One of the most popular concepts in relationship counseling, the idea of speaking the same “love language” as your romantic partner, is widely and unquestioningly accepted. Simply put, a love language is a way of communicating, verbally and non-verbally, with your partner. Like spoken languages, love languages come in a variety of forms. If you and your partner are going to get along, your preferred language needs to match.
Where Does the Idea of Love Languages Come From?
In an earlier post, I summarized the history of love languages and their five varieties. Relationship counselor Gary Chapman is credited with inventing the term in his book The Five Love Languages. He consolidated his many decades of working with couples in this book into this framework, believing that when it comes to relationship satisfaction, it’s all about the match in communication. Each of you will have one preferred language out of these five:
Physical touch: communicating through touch
Acts of service: doing things for your partner
Words of affirmation: expressing your love
Quality time: making room in your schedule for each other
Gifts: giving things to each other
In the earlier post, each language is described in more depth, and it gives information on a well-controlled 2024 study that found no evidence that partners need matching love languages to enjoy strong relationship satisfaction. That 2024 study wasn’t the only one to come up short. Nevertheless, the love language theory remains highly popular.
Love Language’s Latest Test
In a symposium paper presented at the 2025 Gerontological Society of America’s Annual Meeting, Michigan State University’s William Chopik and colleagues explored the possibility that a combination of personality and attachment styles (ways of relating to close partners) plus a match in love languages could predict relationship satisfaction. Using everything from simple difference scores in love language preferences to complex statistical modeling, the research team ended up just as short as all the prior studies.
A key feature that distinguishes this work from much of the other relationship research is that couples were an average of 55 years old in relationships lasting about 27 years. This is important because these were well-established couples who’ve had decades to iron out communication problems.
Using standard Big Five personality scales (openness to experience, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and extraversion) as well as attachment orientation (secure versus insecure), the MSU researchers could find nothing unique about love languages as predictors of relationship satisfaction. In addition, there wasn’t evidence to support the idea that people have one preferred love language. All five language modes were correlated with each other, both in terms of expressions and preferences. Looking at personality, the findings showed that being high on agreeableness (nice) and responsivity were really what counted.
As the authors concluded, “Based on the results of the current study, it is worth revisiting whether love languages tap into distinct relationship preferences and behaviors or if they reflect broader responsiveness or positive relationship behaviors.”
A good relationship partner is one who comes out well in all love language domains of being sensitive to a partner’s touch, doing things the partner likes, making the partner feel loved, spending time together (in accordance with the partner’s wishes), and giving (or not giving) gifts. Titrating these modes of communication to fit what your partner does and wants will demonstrate the quality of responsiveness.
Where Do You Go From Here?
Unfortunately, there seems to be such a disconnect between what people are willing to regard as good advice and what the empirical data have to say. Everyone agrees, whether relationship researcher or not, that emotionally close intimate connections are key contributors to overall well-being. You’re happier when your relationship goes well and miserable when it doesn’t. Perhaps it is this strong need for closeness that drives people to suspend disbelief and buy into what sounds like an easy fix.
To sum up, a theory doesn’t have to be perfect to make it one you can use to improve your relationship. But it does need to have the backing of credible empirical research. Keeping an eye out for this backing will help make your relationships and emotional life that much more fulfilling.
