#108 How to Navigate Different Love Languages
Understanding the 5 love languages can help couples understand the secret language in their relationship dynamics. In this episode, I’ll share how they play out with anxious and avoidant people and offer unique insights and practical tools on how you can share your love language with your partner so they can understand how to love you the way you want to be loved.
We’ll cover:
The 5 different love languages
The benefits of knowing your love language, and your partners
How love languages play out in anxiously attached people
FURTHER LINKS & RESOURCES:
Find me on my new Youtube channel
Follow me on Instagram: @stephanie__rigg & @onattachment
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Episode Transcript
[00:00:04]:
Hey everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Onattachment. In today's episode, we are talking all about Love languages so what they are, how they interface with attachment patterns to the extent that there are any themes there. And what you can do if you and your partner have different Love languages so that you can both feel like you're giving and receiving love in the way that feels good for you, which is really at the crux of the whole idea of Love languages. So that's what we're going to be talking about today. I'm hoping that it will be both fun and useful.
[00:00:55]:
Before we dive into that, I just wanted to share, you might have heard me share that I have started a YouTube channel and I am uploading lots of videos. There are already a bunch on there and I'm uploading new videos almost every day. So if you are someone who likes YouTube, I have to confess, I'm not a huge user of YouTube myself, but I know a lot of people are. So if you're someone who likes video content and you'd like to either watch while you listen to the podcast or look at other exclusive clips from me, on Attachment, love Relationships, all of that good stuff, come find me on YouTube @stephanierigg should be relatively easy to find me and I would love your support there. If you wanted to like and subscribe comment on my videos, that would be a huge help. So let's dive into this conversation around the Love Languages. Now the Five Love Languages, if you're unfamiliar, uninitiated was a book written by a guy called Gary Chapman in the early 90s. So it's been around a really long time.
[00:01:52]:
But the essence of the Love Languages is that we all give and receive love differently. So something that, for me, feels really important in order to feel like I am being loved and cared for and cherished and all of those things might be totally different for you and that might not be significant for you or important to you or something that you particularly value or require in order to feel loved in a relationship. And so he came up with these five Love Languages which are essentially five different broad categories of how people tend to give and receive love. And it's not to say that you are only one of these things, it's not to become overly attached to the label, as with anything, it's a useful tool, but it's not something to get dogmatic about. But the premise of the Five Love Languages is that most of us will have one or two dominant Love Languages, which are the ways that we by default give love and prefer to receive love. And so the idea being that in cultivating a greater understanding around what our preferences are, our love languages and those of the people that we're in relationship with, we can make sure that we're not missing each other. Because so much of the time I could be giving someone love in a way that works for me, but it's not how it works for them or it's just not something that they register as love. And so it might just not be received as an act of love.
[00:03:16]:
And so I can feel then as the giver like the person's not receiving it in the way that I intended when really I'm giving it in the way that I would like to receive it. So that's all a lot of words and I'm going to now dive into what these five love languages are to give a little bit more context for those who might not be familiar. So there's physical touch which is pretty straightforward. People who really value physical touch, affection, kissing, hugging, holding hands, cuddling, intimacy, all of those things that really it's hard to feel loved without having that physical closeness and really really value and rely upon physical closeness and intimacy in order to feel loved and connected to someone. Gift giving is another one. So people who really appreciate to receive gifts and who love to give really thoughtful gifts. I wish I was better at gift giving, it's just so not my love language. As much as I appreciate when someone gives me a nice gift, it's just not part of my programming.
[00:04:16]:
But I have so much admiration for people who are really excellent gift givers and come up with these really creative thoughtful gifts that are just like wow. And so it can be really beautiful. But that's a good example for me. I never really value gift giving that much so I never think to put in heaps of effort to gift giving. The next one is what? Acts of service. So how can I go out of my way to do things for you as an act of love? I always think of this as like a dad love language. I think a lot of dads are acts of service people. So can I go out of my way? Can I lighten the load for you? Can I do chores on your behalf if I see that you're stressed or can I pick something up from the shop for you or drive you to the airport or whatever I can do to make your life easier by way of an act of service of some description.
