SIO479: Does Speaking Your Partner's "Love Language" Foster a Happier Relationship?

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:15 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. This is episode 479. I'm your host, Thomas Smith, and I'm super excited to have a classic SIO for you. It's a really interesting study and we're gonna be speaking to one of the authors. It's about love languages. I'm sure you've heard of the five love languages by someone named Chapman, I guess. I've definitely heard of it and I haven't heard of anything. But not only that, it's used in therapy and stuff. And so this is an idea, this love language idea is very influential. And yet, is there any scientific basis behind it? Well, Dr. Sharon Flicker, who works out of my neck of the woods, Sacramento State, thought she'd maybe find out if there is any science behind this. So does speaking your partner's primary love language predict relationship quality at all? What do you think? Well, why don't we get on over to Dr. Sharon Flickr and we'll find out. Before we do, though, of course, got to take our little break at the beginning. You can avoid that break by going to patreon.com/seriouspod. Please support the show. Patron support is how this show happens. And without patrons, it would not happen. So please consider supporting. And you get to lose the ads. All right. After this break, we'll get to it.

0:01:30 Ad: [Ad break 1 — ad music]

0:01:30 Thomas: I'm joined by Dr. Sharon Flicker. How are you doing today?

0:01:33 Sharon: I'm doing great. Thanks for having me.

0:01:35 Thomas: Oh, thank you. It's just, I think it's nice to talk about something not related to other things. It's Just Let's Just Have a Nice. I'm sorry. It's been a week. Well, I'm excited to talk About this. So love languages. Do you want to talk first about your background and how you ultimately became interested in this area?

0:01:54 Sharon: Absolutely. My training, I'm a clinical psychologist. I, you know, have a background in researching various forms of relationships, some types of family therapy, that kind of thing. And you know just a question came up like everyone else. I was kind of interested in this love languages concept. I learned about it as just like a person, not as a researcher. And I had this question come up like, are there cross -cultural differences in what people's primary love languages are. And I thought this will be a fun thing for me to research with my students. I am a professor at Sac State in the Department of Psychology. And so I run a lab and I'm always looking for kind of fun projects that I can do with my student to teach them how to do research and that kind of thing. And we started kind of diving into, is there any research out there on cross -cultural differences in love languages? And we realized we just we needed to take a step back because it turns out there's actually not much research on whether love languages are empirically supported.

0:02:53 Sharon: You know, this is an idea that someone came up with based on their practice doing couples therapy through their church. So we realized, OK, going to take us back and look at this, whether this can be empirically supportive as a concept, this theory.

0:03:08 Thomas: Right. Right. Well, I assume most people will be familiar in the same way, like vaguely familiar with love languages. But when did that, was that, I guess, book written? How supported was it?

0:03:16 Sharon: Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, Gary Chapman wrote this book. It was first published in 1992. And there's been several editions that have come out since then, including in many different languages. And, you know, he's had books that have came out related to this based on, you know, love languages for different genders and for different types of relationships, for single people, for parents, that kind of thing. So there's been lots of different versions of it over time.

0:03:40 Thomas: All the spinoffs.

0:03:45 Sharon: All the spinoffs. Yes.

0:03:46 Thomas: It feels like a lot of those like self -help -y, relationship -y books kind of go through that same iteration where it's like it has success and then they try to find the different ways to convert it into more money, more versions.

0:03:51 Sharon: I mean, yeah. The public latches onto something. They find it intuitive and useful. Then yeah, they try to apply it as much as possible. So he came up with this, you know, this, this idea based on seeing couples in his practice at his church. He's in the Baptist church, I believe. And he came up with his idea that everyone has a primary language and that primary language, that primary love language is the language that they hear love most easily, meaning that when their partner expresses love in that way, they hear it as love. And if the partner expresses love in different languages, then they're going to miss it. They're not going to feel loved because they're not understanding that their partner is expressing love. Those five love languages are physical touch, which isn't necessarily sexual. He interprets it as both sexual and non-sexual touch. Quality time, which is spending time together. Words of affirmation, which my understanding he interprets rather broadly, but it's saying positive things to each other. Acts of service, which are doing things to make your partner's life easier. And then gift giving, which is self -explanatory, I think.

