“Love language” is a bullshit concept made up by a pastor to gaslight women into tolerating abuse. There is no such thing.
this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2026
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The original 5 love languages schtick was created by a Christian pastor, with no background in psychiatry or psychology, in order to pressure wives to give their husbands sex because the husbands love language was physical touch.
Wow, that explains so much, actually...
The shitty thing is that actual psychology doesn't have an audience, because it never gives simple, neat categories you can sort yourself into.
Oh dang, I thought this was social media lingo like "trauma dumping". The guy wrote a book and the wikipedia entry brutally points out right in the introduction that there's no evidence for any of this.
"The Five Love Languages: How to Express Heartfelt Commitment to Your Mate is a 1992 nonfiction book by Baptist pastor Gary Chapman. It outlines five general ways that romantic partners express and experience love, which Chapman calls "love languages". Empirical evidence does not strongly support its core claims."
Do you have a source for the fact that pressuring wives was the goal/an effect? I want to believe it since it sounds like the kind of thing that would happen but a quick search didn’t really turn anything up.
From the book itself:
An example of this is Chapman’s story about a woman named Ann, who has a husband described as extremely emotionally abusive. Their conversation starts with Ann asking Chapman if it is possible to love someone you hate (girl, RUN). Chapman responds by making Ann read bible passages about loving your enemies. After learning that Ann’s husband’s love language is sexual physical touch, Chapman tells the poor woman that to save her marriage, she has to sleep with her horrible husband twice a week. Ann replies that she finds it “hard to be sexually responsive” to someone who “ignores her”–to which Chapman responds that many women feel that way, and she must simply rely on her Christian faith to get through it. Chapman wraps up this lovely anecdote by saying that Ann took his advice and that there was a tremendous change in her husband’s attitude, with the husband swearing to his friends that Chapman is a miracle worker. We don’t hear how Ann felt about it.
I guess I'll have to go back to the highly credited work of Steve Harvey for relationship advice.
Empotramiento día y noche
I don’t know what I expected…
Just to add some more options, there are the 5 Neurodivergent Love Locutions.
Infodumping, Parallel Play, Support Swapping, Deep Pressure, and Penguin Pebbling.
Honestly i'm not a gigantic fan of any of them in particular though.
Physical touch is good, but my joints get stiff and my skin gets sweaty from too much cuddling. I also don't really like being a smaller spoon - I become very conscious of moving my head and or catching my long hair on something.
Quality Time is probably my biggest. Like, time = life. Giving someone time is sharing life with them in that sense. Responding to messages or giving thought counts. Doing things actively together counts. The Parallel Play locution counts.
Words to Affirmation... Maybe it's the autism but anytime i'm getting the impression that someone is saying something with the goal of making me feel any certain way, it tends not to work. Like, I'll understand and appreciate that you want me to feel that way, but the words won't themselves won't matter much. This applies to a lot of stuff, both positive and negative. If someone insults me I just think "oh you don't like me" without ever ruminating in what the insult was. There is also some evidence that autistic people are less susceptible to advertising and propaganda too, though I would never be so arrogant as to claim imunity from such things.
Acts of service and gift giving are pretty similar in that I am uncomfortable just receiving stuff from people. I'm very particular and I often have unusual taste, and I really enjoy researching things and making a purchasing decision. I prefer collective contributions. I love when my wife and I spend a couple of months saving for and discussing a big purchase we are going to share. I love when we both work together on things like yardwork or cleaning or swapping around the seasonal decorations. It makes me feel like part of something bigger than myself: our household, our marriage, whatever you want to call it.
Infodumping... I can handle some and can provide some on occasion. Maybe I just got really good at masking as a kid, or learned from watching people call my older sister a know-it-all, but I learned fron a young age to evaluate how much someone already knows about something and how much they are willing to learn in that moment. My bf and gf never learned this and occasionally I get exhausted by them. Especially when it's a topic we are both interested in and I disagree.
Parallel Play used to be great. I think I miss it. One of the problems of being in a polycule is that I always put pressure on myself to be more present with whomever I am with. It seems my wife doesn't appreciate parallel play the same way that I do. I've still not gotten to the point of doing so with my bd or gf.
Support Swapping is not something I've done much of. The support I need is mostly time alone. I try to support others by providing a calm, stable presence and a listening ear.
Deep Pressure- I have a bad knee that benefits from massage, but other than that I don't love deep pressure.
Penguin Pebbling- I like a small amount of it, but I also get overwhelmed by clutter. I feel a bit bad because my gf definitely loves this one, and they cone back from every trip with a huge bag of random trinkets they have scavenged, and I am like "I'll take one (1) please" to add to my designated trinket box.
Mine, in order: soapy tiddies, moth, beans, and corn. I don't need a fifth.
Physical touch in erogenous zones.
Elixir.
Those are the five socialized by a particular author, but I’m certain it’s not all-inclusive.
However, I have found over time mine changed a bit based on what I felt I was missing. At this point, for receiving words of affirmation are first, quality time is probably second, and physical touch is also up there (not sex, just touch).
For expressing love, I found I default to gift giving and touch.
Consensual sexual harassment 
My wife and I call it wifesharing.
I’m super into acts of service but rarely ever have partners who are. One day!
That sounds nice.
Me too buddy, me too 🙂↕️
Oversharing fun facts
Gift giving! To the point where I have to actively pace my expectations for other people giving gifts to me.
Biting
I'm huge on giving acts of service and gift giving and on receiving physical touch and words of affirmation. Quality time alone is equally as important as quality time together.
Please crush my soul back into my body
Hmm yes food
Affirmation most of all, but really all except gifts
I think they added a 6th....Food maybe?
Lots of people can add lots of things, because it was always folklore.
It does work though. Partners often give based on what they need...because humans assume everyone is just like them. But funding your partners actual need makes a difference.
Example, my wife likes acts of service and gifts, so she would previously assume I'd want those things. But I score a zero on gifts and acts of service, because I have what I need and I can do stuff for myself with no loss of feeling from my partner
The basic principle that people interpret the same things differently, or desire different things, sure. That there's 5 separate love languages, not so much. (Apparently some random pastor originated that)
If you know of more categories people would identify with you are welcome to add, but they have the main categories covered well. They aren't arbitrary, they are based on human needs and our socialization
They're incredibly arbitrary. Each of them can just be collapsed into "acts of service" an act of service can be a gift, quality time is something that happens alongside the others (and is also something that can be described as a gift) and physical touch is (or should be) quality time.
It was made up by an american pastor to gaslight women, it doesn't have any basis beyond what he felt like. He made up arbitrary categories that would help him sell his spiel about women listening to men.
Ive made a new category; Being nice. It takes all the other categories. The love languages are now: Being nice.
Gaslighting women LOL. It is not gender biased--meaning trying tobsway women to be subservient and men dominant.. Its irrelevant who set it up, that's a fallicious arugment. But since you brought it up it does have basis on the hierarchy of human needs from psychology papers.
Categorization involves finding the limits that determine a category, you could probably break it into a 100 or more, but then you add complexity for no reason, these are distilled to the most base set.
If you don't want to like it because of a pastor you can get a similar scooe with Ortan-Gilingham method since it was backed by science research not just anecdotes from those tested.
I disagree it all boils to acts of service. For example I score high on Physical touch, but it doesn't require an act of service like a back massage, just lying next to my wife with our skin touching is enough to keep my tank full. She could be asleep so there is 0 act of service. It a basic human skin to skin thing like when they say babies (and chimp studies) should have skin to skin contact with mom.
But buy me a gift or do something for me has no tank filling properties. Its nice but, meh
Hey babe, wake up, new love language just dropped