If you’re seeing TikTok posts with a circle made up of yellow, red, orange, blue, and green bars with a symbol in the middle, this may or may not be your first contact with American pastor and author Gary Chapman’s “5 Love Languages” concept.
The quiz in question lives on Chapman’s official site, and it’s probably harmless. If you’re curious about your own “Love Language,” try it. It’s fun.
Is it rooted in science? Not really, no. Is it a cult, or some other form of indoctrination? Also no. It comes from a bestselling book from 1992 called The Five Love Languages: How to Express Heartfelt Commitment to Your Mate, by Chapman that millions of people have found insightful.
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The Love Languages according to Gary Chapman are as follows:
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Physical Touch
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Acts of Service
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Words of Affirmation
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Quality Time
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Receiving Gifts
The online quiz asks you A vs. B questions in an effort to nail down your priorities, and zero in on the emotional needs your partner or partners need to address in order to make you feel loved, and maintain your relationship. Your quiz results may or may not even result in one dominant “Love Language,” so the utility of the quiz varies from person to person. But knowing more about your preferences, and knowing how a partner feels, allows all parties to rethink their relationship behaviors.
For instance, if you feel your top “Love Language” is quality time, and you have a spouse who professes to need gifts, that might explain a birthday fight in which your “gift” of a night in with Netflix wasn’t well received, even though the thought behind it was earnest. Common sense-wise, getting something like this out into the open could be a relationship-saving insight.
Chapman’s “Love Languages” concept may not be the the end-all be all of relationship wisdom, and his books aren’t the product of falsifiable studies. It’s also not the first work to sort the features of what’s known in social science as “relational maintenance” into five categories.
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Social science research in this area includes — to cite just one example — Laura Stafford and Daniel J. Canary’s “Maintenance Strategies and Romantic Relationship Type, Gender and Relational Characteristics,” a study published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships in 1991, the year before Chapman’s book. Their work, an example of “relational maintenance” research, involved asking 956 participants to fill out a survey. The researchers sorted the results into five “factor loadings of maintenance items”: “positivity,” “openness,” “assurance,” “network,” and “tasks.”
At any rate, social science research attempting to validate the general principles of Chapman’s book have actually shown promise. Nichole Egbert of Kent State University and Denise Polk West Chester University devised “A Validity Test of Chapman’s (1992) Five Love Languages” in 2006, published in the journal Communication Research Reports. They find that Chapman’s work, and the world of relational maintenance are simpatico. People acting based on Chapman’s advice, they assert, are engaging in “behaviors performed to enact intended relational maintenance.”
So like anything else you read online, you should be careful not to base your whole life around this quiz. But if you find useful wisdom in it, you’re not alone.