0:05:06 Sharon: Yeah. And that idea is that you need to identify and speak your partner's primary love language for them to feel loved.

0:05:12 Thomas: Yeah, okay. That has some intuitive appeal. It also sounds like things that just should probably be in any relationship, like all of those things, really. But I guess it's about emphasis or your primary one or something. How does that work? Do people use all of them or some of them, or tend to focus on one?

0:05:30 Sharon: Well, what does Chapman say or what does the research say?

0:05:32 Thomas: I guess, yeah, that's a good point. Maybe what was, I guess talking about his kind of theory and framework.

0:05:35 Sharon: His theory is really that most people have a primary and maybe there's some people who have one or two, but that people have a primary love language and that is what you need to express your love in, in that love language. So if someone has physical touch as their primary love language and you're giving words of affirmation, it might just be like, you know, speaking into the wind, that they're not hearing it as love.

0:06:03 Thomas: Interesting. Okay, well, anything else we should know about that initial framework before we talk about your study?

0:06:09 Sharon: I think that's a pretty good basic summary from my understanding of what his books say.

0:06:10 Thomas: And so it was all anecdotal, essentially. I don't know if that's the right word, but it was all based on experience and not nothing, no study. So that's interesting. I wouldn't have thought that myself either, really.

0:06:23 Sharon: Right, right. I mean, so it's kind of like the way Freud came up with his theory, right? Which was interacting with clients and making some conjecture about how people work.

0:06:33 Thomas: Boy, early scientists had it so good, you know, they could just, or like Plato or whatever, you just sit and just, all right, I've had a bath. Here's the universe. Here's The Five. You just like pontificate about the whole framework of everything.

0:06:46 Sharon: And you know, that's great way to come up with hypotheses, right? That's exactly how science works is you start there and then you have to test it. Yeah.

0:06:49 Thomas: Sure, yeah, for sure. Well, okay. So let's hear about the testing it then.

0:06:58 Sharon: So I just want to clarify that I'm not the first person to test it. There are probably about five different studies or maybe a little bit more depending on studies that were done in other cultures that have examined this. And each of these researchers, there's five researchers who've tested theory for me.

0:07:14 Thomas: That's poetic. Did they each pick a love language? No.

0:07:17 Sharon: Oh, I didn't even think about that. That's funny. They all tested the theory slightly differently. And so I really wanted to focus on what I viewed as like the the really core of his theory, which is that you need to feel like your partner is speaking your love language in order to feel loved. So I really focused on individuals and their perceptions of their partner's behavior related to their primary love language. So if they felt satisfied with their partner, love language behavior for their primary, love, language, and how that related to how loved they felt and were they satisfied in this relationship?

0:07:53 Thomas: Well, how do you do something like that? Sounds complicated.

0:07:56 Sharon: Yeah. You know, social science is a little complicated because you have to create scales to measure these ideas, these concepts. And researchers before me have attempted to develop scales. He has a scale, I should mention. Chapman does have a scale. But the scale is what we call forced choice, which means he says, would you feel more loved if your partner did this or if your part of the family did that? And you have a choice for each one.

0:08:24 Sharon: For a lot of reasons that I'm not going to get into that are kind of statistical in nature, that doesn't work well for research.

0:08:33 Thomas: Well actually I will say this show does tend to get into those. We love that stuff, but it's okay. You don't have to, but it makes sense. I mean, it's like that kind of cheats a little bit into, it is going to fit in your framework if you start with a predefined thing that you are forcing people into. Is that kindof why?

0:08:34 Sharon: Yeah. Well, that is an issue that I think is still a limitation, including my scale. I think if I understand what you're saying, which is that we're only measuring what Chapman says, those five love languages are.

0:08:55 Thomas: Yeah, yeah. I think that is what I was saying.

0:08:58 Sharon: That is an issue I think for all of the studies that have come so far. It's actually one that I'm addressing with my current research, which isn't processed right now, which I can talk about a little bit later, but it's more about if you force someone to choose between one and another, it's like a zero sum. You either feel that you either want this one or this one. And you may not actually only want this One and not want that one. You may think out of a scale of one to five, I feel five about this one and three about this One. That doesn't take into account all that variability, if that makes sense.

