> "The Five Love Languages" is literally trademarked.

So?

> It's a framework that's designed to sound plausible, like a horoscope. It's not designed to be accurate, it's designed to make you go, "oooooh" and repeat the trademark. "Having relationship issues? Oh, have you heard of the Love Languages®? I read about it the other day..."

That sounds like you think it was constructed in bad faith. Do you have any evidence for that?

A model that's simplified can still have value even if it doesn't perfectly fit every situation.

> If your partner doesn't want to touch you, what's the most likely explanation? That they "don't speak your love language", or that they aren't attracted to you?

I'm only passingly familiar with the love languages thing, but I think it does have a point, and I've experienced some of the differences in relationships that is schematizes. Reducing it to sexual attraction is kinda missing the point.

Plenty of it has a point - so does Cosmo. The problem is that it's a psychological model written primarily to be sold. You're welcome to put your trust in that, but I think that's a mistake, and the way that type of stuff usually hurts people is that the model being peddled cuts off deeper understanding of human relationships.

You're probably right but does that mean it can't also contain some useful truths? Personally, these types of frameworks do help me break out of my own self centered paradigm and appreciate differences in friends, coworkers and partners. For work teams I highly recommend the DISC survey.

I do agree with the part about not touching though. It seems like a lot of problems are invented in marriages because people are unwilling or unable to say or even think the ugly truth that they simply don't want to have sex with their partner anymore.

In my opinion the issue with pop-psych marketing constructs is that there are kernels of truth embedded within a misleading superstructure. They tend to leave you worse off because the structure (which is wrong, incomplete, misleading) is bundled with the kernels of truth. They also usually purport to be rosetta stones. There are exactly five love languages, and humans happen to each speak a different variety of them? Hmmmmm.

Another example: what if someone feels "loved" when they're bought gifts, but that's because they're materialistic, a gold digger? Likewise if someone wants to be touched because they're more interested in sex than a relationship, and they derive validation from your sexual interest. "It's just their Love Language" is technically correct, but it's the wrong lens to apply to those situations.

One thing is that those aspects map to quite real needs, and the book does provide a set of reasonable metaphors to talk about those needs between partners in a way that gets the point across where previous attempts didn't succeed. It's genuinely hard for many people to define and communicate their own feelings and expectations, and even more so for someone else's feelings and expectations, complicated by the natural tendency to presume that other's preferences work similarly to yours, so a framework that helps this communication is really useful in those cases where relationship problems involve a misunderstanding about those expectations; which is not all relationship problems but certainly a meaningful part of them.

In the examples you provide, I would say that it's exactly the right lens to apply to those situations - it's imperative for both parties to understand that those are the factors that matter instead of trying to work out a relationship around them, ignoring those core issues; and this lens allows to understand/specify/communicate it better.

Like, if someone does derive validation from your sexual interest, then that's a quite important thing to understand for the partner (even if for them personally the concept of needing such validation is a bit alien, because their self-worth is filled differently), because that's not going to change easily and is going to be a big factor in making the relationship work. And if someone is materialistic, pretending otherwise won't be helpful and neither will trying to change someone's values, that generally takes huge time and effort and/or crisis events. Of course, obtaining a proper understanding may also mean understanding that the relationship should not continue, but for such relationships that's also a beneficial result.

There may be more effective ways of facilitating this communication and common understanding of the partner's inner needs, e.g. perhaps couple's therapy can do it faster, but that's a quite expensive process and a simplified set of metaphors can be a cheap and useful approach ("A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points") if there's sufficient material to ensure that both partners, likely coming from very different perspectives given that they have this communications problem, get a common understanding of how they understand them.

I don't mean this disrespectfully, but your comment is a perfect example of someone falling into the trap I was describing. If someone's using you, they don't love you. They won't love you. It doesn't matter what their "love language" is - giving them the thing they're looking to extract isn't going to help, it's just going to get you exploited.

That case doesn't apply because it's not love and that partner is not committed to the relationship. In fact I would go so far to say it's pathological.

I think GP would agree that this type of self help book is not a Rosetta Stone and its core truth may be somewhat banal ie think about what makes your partner feel special not only what makes you feel special. Maybe part of the success formula for these pop psyc books is that we need these truths to be wrapped in a story and labeled so we can remember them more easily.

My point is that he's trying to shoehorn the "Love Languages" framework onto that situation, because the model is designed to encourage you to do that - it's the same thing that makes it sell. You shouldn't dismiss that as a coincidence, it's not as simple as divorcing that from the legitimate insights. The framework is designed to be a brain worm.

Here's a question: you like the framework. Have you ever seen a specific relationship be saved by it?

While it's hard to attribute "saving a relationship" to any one thing, yes, I've seen multiple relationships where this book helped the couple's communication during a crisis in a very long-term relationship; surfacing some things that (with hindsight) could and needed to be communicated and fixed many years ago but which simply were not; because they lacked "skill"(? or had ingrained/cultural barriers?) to meaningfully talk with their partner about the specific issues and unmet needs they had.

However, your objections seem to be about something other than what I'm talking about - what I hear in your responses is something like equivocating "Understand that it's their love language" with "you should accept it unconditionally", especially in the context of abusive relationships, which is definitely not what I'm arguing about. The decision whether a particular relationship is good for both people involved and whether should continue is orthogonal to that aspect, and "love languages" don't/shouldn't affect that decision; But in the context of various one-sided and possibly relationships, however, understanding that (for example) one partner really only cares about sex in this relationship and doesn't care about the other aspects - well, that's useful information to make the decision whether to move on away from the relationship.

I see it's use solely as a means of improving communication, and it's scope limited for couples which have a problem with that communication (which is common) and also a mutual desire to improve it (which is not that common, and already excludes many destined-to-fail relationships), in this regard, it's useful only if applied by the couple, not by one of them. It's definitely not an universal solution - it solves a particular type (though IMHO popular) of miscommunication, and if the couple has fixed those, this book will be useless for any other types of problems in their relationship.