Today, as I waited for a response from someone I know is not typically a swift responder to text messages, I started thinking about love languages. The whole concept is a pretty useful shorthand for talking about the ways in which people show and feel love, but I’ve grown to feel that they’re more limited than useful when it comes to communication in a relationship. Sure, a lot of people’s modes of affection, given and received, can be captured in one of the five categories (acts of service, quality time, words of affirmation, physical touch, and giving/receiving gifts), but they’re collectively broad enough that pretty much every type of action someone might take can be lumped into those categories. Where they become limiting is in the idea that people tend toward one over the others, sometimes with a secondary or tertiary option, and that this answer is, actually, an answer that will stay true for an individual. Most people are not boiled down so easily and I, personally, chafe under any attempts to take something as complex and nuanced as the ways people express and feel love and reduce it to a personality quiz where most of the questions can be honestly answered with “well, it depends on the situation.” Most of which means that I don’t particularly enjoy the whole concept, even if I can see it as a useful tool for opening communication or giving people a resource to express themselves while they’re still working through how to communicate better.

The woman I dated in the latter half of 2017 and the first half of 2018 was a firm believe in things like love language tests and Meyers-Briggs compatibility and I will admit that my experiences in that relationship have definitely colored my perspective. I am not without my biases, after all, and it is difficult to have anything approaching a positive view of something a previous partner frequently used as an excuse to avoid doing the work of improving herself, working to address miscommunications, and meeting the needs of her partner (aka, me). I did not have so dim a view of these things at the time, likely because I was still in the middle of unpacking the ways that my childhood and the trauma I was subjected to were still impacting me as an adult who barely ever had contact with their family, but learning about those quizzes and tests right as I was on the cusp of fully unpacking everything that happened with my family really highlighted what I view as the most glaring flaw in those tests. What the love language evaluation showed me wasn’t how I felt truly loved or how I actually expressed love but what I’d be taught to view as an expression of love and the behaviors that my parents had demanded from me in order to receive love and affection from them (or, in most cases, avoid disapproval since my parents were never really ones to provide me with positive feedback or any kind of affection).

What I learned in therapy during subsequent years, and that was highlighted for me incredibly clearly during that first horrible year of isolation following the start of the pandemic, was that even when I’d done the work to unpack and deal with the ways I’d been raised, my views of love languages and how I felt and showed love changed depending on my needs and experiences. I was raised to put others before myself, to provide acts of service above all else as the ultimate proof of love and subservience to those who, according to my parents, mattered more than me. After that, giving and receiving gifts was the next best thing you could do (though the concept of “gifts” in this instance was so broad that it often wound up falling under “acts of service” anyway). And, instead of developing a corresponding belief that receiving those things was me experiencing love, what I wound up with was the idea that any words of affirmation were a sign of love not because my parents ever made me feel loved by their words but because that was all I ever really got as a sign of love from them. Even then, my standards were incredibly low for what counted as that, which wound up being the cause of many unhealthy relationships in my early years as an adult. After all, there are many people who will toss you a spare few words of affirmation that mean nothing to them and delight in everything they get in return for so little work on their part. Which isn’t to say that I don’t still appreciate words of affirmation, just that I have much higher standards for what I’m willing to see as an expression of love.

During the first year and a half of the pandemic, before I started (very cautiously) seeing people more widely, I went through pretty much every love language as my primary form of reception and expression. It was a wild, at least mildly traumatizing time for anyone who wasn’t rich enough to escape the effects of the rampant loss of life and the subsequent economic fallout (not to mention the on-going portion of both of those things), so it makes sense that a person’s needs and expressions of care would change as a result. You are shaped by your environment, after all. What has changed the most, though, was an early realization that a more healthy way for me to feel loved was to find the ways that other people casually expressed it. To watch closely for the cues in the people I knew well to see when they were expressing it, no matter what form it took, be it them defaulting to what feels like a natural expression for them or them expressing what they think I need in the moment (regardless of what I’m actually looking for in the moment). Then, in turn, to pay attention to what makes the people I care about feel loved and to make sure that, to the best of my ability, I’m giving that to them when I’m able to. It’s a lot of work, especially as time and distance pull us all further apart than ever before, but I think its worth it even if I know I’m not always up to the task.

The concept of Love Languages and the various popular means of identifying them are useful tools, to be sure, but they run the risk of being just as inflexible and useless as any tool used without regard to the situation or without enough maintenance to keep it in proper working order. I know most people probably use them as just that, as a tool in their belt rather than their one and only means of communication, but its difficult not to look at it and the way that people get about classifying and categorizing things and start to worry that maybe something this directly laid-out might do more harm than good for a lot of people. Which sucks since these people are clearly interested in communicating about love, even if that oftentimes winds up entirely focused on how other people should treat them. Still, its not like this system is to blame. If someone wants a rigid, codified system to use as an excuse to avoid doing any extra work or putting in any amount of thought, they’re going to find one. I just hope people put more effort into it than just taking an online quiz.