The 5 Love Languages: The Secret to Love that Lasts by Gary Chapman

I had heard about the concept of love languages before and out of sheer curiosity for the human condition, I decided to pick this book up on Amazon one day and give it a read. It’s a short and easy read, I finished the book in two days. Here’s my quick review of it.

The Common Sense Approach to Love

This book made a ton of sense. Most marital (or relationship) problems can be chalked up to miscommunications. In other words, I may express my love language differently than my wife. When I express it, I take it as a sign that I am showing my love to her, but if my wife doesn’t “speak” that love language, she may not realize I am showing my love. After the wedding’s over, as Chapman says, and the passion of love wears off, couples revert to their default love languages, which may be opposite of each other, and this an lead to conflict that builds up over time, which could lead to unhappiness. But the good news is by reading this book, couples can rekindle their old flames.

The Five Love Languages Are:

• Words of Affirmation
• Quality Time
• Receiving Gifts
• Acts of Service
• Physical Touch

The above love languages are pretty self explanatory. Words of Affirmation would be giving your spouse kind words or compliments. Quality Time would be just spending time with your partner talking, or cuddling on the couch or just walking together. Receiving (or giving) Gifts would be surprising your spouse coming home from work with a gift or just giving flowers for no special reason as examples. Acts of Service would be when you do the laundry or wash the car or prepare dinner. Physical Touch is touching- sex is also under this one.

Whoops! I just spilled the whole book. Kidding, but this is 90% of what the book is about. 🙂

My Love Language(s)

My primary love language is words of affirmation followed by receiving gifts. There is an assessment you can take at the back of the book for both males and females to figure out your primary love language.

Results May Vary

For me, this was an interesting way to view my marriage and relationships with people overall. Now that I know about it, it’s pretty easy to see that people operate in these different love languages; example abound that I hadn’t noticed before. Maybe you’re already well versed in this, or maybe you don’t need to read it. Perhaps you have different love languages or you will have a different experience reading this book.

How Many Stars?

4 🙂

I give it 4 stars. I recommend it! Even if you have a strong marriage you can glean some pointers on where you or your spouse might be coming from. Marriage is like anything else that is important- it takes work and investment sometimes. One thing I noticed is the stories and examples are super cheesy and sound made up to me, but they get the point across.

–> Buy the book here<–

Conclusion

This book was an easy read. I recommend it if you are trying to improve your marriage or even if you are happily married. Hindsight is 2020 and this book has a lot of commonsense points but it’s an interesting and true lens to look at a marriage. If you don’t want to read the book, you can just refer to the above paragraph about love languages and go from there.

Book Details one more time

Title: The 5 Love Languages: The Secret to Love that Lasts
Author: Gary Chapman
Publish Date:  January 1, 2015
ISBN: 080241270X  ISBN-13: 978-1591842057

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