I love the way you love me: Responding to partner’s love language preferences boosts satisfaction in romantic heterosexual couples

Abstract

Chapman’s Love Languages hypothesis claims that (1) people vary in the ways they prefer to receive and express affection and (2) romantic partners who communicate their feelings congruent with their partner’s preferences experience greater relationship quality. The author proposes five distinct preferences and tendencies for expressing love, including: Acts of Service, Physical Touch, Words of Affirmation, Quality Time and Gifts. In the present study partners (N = 100 heterosexual couples) completed measures assessing their preferences and behavioral tendencies for a) expressions of love and b) reception of signs of affection, for each of the five proposed “love languages”. Relationship satisfaction, sexual satisfaction and empathy were also assessed. The degree of the within-couple mismatch was calculated separately for each individual based on the discrepancies between the person’s felt (preferred) and their partner’s expressed love language. The joint mismatch indicator was a sum of discrepancies across the five love languages. Matching on love languages was associated with both relationship and sexual satisfaction. In particular, people who expressed their affection in the way their partners preferred to receive it, experienced greater satisfaction with their relationships and were more sexually satisfied compared to those who met their partner’s needs to lesser extent. Empathy was expected to be a critical factor for better understanding of and responding to the partner’s needs. Results provided some support for this hypothesis among male but not female participants.

Exploring the association between sexual motivation and quality of life in China and the United Kingdom

“…Secondly, having sex for love and commitment reasons was associated with better psychological health QoL, which is in line with studies by Brunell and Webster [ 48 ] who found that love and commitment in romantic relationships are linked to better sexual satisfaction and psychological health. Accordingly, Mostova, Stolarski, and Matthews [ 49 ] found that expressing and receiving love in preferred ways, such as physical touch, can increase sexual satisfaction and overall psychological well-being [ 50 ]. Muise and Impett also found that those with higher communal strength, that is people who are motivated to respond unconditionally to their partners’ sexual requirement, are more likely to satisfy their partner’s sexual needs, leading to increased relationship and psychological well-being [ 51 ].…”

Popular Psychology Through a Scientific Lens: Evaluating Love Languages From a Relationship Science Perspective

“…Although there is only a limited body of empirical research on love languages, the work that does exist does not provide strong support for the validity of the love languages’ core assumptions. First, contradicting the notion that “we speak only our primary language” (Chapman, 2015, p. 15), studies have consistently demonstrated that people tend to endorse all five love languages as meaningful ways of expressing love and feeling loved (Bunt & Hazelwood, 2017; Cook et al, 2013; Egbert & Polk, 2006; Mostova et al, 2022; Polk & Egbert, 2013; Surijah et al, 2020). Specifically, the ratings on the Likert-type measures consistently exhibit highly skewed distributions, with most ratings falling above the midpoint of the scale and average ratings hovering around 4 on a 5-point scale for all five love languages.…”

“…Consequently, studies have shown that a person’s primary love language, as identified by the forced-choice LLPP measure, is not reliably associated with their scores on the continuous measure (Mostova et al, 2022; Polk & Egbert, 2013; Surijah et al, 2020), such that a person’s forced-choice primary love language does not surface as their highest-rated love language on the continuous measure. For example, Polk and Egbert (2013) found that a majority of their sample were categorized as having quality time or physical touch as their primary love language when using the forced-choice measure, but gifts showed the highest mean score using the Likert-type measure.…”

“…For example, Polk and Egbert (2013) found that a majority of their sample were categorized as having quality time or physical touch as their primary love language when using the forced-choice measure, but gifts showed the highest mean score using the Likert-type measure. In fact, comparisons across studies show that the number of people categorized as having gifts as their primary love language was as low as 0% to 4% of the sample when using the forced-choice LLPP measure (Hughes & Camden, 2020; Mostova et al, 2022; Polk & Egbert, 2013) but as high as over 50% of the sample when selected on the basis of the highest score on the continuous scale (Bunt & Hazelwood, 2017). These findings discount the notion that each person has a primary love language and illustrate that people value all five love languages but perhaps in different contexts.…”

“…A second way that this assumption has been tested is by examining whether people report greater relationship satisfaction when their partner expresses love to them in their preferred love language. Although a few studies argue to have found support for this assumption (Hughes & Camden, 2020; Mostova et al, 2022), the methodological limitations of these studies render it possible that the results simply reflect the main effects of any type of expression. For example, Hughes and Camden (2020) examined only the effects of a partner’s expression of the person’s “primary” love language, which was associated with greater relationship satisfaction, but it is possible that receiving expressions of love in any form could have relationship benefits regardless of a person’s preferences.…”