Love Life with Matthew Hussey - 248: Are They Right for You? (Love Languages Explained)

Episode Date: June 12, 2024

The concept of "love languages" has been incredibly popular in recent years. But is there really only 5 ways to give and receive love? And how useful is the idea of love languages when trying to find a compatible partner for a relationship? Join Matt, Stephen and Audrey for an explanation of the science around love languages, criticisms and challenges of the theory, and how you can apply them when dating.  ►► Sign up Now For My Free Weekly Newsletter, The 3 Relationships at . . . → http://www.The3Relationships.com   ►► Order My New Book, "Love Life" at → http://www.LoveLifeBook.com   ►► FREE Video Training: “Dating With Results” → http://www.DatingWithResults.com

It's always the thing that we don't feel like we're getting. Often we might think to ourselves like that's my love language. But in a way, the reason we feel we need it so badly right now is because we're not getting it. what's up guys before we get into the show today if you haven't already make sure that you sign up to my brand new newsletter that goes out every single friday it is called The Three Relationships because it is designed to help you with each of the three relationships that determine our quality of life, our relationship with other people, our relationship with ourselves, and our relationship with life itself. It is one of my favorite things I'm doing right now. It is totally free and you have my word that it will be an email you will actually look forward to every single Friday delivered straight to your inbox. Go to the3relationships.com to sign up for free right now and I will see you in your inbox this Friday.

Welcome back to another episode of the Love Life Podcast. It is me, Matthew Hussey, one of your hosts, not your host. I am here with Audrey Hussey, and I am here with the much demanded Stephen Hussey, my brother. Hello, good to be back, friends. You just got back to Los Angeles. I did indeed. And we're about to leave, aren't we, for our three-day retreat in Zion.

Yeah. National Park, Utah, which is a, oh, it's very exciting. We're taking a group of 50 of our closest what what do we say i mean i guess clients our club 320 members which by the way no one will even know what that means because club 320 is literally a program that has had zero promotion whatsoever like the league of shadows what's the league of shadows exactly yeah it's it's had it's had no we don't publicize it anywhere um but we're taking away 50 people for three days to some glamorous camping stay in airstreams in this amazing place in Zion National Park. So that's coming up. And well, it's just we're post book launch.

We don't have to worry about the book anymore. It's doing its thing. It's out there in the world. It's learned to fly on its own. Stephen, fun fact, right now, we have currently two books in the top 100 of all of Amazon in self-help. That is amazing. Love Life is number 60 in all of Amazon in self-help and Get the Guy is number 100 right now,

which is crazy. It's great. It's pulling its weight. 11 years later, it's number 100 in all of self-help it's it's nuts so that i thought that was a fun that was a fun moment this morning when i saw that buying the collection the collection yeah yeah like game of thrones what will be next matt's gonna get to 100 and people are gonna go when you going to write the final book? Is that coming out? So what are we talking about today? Well, we're talking about the very fashionable concept, the ever fashionable concept of love languages and maybe casting a bit

of skepticism on the idea. There's been a bit of research that was commented on sort of within the last couple of months where a lot of people know this idea, this idea that we all have five love languages, the idea that there's certain ways we like to receive love or that we feel loved by our partner. So the five are words of affirmation, like compliments, kind words, quality time, gifts, acts of service, and touch. And this was very much popularized by Gary Chapman's super popular book, which a lot of people, and I enjoyed and found, you know, I found useful. And I've thought about my own love languages. But there's some research from the University of toronto mrs sorger i don't canadians are going to kill me for not pronouncing that right but it's a university in toronto

but basically they are sort of debunking the concept of love languages and what they say is although popular lay theories lead people to believe that there's a simple formula for cultivating lasting love empirical research shows that successful relationships require that partners have a comprehensive understanding of one another's needs and put in the effort to respond to those needs and they say that actually rather than having people don't have one primary love language. It's more like a balanced diet. It's more like a healthy nutrition all around. And look, there isn't one necessarily dominant love language. There also might be other meaningful ways of expressing love that aren't captured

through the five love languages. So this basically allows for the fact that relationships aren't static and people aren't categorized into neat boxes there's basically all expressions of love are on the menu and people need different ones at different times hmm let's let's do a quick check okay acts of service audrey yes or no as in do I care about them? Yeah. Do you like it? I like when you make me coffee. Okay.