0:09:24 Thomas: Gotcha so it could okay so it might depending on how you're asking stuff I wasn't sure what specific questions but it more forces like the one love language theory rather than like there could be like a top three they're all very close maybe like for example okay oh

0:09:42 Sharon: Yeah, that can contribute to that for sure. So what most most researchers have done is to use a Likert scale. A Likbert scale means that you ask folks to rate different behaviors on how much would this behavior feel loved. And then, you know, you ask them to rate it from one to five and one means not at all. And five means extremely loved, right? And so there's like, you Know, an option, they have five choices. And then you can add them all up and you get a score for each of the five love languages. And so that's what we did. We tried to create one in the past, the scales haven't been well supported by the data, meaning that some scales have come up with three love languages. Some have come up four, some have come with five, some of come up six. They don't always map onto the concepts of the five love languages that he talked about.

0:10:30 Thomas: Wow what's the sixth one math that'd be mine

0:10:33 Sharon: If, oh, math that they do your math for you,

0:10:35 Thomas: If my wife does math at me I'm I'm telling you I'm over over the moon I'm like so that is my

0:10:41 Sharon: You want her to calculate the tip.

0:10:41 Thomas: Language oh 100 no actually I want to calculate that's that's that's a good point I don't want her to take over math because then I don'T get to do it but if she flirts using math we're there we're totally

0:10:53 Sharon: That might be a very unique love language.

0:10:56 Thomas: We're okay well what's the real sixth

0:10:58 Sharon: My best memory would be that it was like acts of service for inside the house versus outside the house, something like that.

0:11:03 Thomas: One oh okay like split split it off yeah okay so not math all right boring

0:11:06 Sharon: No, sorry. Sorry to disappoint. Yeah. So we tried to kind of start over and to develop a new scale or a revised scale, I should say. It's not that we threw out the scale, it's that we tried To add other items and do a more maybe comprehensive scale development process. And the research, our research shows that we were able to identify five factor scale, scale, a scale with five love languages that mapped onto his love languages that he proposed, but it fit pretty well, not great. And frankly, we had a one love language, two love language three love language for love language and two separate five love language scales that all did pretty well with the data. So it's not really showing that it's definitely five love Languages. We can make it work, but it's, it's a, it doesn't, it does not look like a robust finding that yes, there are five love. Languages.

0:11:58 Thomas: You know it's funny we've done some amount of this stuff and my wife actually has a master's in experimental psychology so she has some experience and we've talked about other studies I have ADHD so I quickly forget everything but we've done a lot of that and I remember so are you doing like factor analysis and then like you can do the thing where you like fit five factors kind of artificially but then also you can like see what the math just wants you to do is that kind of what you're talking

0:12:23 Sharon: So the first part is exploratory factor analysis. So we had 64 items that we came up with based on Chapman's book, different examples that he offered, things like that. And then we had about 350 people take the items and we saw which items grouped together based on people's responses. So just kind of let the data fall where they may.

0:12:44 Sharon: So that's exploratory. And then what you do is the second step is a confirmatory factor analysis where you take the factor structure, the five factors that we found in the exploratory factor analysis, and we test it with a different sample of about 350 and see whether that factor structure holds up. And so we found we found decent enough metrics that we went ahead with using that scale. Yeah.

0:12:43 Thomas: About mm -hmm oh

0:13:07 Sharon: And so then we wanted to see based on people's responses, we want, you know, we identified what their primary love language was. And I will say that about half did not have a primary love language. They did not have one love language that stood out from the others. And for the vast majority of people who we could identify a primary loved language, it was pretty close to their secondary love language. There was not a huge gap in how much they really cared about one over the other.

0:13:06 Thomas: Okay cool oh wow oh wow wow. So, I mean, I know you've already kind of mentioned this, but that sort of throws the whole theory a little bit out. At least as originally proposed in the book, if half the people don't even have a primary and then even the ones you're doing are like it's first and second place pretty close. Yeah. OK.

