The 5 Love Languages

There are some nice ideas in here about how to share and communicate love to and from your partner.

As most of the self-help books, pretty repetitive in terms of the content. Nonetheless, the key points were useful insights.

Fantastic concept. Poor book.

The writing very much assumes traditional gender roles (what about two full-time workers? This is a very obvious omission) and after the first two chapters I was sick of the stereotyped use of “he/she” when “they” would be perfectly reasonable. The author's constant hero self-worship was tiring after 4 pages, let alone the entire book. When I got to the end of the book (and did some Googling) and realised that Chapman is an evangelical preacher, his world-view made more sense.

My least favourite part was when I got to the chapter on “Physical Touch”. This is my own love language but Chapman managed to make me feel gross about it. When Chapman wrote about how he used a woman's Christian faith to tell her she regularly have sex with a husband she clearly disliked (because God would rather she have miserable sex than get a divorce) it made me feel that “Physical Touch” was purely about selfish receipt of sex rather than a shared experience. This is a very icky position and a disappointing perspective to read given there are so many ways to communicate this common imbalance in physical desires in relationships.

I honestly think the “5 love languages” concept is important to understand to better communicate with your partner. This isn't the book to learn this in.