After being published thirty-two years ago, The Five Love Languages has become a sensation and a cultural icon. It has sold about 20 million copies of the book. The term “love language” has become widely used: donuts, surfing, proper grammar—all of the things we care about—are now considered to be love languages. It’s now used as a shorthand for concepts or inclinations that embody the essence of who we are and what we cherish. However, after all these years, there is growing doubt about the validity of the initial notion of the five love languages.
Amy Muise, an assistant professor in York University’s psychology department and the head of ShaRe Lab, a relationship research organization, published a review of recent studies last month that cast doubt on Chapman’s fundamental theories. I chose to give her a call. She was also ready to dispel a number of other illusions around desire and love. Though it seems reasonable intuitively that each of us has preferred methods for showing and receiving affection, there appears to be little scientific evidence to support this theory. According to Muise, “people love a metaphor, you know?” In addition, I believe that people enjoy categorization. Online, you see that a lot. Such as, “Which character from Harry Potter are you most like?” People enjoy having these identity divisions, according to her. “But realizing that relationships require work and effort and that your partner will have different needs that you’ll have to stay attuned to is more helpful than having this fixed mindset about your love identity.”
According to Muise, the evidence indicates that there are more than five ways to show love, that we require affection in a variety of circumstances rather than just one or two, and that people typically show love in numerous ways at once in the actual world. Furthermore, research does not support the notion that a stronger connection results from sharing preferences with your partner. According to her, when research participants were asked to evaluate every possible “language” of love on a continuous scale rather than being compelled to select one, their results showed that they gave high ratings to all forms of love. “Considering the metaphor, it could be more appropriate to compare healthy love to a well-balanced diet, as it leaves all of these manifestations of love unaccounted for,” suggests Muise.
2. Regular Intercourse Forms a Healthy Partnership
Famous novelist John Updike once said, “Sex is like money; only too much is enough.” He was not alone in believing that. Numerous widely read books on love make the argument that having sex more frequently is always preferable to having it every day. For example, Charla Muller authored a book titled 365 Nights: A Memoir of Intimacy about how she surprised her husband by giving him sex every day for a year to celebrate his fortieth birthday. However, Muise made the decision to look into the relationship between sexual frequency and relationship satisfaction in a work published a few years ago. It’s not a linear correlation, she and her colleagues discovered in three investigations involving over 30,000 participants. Rather, regardless of age, gender, or length of relationship, couples’ well-being rises with the frequency of sex up to a rate of roughly once per week—the average observed in established relationships—but then levels off. Maybe couples feel happiest when they are having at least as much sex as the average for most couples, or maybe once a week is the typical amount of sex that most couples have since higher frequency is not linked to improved well-being, as shown by Muise and her colleagues.
3. Unplanned Intercourse Is More Intense
The prevailing belief in popular culture is that unplanned, spontaneous sex is more fulfilling and intense. Thus Muise resolved to investigate this presumption. She discovered that the majority of individuals do, in fact, think that. However, after spending several weeks observing people in their everyday lives, she and her colleagues discovered that there was no difference in the satisfaction people felt after having sex, whether it was planned or not. She admits that the majority of the couples in the survey were in happy relationships. It’s probable that in highly conflictual relationships, arranging sex is more challenging. She and her team will next investigate whether or not preparing ahead can be particularly crucial for maintaining a sexual connection in couples with young children.