0:13:47 Thomas: So that. All right. But it's still interesting to test, but that already feels like not the thing we're talking about. Yeah.

0:13:53 Sharon: And, you know, I think, you know, you see people talking about love languages all the time. What's your primary love language, you see it on dating apps, right? It's like, it's all over the place. Very rarely does someone say I have one, they usually say two or three, right. So even just in terms of like personal experience, talking about it and seeing what's posted online, most people don't identify one. But we did we did use that subsample who identified a primary love language, and we tested the theory. And so we tested it in a variety of different ways. The first one is we asked them how satisfied they were with their partners, how frequently their partners performed each of these behaviors. And we looked at how satisfied they were with their partner's love language behavior for their primary love language. And that was related to feeling more loved and feeling more satisfied in their relationship if they felt more satisfied with their partners' behavior. However, and this is the important part, I think, it was no more predictive than how satisfied they were within any of the other love language behaviors. So in general, across the board, the more satisfied they were with how their partner, you know, had, you know, engaged in loving behaviors, regardless of what that love language behavior was, it was pretty robustly correlated with how satisfied they were and how loved they felt.

0:15:09 Sharon: But I mean, it does show that regardless of the love language, how satisfied they Were was related to how loved, they felt and how satisfied they are in the relationship.

0:15:09 Thomas: Makes sense.

0:15:18 Sharon: So across all the love languages, they're all, they all predict how loved people feel and how satisfied they are in their relationship.

0:15:26 Thomas: How did you feel about that when you got those results? Was it kind of what you imagined or?

0:15:29 Sharon: I mean, so I guess before I started my research and reading the research that had been done before, I was surprised because, you know, it seems intuitive, right?

0:15:38 Thomas: Hmm.

0:15:38 Sharon: Oh, yeah, love language. And if you speak the language I want, then I'm going to like that. But then once I read the studies that came before, I mean this is consistent with pretty much all of the previous findings. And everyone's tested it a little bit differently, but no one's really been able to find robust support that primary love language is more predictive than any of the other love languages. There's nothing special about what people identify as their primary love language.

0:16:03 Thomas: Okay. Is it that, or is it people recognize the effort no matter what, or like, how are you thinking about it? Cause I almost, one part of me was thinking like, well, you know, some relationships are so bad. It's like if their partner's making an effort in whatever language they're speaking, even if it's not math, then that is like a positive, you Know, and it's more about any effort whatsoever. Is that kind of how you're looking at it?

0:16:27 Sharon: I mean, I hadn't looked at that. I think that's an interesting way to look at it. I think it's more that relationships to be successful require a variety of different ways of engaging with your partner in positive ways. There has to be positive communication. People have to be supportive in their communication and express that they like the person, that the person's important to them. They have to spend time together, you know, in a quality time way where they're not just like looking at their phones, right? They have to preferably touch each other if that's something that both partners, a lot of people do enjoy that. So I love Emily and Pet did a review of the research. She and her colleagues published it, a review right before my paper came out. And she kind of gives the analogy of a well -balanced diet. It's not that you need to speak one language. It'S that relationships require well -balanced diets. And sometimes maybe there's a, you know, a vitamin that's missing or something. And then in that case, when that thing's missing, it feels really important to you to have it, but it's not That when everything's going well, we need just one love language.

0:17:12 Thomas: All right yeah makes sense

0:17:43 Ad: [Ad break 2 — ad music]

0:17:43 Thomas: Reminding me is this all based on one person answering for their relationship it's not like you talk to like two people in a relationship right it's just like one self

0:17:52 Sharon: This is just about individuals. So how they perceive their partner's love language behavior may be different than how the partner perceives their own. The partner may feel like they're doing this love language. But I do think there's a theory, a responsiveness theory, where it's about how responsive your partner is to you that matters or how responsive you perceive your partner as being that matters. And I think that it is about how you perceive what your partner's doing that's probably more important than what your partners actually do.