But that's about it. I don't really care for acts of service that much, no. But I think that it depends on where you're at in your life. But you do. It means a lot to you that I bring you coffee in the morning. Yeah, but that's a very specific one. Because you don't like to wake up. Because I struggle to wake up in the morning.

Touch. Yeah, I like touch. I feel like Audrey likes quality time. Yeah, you love quality time. I do. Words of affirmation you love. I do, yeah. I do.

And what was the other one? Gifts. Gifts. You like gifts. I like gifts. So you're pretty lucky. So it sort of proves the point, I suppose. I like thoughtful gifts thoughtful gifts

who doesn't see i actually do most relate to words of affirmation and touch i'm not bothered about gifts quality time more about yeah you know depends sometimes like with myself sounds great yeah and gifts and acts of service i don't think mean are that concerning to me i'm not i'm not so fussed about them but then i wonder now i'm wondering reflecting on this i'm i'm wondering could i actually survive being starved of all the others and only having words of affirmation and touch? And the answer is no. I probably would feel if someone never did something thoughtful, just said, oh, I thought of you and did this, I'd feel like, oh, they never like, you know, I would have that feeling like, oh, they never just think of me or they never put any thought into their gifts. That it actually would bother me. But I don't know if that's reciprocity because

i'm thinking i'm trying to think of a nice gift for you and you're not or is it that you do need a banquet a full menu i think it's also where you're at in your life i think like depending if you're in a really busy period for instance you might crave acts of service more if you're in early dating and you're a little bit insecure you might crave words of affirmation more if you are you know you spend lots of time apart and there's been no quality time you might crave quality time yeah so do you think it depends on where you're at in your life you know if you have children i think you might crave physical touch more maybe than than something else because you're

getting a lot of time together but maybe not enough where you're feeling connected and i just think there's like lots of yeah i just think it depends on where you're at in your life i do think the one we're missing often gets a lot of emphasis like it's it's always the thing that we don't feel like we're getting often we might think to ourselves like that's my love language like i really need that but in a way the reason we feel we need it so badly right now is because we're not getting it you know if you're in a relationship where you have a high sex drive and the other person really doesn't and you're the person that's like you know feeling like you're not wanted or your needs aren't getting met there or you're the person that's like you know feeling like you're not wanted or your needs aren't getting

met there or you're not getting enough touch then all of a sudden it can feel like oh my big love language is touch but if you're in a relationship where you feel fulfilled in that area it's just not on your mind in the same way because you feel fulfilled in that area it's a bit like that saying that when the sex is good it's only 10 of relationship when it's bad it's 80 of the relationship yeah exactly and yeah i think you can feel starved in different ways like if you yeah you can feel starved of time if your partner is always putting you last and goes oh i'm going out with my friends again even though you haven't spent a weekend together in four weekends and like oh i'm gonna just hang out with my friends and it seems like they're not bothered then you're like oh i'm gonna just hang out with my friends and it

seems like they're not bothered then you're like oh so they're not like they're not bothered about prioritizing us like spending a time together going to dinner going to a movie you would even though that's not my primary one that would get to me if it was you know if i was starved of it are we leaning towards this balanced diet view of the various love languages i mean it might be true it's also there's something there's something kind of greek about it isn't there like sort of everything in moderation yeah it's kind of like the aristotelian virtues like you need you can't just only double down on being charitable or being you know you have to kind of have a balance of all the virtues but look i think any theory that try that tries to be too reductive will inevitably

cut some corners on reality right because we're just too complicated we're very complicated that's why i like theories on love like a singular theory of love i mean the the greatest poets the greatest philosophers the greatest scientists have all been studying for centuries but no one has like a singular theory of love i mean the the greatest poets the greatest philosophers the greatest scientists have all been studying it for centuries but no one has like a fit all thing for like everything that love entails because we are just our brains are very complicated and love is very complicated but but the question is like is it useful still the love languages model and a lot of people do seem to find it useful so there's there's something that it is capturing that seem that does seem to vibe with people it can't just be that everyone's

you know i know there are things where people just vibe with them that are nonsense but it must resonate if people go yeah there is a way that i prefer i just know some people that gifts mean a lot to them and it's you can tell that they really really love it when you give a thoughtful gift i could be wrong but i think they were formulated the love languages were initially formulated from because he he was a psychotherapist and he was finding that they were the patterns that couples were coming to him for therapy for always fell into these five buckets they were saying like we don't have sex enough or we're not intimate enough or you never tell me you love me

or and he basically narrowed them down as these five like needs i guess in relationships i could be wrong but i'm pretty sure that is where that whole model came from and i do think it's quite useful in identifying is there something in your relationship that you're not getting because there are some people who are not well matched right like because some people do have greater emotional needs than others some people are much more kind of introverted emotionally than other people. There's people who don't like to hold hands and be cozy and intimate, and they much prefer to just kind of be more like, you know, separate, physically separate.