[00:05:07]:
So that's one of the love languages is acts of service words of affirmation. So really loving affirming words, giving people compliments, telling them how much you admire them, telling them that you appreciate them, that you value them being really verbally affirming and loving and really overt in those expressions of love and affection and admiration for someone. And last but not least, quality time. So if quality time is my love language, I might really value not just spending time with you, but doing really exciting things together. So playing a game or going on a hike or doing things that feel connective as joint experiences rather than just it's not quantity time is probably a good way of putting it. So people who value that, who have this quality time, love language, might like to go on an adventure with their partner, do something exciting, do a class together, have new experiences, but they get a lot out of connecting through doing together. So those are the five love languages physical touch, words of affirmation, acts of service, gift giving and quality time. So, as I said, the whole premise of these love languages is that most of the time in relationship you're not going to have the same love languages as your partner.
[00:06:24]:
And what that means is that we are on different wavelengths, speaking different languages, right? It's as if we were speaking different languages in terms of how we are giving and receiving love. And so the idea being that if we can have greater clarity around not only what our love language is, but what our partners is, then we can get better at giving them love in their love language and receiving love from them in their love languages. Whereas without that knowledge we might be just giving them love in our love language in a way that doesn't really land for them as particularly significant or loving. And we're missing all the ways in which they give us love in their love languages because we're expecting to receive it in ours. So taking this out of the abstract, because again, I realise that all sounds a bit semantic and wordy, I won't even give hypotheticals, I'll use myself and my partner as an example. I always think it's kind of funny, anxious attachment. I kind of think that every love language is an anxious attachment love language because there's kind of no ceiling or upper limit in terms of how much love anxiously attached people want and the ways in which they are open to receiving it. But I tend to find that in terms of how anxiously attached people like to receive love, I think that physical touch, words of affirmation and maybe acts of service to a lesser degree can be really dominant for people with anxious attachment patterns.
[00:07:50]:
And certainly myself included quality time as well, now that I say it really ticking all the boxes, but for me those things are really, really important. Whereas my partner, he's probably more quality time and definitely doesn't naturally or by default he doesn't value physical touch or words of affirmation anywhere near as much as I do. And so without having that recognition and that knowledge, it would be really easy for me to internalise that as he doesn't love me or care about me, right? That's an easy story to tell. It's like, oh, you never even reach out to give me a massage when we're watching TV or something. It's like, I would always do that for you. It's like, yeah, well, we're not coming from the same starting point and that's a really important thing to recognise. And on the flip side, for me, quality time, I don't really care that much what we're doing. I'm happy to hang out at home together, I'm happy to go on a bushwalk, I'm happy to go out to a restaurant.
[00:08:48]:
I don't really mind what the substance of the activity is, but for my partner, it's really important to have some sort of sense of novelty or excitement or like we're doing something that is a little bit more than just hanging out at home. For me, I'm kind of happy with the comfy cosy do nothing, because the quality time is not such a big one for me. So recognising that and going as always, it's not just like, okay, who wins? Whose way is the right way? Does one of us just have to yield to the other or one of us just has to accommodate the other? No, of course not. The idea is that we both develop the knowledge and understanding to accommodate each other while also making space for our way. So if you have different love languages to your partner, which you probably will, the challenge is, can I go out of my way to give them love in the way that feels good for them and can they do the same for me so that we're both getting love in the way that we want it? And can I start looking at their acts and behaviours as potentially loving in ways that I might have missed otherwise? For example, if my partner suggests an activity like, oh, do you want to go play tennis with me? That might be an act of love from him, because that's a quality time experience. Whereas for me, I'm just like, yeah, okay, but that doesn't score higher points for me by default than just being at home together. But it's like, can I bring more awareness to the ways in which you are offering these bids for connection, in the way that to use the Gottman language, because that allows us to receive more love, right? That's what this ultimately boils down to, is, can we give and receive more love in all directions? So I promised that I'd also speak a little to the attachment dynamics here and I kind of have already alluded to it by using myself and my partner as an example, that for people with more anxious attachment patterns, more overt and direct expressions of love tend to be favoured. So physical touch and words of affirmation giving, that really direct reassurance of, like, I love you and you're beautiful and you're amazing.