0:17:55 Thomas: -reported yeah interesting yeah I was just thinking like if I were I don't know that guy wrote the book and I was trying to like salvage this could you wonder if like well yeah but your primary love language maybe it takes so much less effort by that person so like you would measure it the same or something or like you would measure it positively with a lot less effort because it's your primary like is that something that the the questioning would have accounted for at all what do you

0:18:46 Sharon: Well, so we're asking people what their primary love language is, which is how do they want to receive love? And then we're asking them, how do they feel their partner is expressing love?

0:18:49 Thomas: Think okay so did

0:19:05 Sharon: So we came up with a scale

0:19:06 Thomas: Did it just ask like how they're expressing or did it ask any more detail about those expressions themselves or like what constituted that

0:19:06 Sharon: In each of the love languages, the five love languages. We measured four different behaviors that seemed predictive of that love language based on the data that we collected in the scale development. And then what we did was we asked those individuals, how satisfied are you with how frequently your partner engages in eachof these behaviors? So we asked them from one to five, how satisfied are you with how frequently your partner engages in each of these behaviors? And then we added them up and calculated a score of how satisfied they are with their partner's behavior for each of the love languages.

0:19:41 Thomas: Okay so it wasn't as big picture as like just you know touch or something it was like you identified I think you said four kind of examples of like typical actions within the love language. Oh, okay. Interesting. Yeah. I was just, I think I was just trying to figure out if there's any, is there any way to know the level of sensitivity? Like if my wife were to even do a little math for me, you know, just like a little bit, I'd be over the moon and maybe I would answer super positively, but that might disguise the fact that she only did like one equation. Like it was like almost nothing.

0:20:13 Thomas: And I was just trying to think of like, if that's anything that would confound this at all.

0:20:16 Sharon: I mean, I do think that's an important consideration, which is you probably need ongoing quality time, ongoing words of affirmation more than you need ongoing gift giving, right? Gift giving tends to be a more occasional thing. It happens infrequently and you expect it to happen infrequently compared to a lot of the other love languages where you want that kind of on a more daily basis.

0:20:37 Thomas: Interesting so it's like satisfied it's not in any sort of like quantitative terms in terms of like what they're doing it's more about hey are you satisfied with whatever the amount of this is for these different

0:20:49 Sharon: Right. So it's like in their mind, you know, based on how frequent you would like it to be, how satisfied are you with how frequent it's occurring?

0:20:49 Thomas: Actions yeah interesting okay yeah I'm just trying to think does it does that leave any room for like if you either have a love language that you you really want a lot of or not a lot of. How are you thinking of that in terms of like the different demand you might have and how that is, I guess, measured in this study? And sorry if I'm not, maybe I'm not grasping it, but if someone has a different amount they want and they're just answering not satisfied, for example, are we losing anything if actually in real terms their partner is doing a whole lot there, but they just have such a demand for it? Are we losing any information information there in the way this is being measured, or am I just not seeing it?

0:21:21 Sharon: Occurring. I'm not sure he really talks about that in his theory at all. So you're saying like, well, what if the person is just asking for too much? So like, let's say they're saying, like, let's say words of affirmation. They want a lot of the way I would imagine they would answer that question is, well, I want a lot of words of affirmation, but I'm getting a lot of words of affirmation from him. So I'm satisfied. Or I want a lot of words of affirmation. He only says it once in a while. So I'm less satisfied.

0:21:59 Thomas: Gotcha. So it sort of doesn't really matter. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Yeah. No, that makes total sense. Okay, so the amount that you might be wanting doesn't really factor into this kind of thing we're measuring because it's about your satisfaction. Okay? Yeah, that makes sense. Cool.

0:22:02 Sharon: Yeah. I mean, if it's something infrequent, like gift giving, it's like, you know, I don't need a lot, but it's nice that, you know, on special occasions to have a gift and that's what he does. So I'm satisfied.

0:22:21 Thomas: Well, so what else did you find interesting about these results?

0:22:24 Sharon: Yeah.

0:22:24 Thomas: Is there more you want to tell us about this study or future studies?

