“If you’re a giver, what are you looking for?”
…
“Takers!”
That is, if you’re giving with an expectation of something in return, you’re not looking to give, you’re looking for a transaction. True giving, then, does not carry with it the weight of any expectation or fruit. The joy is in the act of giving itself, the sacrifice, as a candle sacrifices itself to give light.
He elaborated further to say that if one person is giving oriented in a relationship, it would be stable. If both, it would be heaven. To come back to the point of the OP, it’s the focus on “me, me, me” that’s the issue.
Abraham Lincoln said (paraphrase) “there is one way to bring up your children, and that is to walk that way yourself.” I feel in relationships it’s similar. Less sermons, more leading by example without expectations.
1. If kids see the example of a marital power dynamic of taking and giving, it's not that they will necessarily learn to be selfless givers!
2. I like the F Scott Peck definition of love, which is to extend ones self to support the spiritual growth of another. And, often the growth that a taker needs is to learn to be giving. Often, takers take because they view themselves as a victim.
For a giver, it can be really difficult to go outside of one's normal giving mode without being sucked into a mode of anger or resentment.
3."Being married" is not an ultimate value—it can hurt all the people involved. Complicated! Sometimes I feel I could be a much better, more giving person in a healthier relationship because I could be helping many more people. If i take your example of the candle—it may be great to sacrifice yourself to create light, but is it worth the sacrifice if you aren't producing light?
I like it because it puts the ball back in my court and forces me to take responsibility without judging the other.
There is value in being able to ask for what you need and being able to realize when giving is not reciprocated.
In the parent post's quote "If you’re a giver, what are you looking for?" the "If" is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
And all of it is healthy. Being submissive doormat and not having boundaries is not healthy.
And what is wrong with that? I help you with your shit and you help me with mine.
It's not at the level of transactional quid pro quos. But at a basic level you can't have one giver and one taker. Eventually that breaks down into resentment.
Thats why people communicate.
https://www.mic.com/p/do-love-languages-actually-matter-psyc...
“I don’t consider it to be an evidence-based practice, but I do find it to be a very useful tool and use it in all of my work with couples,” says Stefani Goerlich, a Detroit-based psychotherapist.
research conducted in 2017 suggests that the five love languages only work when “both spouses exhibit appropriate self-regulatory behaviors.”
Also, just because something only works within specific parameters (spouses with self-regulating behaviors), doesn't mean it doesn't work. It just isn't a cure-all. It would be like saying antibiotics are BS just because they only work on a subset of bacterial infections.
Another study: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233241159_Speaking_...
That doesn't mean psychology in general is pseudoscience. But it does mean this is a bad study that tells us almost nothing, and if this is representative of the quality of studies on the love languages overall, then we basically have no evidence one way or another about them.
> What evidence do you have that the two studies are bad?
The study indicts itself (i.e. it describes its methods, and the methods are not ones that lead to strong evidence).
The study population is only non-representative if applying it to populations that don't match. For example, this study supports the results for university students 18-22. Again, we come back to the point that just because it only applies for a subset does not make it "BS".
So what's wrong with the other study? Or will it be more of the same generalized claims about poor methods without any specific details from the study being given, nor any supporting facts to back up your determination?
When you sample a non-representative subset, you often get different results from the population at large. For example, you might get a different answer if you ask the Porsche enthusiasts club what the best car is, compared to if you ask random people in the population.
Undergrads are the same way. Asking a group of people, almost half of whom are virgins, questions about romantic relationships . . . well let's just say it might not generalize to the adult population.
This is covered in detail in any intro stats course or textbook. You may also be able to Google something like "unrepresentative subset psychology" to get an explainer. I can't do the issue complete justice in a comment here.
> So what's wrong with the other study?
I'm sorry, I did not sign up for reviewing every study you link me to. I reviewed the one, and explained my perception that it is a good example of the overall quality of the research on this topic. If you want an assessment of the other study, you'll need to look elsewhere.
It sounds a bit like trolling when you call something BS, then the source you give shows evidence that it does work in some populations. Then there are two other supportive studies. Yet you want to give non-sensical and non-applicable examples of asking Porche owners questions.
That's obviously not true. Show me the high quality research studies backing up the idea that a hammer is useful for hammering nails or that a flat-head screwdriver is useful as a improvised chisel. The way to tell if a tool is useful is if you use it and it works for your application.
> Love languages were invented to sell a book in 1992.
Can you clarify? Are you saying that someone first decided they were going to sell a book in 1992, and "invented" love languages to "fill in the blank" in order to do so? Or are you just talking about the normal situation of someone introducing a new idea of theirs (or in this case, schema) in the form of a book?
I get the impression that you're objecting to the concept as not really a thing because it doesn't have a deep history. However, not all real things have names, or always had names.
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?
Ok, and if you are that partner, but you don't want to lose the relationship, what's an easy response? "I don't want to touch you because I don't find you attractive," or "I'm sorry babe, I do love you, but we just don't speak the same love language"?
The whole thing is very Cosmo. It's designed to sell in the same way as Cosmo.
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.
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.
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 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.
Here's a question: you like the framework. Have you ever seen a specific relationship be saved by it?
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.
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.
Meyers-briggs, zodiac, learning styles, love languages, etc. are all self-fulfilling prophecies that are sold as empowering but are mostly just traps which limit your potential.