And there are people who are not thoughtful at all. And I think all of those things would make you incompatible with that person if that was a really, really big thing for you. And so to that extent, I think it's really useful yeah to still use but i do think that there are so many missing i do agree with that point that they make what do you feel is missing i've thought this for a while i think preempt preempting someone's needs it's a bit of a love language i like that anticipating needs yeah that's that's like one of my favorite things that you do with me

there is something there's something that I'm like noticing though from this conversation that there's almost like two two kind of ways that the idea of love languages can go or where they can kind of emerge from one is this natural inclination towards something so for example if you are just naturally a very touchy-feely person and you like to be that with people you're gonna have a hard time with a partner who is not that way but then there's the if the languages that seem to emerge from a kind of deficit like something that you've lacked either in life growing up or something that you lacked in a previous relationship that has made you really hungry for that thing and that could be safety it could be peace it could be it could be touch you know it could be any it could be being thought about or being seen being seen could be another love language

but you know there might be love languages that we ourselves would be less preoccupied with if we felt that that need had been met or if we felt that we weren't in deficit or hadn't been in deficit in that area i don't know i guess it's interesting because there might be areas where we've had enough of that we've had plenty of that thing in life but it still is a very important it just is like part of our makeup that's really important to us and there are other things that they feel that so important to us because we've always felt like we've been lacking there or we feel like we don't have you know we haven't had enough of that thing well one thing i think the love language is language is useful for is just as it's become like a signaling device for saying to someone like hey this is a blueprint for how i need you to be or how i need

to feel loved and it's given people the ability to express it in a certain way like my love language is quality time and someone goes ah quality time or that's true i need to say you look beautiful this morning or give them physical compliments because someone just might not be inclined to be that way like i know some very great guys they're very caring whatever but they might not be the type who gives someone a hug naturally or just says something like sweet sends a sweet message but i think it's interesting who we become when we feel like something we haven't had enough of we finally get because i think a lot of us i don't i think i'm speaking on the same subject here and i'm not going just off on a tangent but i i think a lot of the time we don't

necessarily know exactly who we are until certain needs get met you know if we've never felt safe for example or we've never had peace then we can be preoccupied with that distracted by the need for safety and in a way that takes energy from developing ourselves in other ways i think it's interesting like who you become once you actually feel like you have that thing because when you have that thing it's like now you have the potential a bit like kind of maslow's hierarchy of needs right when at the base of that pyramid are physiological factors like food and water and shelter and when you have those things you can't focus on actualization until you have those things and i think it's interesting what what gets to become important to us in a relationship once certain baseline

needs or love languages are actually met we might find that something else becomes important to us that has not had a chance to be important to us before yeah well this in a way somewhat vibes of what these researchers are saying where they're saying relationships aren't static and the the ways of giving and receiving love almost do change or evolve or you know you're not like this fixed entity so maybe as your relationship becomes richer and deeper these other things like also become important or now we've satisfied this there's like ways to actually understand each other deeper or in the same way i mean touch for a lot of people is i i always think about people on the retreat and how there are people who show up to our retreat and you know we're kind of we're all huggers and you know we don't impose hugs on anyone but you know we kind of naturally we kind

of impose them on people no but i mean we go to give people out people are entitled to reject force them no but we give people a hug like that's when we walk up to them arms stretched out going hi we do that's true we assume making it very difficult for someone to say i'm not a hugger get away from me but what's interesting is the number of people who will over the course of even just six days on a retreat by the end of it they will say i came into this as someone who's not really used to physical affection and i'm i wouldn't call myself a hugger and yet i've so enjoyed like by by day three i found myself walking up to people and giving them a hug yeah and that's so new for me and so even then it there's a there's that interesting

it's interesting to think how well do i know myself how much of what i think are my needs are just related to what's been acceptable in my life so far what's what's been expected or what i've expected from life the way i've been conditioned as opposed to these are my innate preferences and needs something that could be useful i think for people because this is all very like philosophical debate about love languages and i think if you are in a relationship right now or you're dating someone you're getting to know someone and what you're trying to establish is whether or not you and that person are compatible in terms of are they able to meet your needs I think it might be useful to give people some frameworks around how you can have those conversations and how you can you can ask for your love languages or whatever we want to call it