0:22:27 Sharon: So I think one of the strengths of this study is that it was a sample of a wide variety of age. The average age was in their forties. The average length of time of their relationship was over 15 years. 97 % were living together, about almost 80 % were married or engaged. So this was a highly committed sample of people in long -term relationships, which not all the research so far has been. So I think that's a strength. I'll mention one of the weaknesses is that it was a less diverse sample in terms of being primarily white, primarily heterosexual, primarily women. The results that we got actually are consistent with, we'd done two studies before this. We presented at conferences, but haven't published. And those two studies are with people in shorter relationships, less committed relationships, younger people, but much more ethnically diverse, much more diverse in terms of sexual orientation. So even in more diverse samples, we do see consistent results. We tested this as well because we had about 700 people in our sample. We were able to pull out those people who expressed relationship distress, those people Who reported that they weren't very satisfied in the relationships. And we wanted to see whether, because that's who Chapman's really marketing his book too. So does this work only for that sample, that part of the sample? And it did not. The hypotheses still were not supported in that sample, in that part the sample, and actually it was less supported. So the primary love language, satisfaction with their partner's primary love languages was actually less predictive of satisfaction in that sub -sample. And also interestingly, those folks who did, remember I said that not everyone that almost about half of people did not have a primary love language those folks who did report a primary loved language turned out to be less satisfied in their relationships than those who didn't right

0:23:51 Thomas: Oh, interesting. Interesting. But as you said, it's not due to like receiving love language in any different, because you're saying it's not, that didn't predict that they were less satisfied because they were receiving less of that love language. It's just that that group of people was less satisfied in general. Oh, that's interesting. What do you think is going on there?

0:24:32 Sharon: Well I had a hypothesis which I don't think was supported by the data which is that maybe those people had a primary love language that felt more important to them because it was missing so they were less satisfied with that um love language behavior but that actually wasn't supported by our data when we looked at our data. So I think what it means is that if you can hear your partner's expression of love across a wider range of behaviors, if you can interpret your partner's behaviors in loving ways, you're more likely to be satisfied.

0:25:00 Thomas: Oh, that's an interesting. Yeah. That makes sense.

0:25:02 Sharon: That's my interpretation.

0:25:04 Thomas: Yeah, yeah. And who knows? And I was gonna ask I always feel like this is tough to answer whenever I ask anyone who just studies this but like what kind of effect like strength of effect you're talking or like I can never quite understand that the amount of that we're talking like how much less satisfied is someone who has a primary love language kind of thing gotcha yeah

0:25:20 Sharon: You know, I don't think it's a huge effect. And it really needs to be replicated before we put too much faith in that. But you know, I think that there is pretty consistent evidence across various studies that people tend to think all of the love languages are important. The love languages are moderately to strongly correlated with each other in terms of how much people prefer the different love languages, and that they're all pretty important to relationship satisfaction and feeling loved.

0:25:46 Thomas: Yeah do you think there's any chance that people could have a different love language that they prefer to give versus receive and maybe they don't know? Or is it assumed that if someone has a love language, that's their preference, they both prefer to express it that way and receive expression that way?

0:25:48 Ad: [Ad break 3 — ad music]

0:26:04 Sharon: Chapman hypothesizes in his book that people are more likely to speak the love language that they prefer to receive love in, but it's certainly not always the case. There is research from other studies that show that people don't always prefer to express love the same way they prefer to receive it. And certainly the core of his book is trying to teach people to learn how to express other love languages. So he surely believes that we're not confined to expressing the love language that we prefer to receive it in.

0:26:32 Thomas: That's interesting. Yeah. Oh, then again, I mean, his whole crap didn't stand up to scrutiny. So I don't know if I care what he thinks. I care. What do you think? But it'd be hard to evaluate based on any of these studies that we've talked about, right?

0:26:39 Sharon: There is a study that looks at how they tend to express it and how they prefer receive it, there is a study that looks at that. I'm trying to remember the findings. But I think there is research that but not everyone for sure, like expresses it the same way they prefer to receive it. I don't know if you're more likely to, um, I don'T remember that finding off the top of my head.

0:26:56 Thomas: Hmm, right. Interesting. Did any of the studies involve like actually getting to, I know it's, I don't know, it's hard to do research and hard to get the ideal sample of people that you'd want. But is there any of the research that looks at actual like people in relationships together and kind of the interplay there and like their perceptions of each other and all that?