[00:10:52]:
And all of that is going to really support the anxious person, to feel reassured and really valued as a partner, make them feel special, make them feel really you're my person, all of that kind of thing. It's going to be like warm honey for the anxiously attached person who in the absence of that, it doesn't take much to go quickly into insecurity and worrying, I'm not good enough, I'm this, I'm that. All of that unworthiness stuff can bubble up to the surface pretty quickly in the absence of those displays of love and affection. So if you're in relationship with someone who has more anxious attachment patterns, you would do well to really dial up the words of affirmation, the physical touch, even the access like any of them, right? Gift giving. I'm sure if you went out of your way to give a really thoughtful gift to your partner, they'd really appreciate it. But particularly words of affirmation and physical touch are really, really big for anxiously attached people. So going out of your way to really deliberately dial up the intensity on those love languages will usually do a lot. It's not just like a nice thing to do, although it absolutely is a nice thing to do, but it will actually lessen the anxiety quite a lot.
[00:12:05]:
So it's in your interest as well because your partner is likely to really settle into the security of that and feel really loved and that is obviously an everybody wins situation. More avoidant folk, as we know, tend to be less focused on overt displays of emotion, can feel a little vulnerable around that, so they tend to focus more on things like quality time, gift giving and acts of service. Those are more doing based rather than saying or overt connections. So it's almost like those activities like if we're doing something together or I'm going out of my way for you or I'm giving you a gift, it's like there's a buffer between us that allows me to feel a little less vulnerable in my display of love. Because to just lay it all out there might feel really intensely vulnerable for someone with more avoidant patterns who hasn't had experience with that level of vulnerability. So yeah, I think that people with more avoidant patterns do tend towards love languages that feel a little safer in that they're a little more indirect. And again, there's nothing wrong with that. It's just recognising the difference and going, oh, okay.
[00:13:14]:
When they do those things, when they ask me if I need anything or if they offer to drive me here or they give me a gift or they want to do an activity together, that is a bid for connection. That is them trying to connect with me. That is them trying to show love. Even if I'm sitting there just feeling the lack of the other things, when really there is love coming my way, I'm just not aware of it. I think the other thing to say about love Languages is it's really good to be specific about just saying to someone, I really value gift giving is very broad and doesn't really help someone out all that much, so be specific in what the actual quality of the thing is that you desire. So I think gift giving is a good example because some people who like gift giving might want something really extravagant and expensive and luxurious, and other people want something handmade, thoughtful and really tailored uniquely to them that has all of this personal significance. Those are two very different categories of gift giving, and if you went for one and the person was expecting the other, again, it wouldn't land. So I think we do have to dig a little beneath the surface of these love languages and go, okay, words of Affirmation do I just want you to tell me that you love me or do I want you to give me compliments? Do I want compliments on my appearance or do I want compliments on my personality? All of these things, I get pretty granular in terms of helping your partner out on the things that you appreciate and the things that feel really good for you.
[00:14:39]:
So I think that that can help a lot. And I think that, as always, the more we can create open dialogues around these things and be really open minded and curious and let the ethos of this be how can I love my partner better? And how can I receive their love in a more open hearted way? That is really the gift or the opportunity that learning about love languages presents to us. And so if you take anything from this episode, I hope that it's. That opening my eyes to the ways in which my partner might be giving me love that I'm missing and thinking about some ways that I might be able to take steps towards them in a way that is going to really land for them and feel really deeply loving, even if it's not my default mode, even if it's not something that feels particularly significant for me. And just seeing what happens from that place, seeing what blossoms from that culture or environment of giving and receiving love really deliberately and intentionally that you can foster in your relationship. As always, I hope that this episode has been helpful and if you want to leave a review or a rating, I'd really appreciate it. And as I said, come find me on YouTube. I'm trying to build up more of an audience there and putting out lots of exclusive content as well as stuff from the podcast.
[00:15:53]:
So if you love the podcast, you'll love the YouTube channel. Come find me @stephanierigg. Otherwise, I look forward to seeing you again next time. Thanks, guys. Thanks for joining me for this episode of On Attachment. If you want to go deeper on all things attachment, love and relationships, you can find me on Instagram @stephanie__rigg or at stephanierigg.com. And if you enjoyed this episode, I'd be so grateful if you could leave a review and a five star rating. It really does help so much.
[00:16:21]:
Thanks again for being here, and I hope to see you again sooner.