To your point tho we use all the languages, and many other things beyond the languages. I think it’s important to not get too fixated on them. It’s just one piece of the puzzle. There’s many other things required besides speaking someone’s love language, but it helps!
Does this style of post ever work? You are dismissive of all these things but you lack a single reason/argument. Is there a chain of logic that leads you to this conclusion?
It's a bit fascinating to me. I imagine the purpose of a post is to share ideas, to give people a chance to think more like you and that takes a persuasive argument.
There's no burden of proof here, the question is: what is the point of the post? I assume the goal is to help someone change their mind - to think more like you. And my observation is that you are not providing anything in your comment that would enable someone to follow a logical thread to reach the same conclusion as you.
So the net effect is, whoever already agreed with you continues to agree with you, and anyone who doesn't already agree with you isn't given a reason to change their mind.
In my mind that's a lost opportunity to persuade people, in which case what's the point of the comment?
On top of that, however, I specifically compared love languages to other things which people might have already examined critically. Since this is HN, probably the most cogent item from my list is zodiac/horoscope, as techies tend to be fairly dismissive of it already, and therefore might have the realization (after reading my comment): "oh wow, I've been believing in love languages this whole time but been dismissive of zodiac, even though both have the same amount of evidentiary backing (~ 0)". However, I actually think "learning styles" is a better example because it is something a lot of people believe in (something like 90% from the surveys I've seen), even though in reality there is almost zero experimental evidence for them as well, despite many biased attempts to do so. My opinion is that love languages are very similar – people believe strongly that there are certain actions/behaviors that they are most receptive to when it comes to romance, but that fundamentally people just want to be loved in a much more generic way and that if the particular way in which love is expressed matters that much to you, you are probably focused on the wrong thing (missing the forest for the trees).
To really spell out why this is bad, let's look back at learning styles: someone believes in learning styles, which don't exist[1]. Specifically, they believe they are a "visual learner". As soon as this belief forms, it almost instantly becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy – they think they are a visual learner, so whenever they are faced with learning something in a non-visual way they don't try as hard, and therefore do not learn the material as well. They are effectively self-sabotaging by having this constrained picture of themselves in their head. There is no reason to believe that people who take love languages seriously will not suffer a similar fate. Imagine someone who thinks of themself as a lover whose primary love language is "physical touch", so when someone demonstrates love in a way that is not touch, they say to themselves (maybe not in an explicitly conscious way): "hmm, this isn't as compelling as it could be because I'm a physical touch lover – I wish my partner demonstrated their love with more touch".
In essence, I feel that all of these things, love languages included, are artificial and mostly arbitrary labels (some more arbitrary than others) which only serve to constrain your breadth of experience and openness to new things, resulting in unfortunate self-fulfilling downsides with no clear upside.
[1] https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/features/edu-a0037478.pdf
If you start to confuse the map for the territory then yes they can be limiting in some ways, because you no longer see any features that are not included on the map. And the features that have been included seem more prominent.
All we can create as humans are maps for things. Different types of abstractions. And refine them over time as we gain better understanding. But when using these maps it's important to keep in mind that they're just one of many ways of describing the thing you're trying to understand.
Myers-Briggs for me was very enlightening, and started me on a journey of understanding how people can be different (led to greater empathy and awareness on my part). I don't walk around classifying people's MBTI type though.
Zodiac... not so much. That map is a bit old now!
As an example of this with Myers-Briggs: I think your MBTI can be helpful if you think of it as "these are the patterns of behavior I naturally fall into, I should try harder to be aware of and use patterns outside my comfort zone in situations where that might be more productive than my default".
However, 9 times out of 10 when I actually meet someone who brings up their MBTI in conversation, the way they think about it is more like "I'm an INTJ, X just isn't something I do", where X is something they probably should do but are avoiding because their MBTI is giving them a pass (in their mind).
So on balance I feel that "maps" like this do more harm than good, because our human instinct when given such a map is to point to it and say "this bit of territory looks scary so I'm gonna avoid it".
I think you're right that confusing the map for the territory is by far the default. So in that sense I do agree with the downsides that you're bringing attention to. And as always, it's not so much about the tool but how you use it.
If you give a power saw to someone who hasn't used it before and hasn't been remotely trained on how to, then they'll probably end up chopping off a limb. But that's not to say the power saw isn't an incredibly effective tool for achieving a very specific task in the right context.
So I can't agree that these maps do more harm than good. It's not as binary as that in my view.
Even if maps like MBTI are wrong - there is a lot of meta-understanding that can come from just going through the exercise. Most people go through life not really understanding that other people don't see the world exactly the same way as they do. And we judge people on their external actions alone with, most of the time, very little understanding or empathy as to what beliefs, traits and preferences might exist below the surface that drives their behaviour.
The bar is very low even for the best of us in our ability to really understand ourselves and others. So just the process of discovering a map that shows you a different view of the world can be very powerful - even if ultimately the map itself isn't quite right.
Without the use of external maps, we create our own internal maps by default anyway - this is just how the brain works. And those maps can have the exact same effect that you're describing. "I believe that I am X and so this is why I can't do Y". But often those maps aren't created with intention, nor are they based on information that is up-to-date and relevant (eg. our limbic system by default wants to pull our default behaviours/actions back towards surviving tiger attacks and hunting for food - this is out of date information encoded in an out of date map).
I guess another way to put it, is we're always following a map of some sort. Our default maps (our beliefs about ourselves) aren't as a rule known to be the most accurate either!