0:27:20 Sharon: There is one study that was published recently that did that. And, um, they did see that how well, for example, their partner perceived what their primary love language was, was related to, to the other person's satisfaction in the relationship. So how well their part, their partner knew what their love language was, was predictive.

0:27:34 Thomas: Oh, but now was that just about knowing your partner, like people who know their partners or have a partner who knows them are going to be happier?

0:27:45 Sharon: Well, we don't know whether just because someone like perceives it correctly, does it mean that they're actually enacting those behaviors? Right. So, cause there's, there's a step between understanding I, my partner wants to have love received this way. It doesn't necessarily mean that they do that. Right.

0:27:57 Thomas: Well, let me ask a question about that last one you just said. So it was people who had partners who had more like, I don't know, accurate views of what their partner's love language was, had more relationship satisfaction. Was that what the finding was? Now, the question I was asking is, is that about just knowing your partner? Like in any, like if you had asked other questions and they had a higher knowledge of anything about their partner, that means they have a partner who's like kind of tuned into them. And is that separate from the love language part or, you know what I mean?

0:28:29 Sharon: That's a great point. Gottman calls that like the love map where you really know what's going on in your partner's life. You know, your partner better. Yeah. And his research would suggest that partners who have better knowledge of their partners, yeah, that's related to higher quality relationships, better satisfaction.

0:28:45 Thomas: It really feels like you just got to be tuned in. I mean, as a result of all this for folks listening who want to maybe, I don't know, try to do better in their relationships. I know it's a broad question, but what do you think? It's about tuning in. It's about effort. It's about, you know, what do you think.

0:28:59 Sharon: Yeah, I think it's about being engaged with your partner in multiple ways. I think communication helps you tune in. Quality time helps you tune in, right? All of that helps you to feel tuned in with your partner and really understanding what your partner wants and expressing love in that way. Absolutely, that is going to be important.

0:29:26 Ad: [Ad break 4 — ad music]

0:29:26 Thomas: So do you go so far as to say the love languages is a, you know, quote -unquote myth or how strongly would you characterize this whole thing?

0:29:33 Sharon: Well, I would say that it serves a purpose in that it provides language for folks to talk about what they want in their relationship, what maybe they're finding missing. And so in many ways, people are finding that helpful, obviously. But I do think it's detrimental to try and push this idea that everyone has a primary love language that you need to identify and speak because it's kind of oversimplifying things. If people really do stick to that, then they're unlikely to have really rich loving relationships if they're only loving someone in one particular way and it can also if people are like well I need someone who speaks this love language if they are trying to choose someone based on whether they think that person speaks that love language that could also be detrimental so I think we should think about what the strengths of it are is that it gives people a language that helps them talk about these things that helps him become as you put it it more in tune with their partner, but that really having this over focus on, or a singular focus on a primary love language is probably not useful at best and possibly harmful.

0:30:36 Thomas: Yeah. I was also just thinking I could imagine, you know, it might be an easy way to make an excuse for yourself. Maybe if you're not pulling your weight in a relationship or something. If it's like, well, I express stuff my way, but it's just not the way they want. If the data is showing that that's not really how it works, then maybe it might be more that effort is missing everywhere, or is that a fair concern based on the data?

0:30:49 Sharon: I think if someone's making excuses for why their partner doesn't feel loved, it's probably not in a great space to begin with. There's going to be, there's work that's needed there. I mean, the other piece of that is, which, you know, my, as I mentioned before, my current research is, is trying to address is so far, all of the scales that have been created have focused on his ideas of what the five love languages are. And so that's very like top down. Um, and so what I'm trying to do now and what I think is important is to, um, I asked folks, how do you express love to your partner? How does your partner express love for you? How did your parents express love to each other? And, you know, kind of did an analysis of what themes emerged from there. And there was a lot that came up that wasn't encompassed by his five love languages. So now I'm trying to see if I develop items and see whether there's a more comprehensive scale that can be developed.

