of your partner speaking your preferred love language, compared to the other love languages. How satisfied study participants were with their partners’ efforts to use their primary love language did not predict their relationship satisfaction better than their partners’ use of the other love languages (Flicker & Sancier-Barbosa, 2025). Instead, their reports of their partners’ use of two love languages—words of affirmation and quality time—were a better predictor than whichever love language they preferred.
As a couples therapist and relationships researcher, I find these results highly intuitive. If these are the love languages that matter most, it’s because they are the most sustained and interactive ones. Partners who spend substantive time together, and express positivity and care toward each other, are regularly oriented to each other. These behaviors might demonstrate love in a present-moment way that acts of service or gifts cannot.
So what should your takeaway be here? There’s nothing wrong with really appreciating when your partner brings home your favorite takeout or gives you a foot massage. Let’s go back to thinking in food terms: There are so many ways to eat a nutritionally complete diet. Enjoy your love language, but recognize that relationships are nourished by many different processes—and some are more nutritious for us than others, whether or not they feel special to us.