0:31:40 Thomas: Oh, I love that. Right. Yeah, I guess that there's the possibility that if, let's say there is a scale out there that's different than the five and is more accurate or something, I guess that does allow for more things to be true. Like maybe, maybe if with the correct scale, for example, maybe there would be more preferences that mattered or more. I don't know. What do you think about that? Or is it more about just finding those, what a more accurate list of those items might be?

0:31:52 Sharon: Yeah. So that's what I'm kind of focused on now. And it might show that maybe having this vocabulary is really useful, but it actually goes beyond five love languages.

0:32:24 Sharon: Yeah, I think that there's a lot of theories that are empirically supported in relationship science that aren't really encapsulated with this five love languages. You know, he doesn't really talk much about conflict management or speaking in a way to reduce conflict. He doesn't talk much about one thing that came up, which was kind of interesting in a bunch of people's answers was gives me space.

0:32:46 Sharon: Kind of the opposite of quality time is that, you know, I need space and my partner gives it to me. And to me, that's loving. Kind of interesting. So there was a there was a variety of things that came up that weren't necessarily encompassed by his five love languages. So we'll see where that research goes.

0:33:02 Thomas: That's really cool. I will try to keep an eye on that. Maybe you can write a better book, a new love languages book that's more scientific.

0:33:11 Sharon: We'll see I'll definitely try and get the research out there for sure

0:33:13 Thomas: Yeah. So how would you think About that one as we, in the winning moments here, how would what'd you think about that? Like giving space, for example, is this something that there's a body of research on or not? Are you out on your own in this, in this endeavor in terms of like developing a new scale of, or, you know, an open -ended scale of love language?

0:33:31 Sharon: Well so I started with open -ended um just to kind of get a sense of how people feel that they're expressing and receiving love and I'm trying to actually develop it into not an open -ended scale a scale that's just like the scales that have come before yeah

0:33:37 Thomas: Right. Sorry, I asked the wrong question. I just meant like, has anyone else done this endeavor of like doing an open ended thing and then producing like a, yeah.

0:33:48 Sharon: Not that I know of not for love languages yet yeah um so we'll we'll see what happens

0:33:53 Thomas: So that's really interesting. So with something like giving space are you thinking, okay, giving someone space could be a love or is that like an expression of something else? Is that an expression? How do you think about whether it's going to be a love language in itself? Or how do you differentiate between a whole love language versus one of the, for example, four things that you specified are part of a love language? Like, how do you, how are you thinking about that framework and building that?

0:34:02 Sharon: Yeah yeah well you know I think because because it's bottom up. I'm just trying to see how things fall based on people's responses. I do know in terms of space, if you're asking about that specifically, that is something that I know a lot of couples have to work towards. Just like people have different needs for physical affection or for sex, different ways of handling money. People have different needs for space in a relationship, how much time they want to spend together, how much they want apart. I think it makes sense that it's one of those things that is identified as, as being loving?

0:34:50 Thomas: Perfect example. Would you look at giving someone space as part of the touch or that kind of physical affection language? You know, would that just be like, oh, they are giving me what I want in terms of the physical affection right now in this moment, which is none, you know, like, it's just kind of interesting. Yeah.

0:35:06 Sharon: I guess, I guess it could be, I mean, I would probably think of it more in terms of quality time. They're giving me, like, they're not spending time with me. I don't, it's an interesting thing to think about is like, you know, quality time as a continuum that is not just necessarily always more is better. You know,

0:35:26 Thomas: Well, interesting. So much fun. Is there anything else you want to tell us about on the horizon or anything else about the study that I didn't ask or you didn't get a chance to tell us about?

0:35:34 Sharon: I am really interested to see if there are other ways that this can be conceptualized. And another thing I want to do is to look at this theory and see how predictive it might be compared to other theories that are already empirically based in relationship science. But yeah, I think that's about it.

0:35:52 Thomas: Is there any place you'd want to send listeners to find out more, to follow you or any of your work or anything?

0:35:58 Sharon: I do have a website. It's probably easiest if you kind of just Google Sharon Flicker Sac State to find my website. It's a relationships lab website.

0:36:07 Thomas: Absolutely. Thanks so much for taking the time. Really appreciate it.

0:36:09 Sharon: Yeah, it's been a pleasure. Thank you for having me.