to be met by the other person like for instance you love acts of service and i remember i used to tidy up the whole house and you would be like oh my god it means so much to me when you do that when you just like i come out of this thing that I'm doing, come home and everything is just immaculate. Thank you. That is true. And you used to say that to me. It used to shock me every time like that someone did that

and I would be so happy. Yeah. And so I was like, oh, okay. Like that's, you've given me a grain of information about yourself and people are always dropping bits of information about yourself and people are always dropping bits of information about themselves and kind of giving you the handbook on how to handle them oh yeah and we're not necessarily always paying attention because we're so preoccupied by having our own needs met do you know a really

sweet realization that I had about you was that for the for those of you out there for the uninitiated there's a game uh called uh zelda tears of the kingdom uh the sequel to zelda breath of the wild and it's on the nintendo switch and it's just a magical game it's amazing and we don't get that many times that we get to sit and play it but whenever we do audrey loves it like she's not even interested in playing she just really loves it when we like sit and play together and we just explore the world together and i just bark orders of she like tells us she's like go in that cave. Pick up that. Go fight them. See what's in the box. See what's in the treasure box if you beat them.

Yeah, I think that's nice. No, but I find it really endearing because I realized that you love Zelda, but you also love it as a moment that we get together. And I love Zelda. No, I'm joking. No, it's true. It's true. But you're very right.

The whole overarching concept is that people do like to be loved that no i'm joking no it's true it's true but you're very right the whole like overarching concept is that people do like to be loved in their own personal ways and when you can listen a lot and pick up like oh that really resonated or when i said that they their eyes lit up or they loved that compliment they were like oh my god i love hearing those words or whatever you can kind of start to well first judge your compatibility because maybe if someone's like oh i never want to hold hands on the street and you're like a hand holder and you love touching you might be like oh this is going to be difficult but you know you can also just learn like oh that they this thing I like a lot is naturally not so such a big deal to them and I need to love them in their way yeah figure that out and that that's

kind of the point I I think is important to make here and I wanted to make is like you can build up and it's not how the way to look at it but I do think just to put it in simple terms you by loving someone in the way that they want to be loved not in the way that you want to love them not in the way that you want to be loved but in the way that they want to be loved you build up leverage to then say this is how I want to be loved and by default if you're with a decent human being who wants a beautiful relationship they'll go i can see how you love me in the way that i want to be loved let me love you in the way that you want to be loved they're more likely to listen to you and say yeah i'll do that i'll give you compliments i'll you know um spend that quality time with you i'll do whatever if you

on the other hand are kind of already meeting their needs and making them feel like they're in a beautiful situation and they feel really seen and kind of nourished with everything which is where you're anticipating needs point is so important because it's you're you're you're really leading you're creating a culture in the relationship where you're saying i am going out of my way to think about what would make you happy what would make your life better whatever however you define better and you're creating an environment where this is the this is like the level that we're playing at is that we we do these things to make each other happy and we're also creating that

amazing reciprocity you know that idea of giving first and expecting second you know but focusing on giving of course over time if you find that you're always anticipating their needs and they never meet you there or never you know reciprocity is ever created then you might be in a relationship where you haven't got the kind of teammate that you need but i do think that there is a we we should put the emphasis on being an amazing teammate because you are then showing someone the level of teammanship that you want to exist in your relationship and i also i fundamentally believe when someone feels like they their needs are being taken care of it frees them up to then go well how do i show up for you yeah if you're worried your needs aren't taken care of if you're worried that you're

not going to kind of you know in a sense you're going to go hungry, then you're too worried about that to then anticipate someone else's needs. But you no longer have to be preoccupied with your own needs, in a sense, if you know that the person you're with has got your back in that department. Yeah, and I think communication is key in that because otherwise you can give, give, give give not communicate and just feel resentful

or be taken advantage of because you're not actually expressing what you need because you feel shame around what you need but if you establish early on this is the kind of partner I want to be to you and it's the kind of partner I want you to be to me and if I take care of you and you take care of me we shouldn't have an issue you then build that reciprocity you build that connection which feels it's not free I'm not just giving giving giving all the time and expecting nothing in return but I'm putting your needs at the top of my list of priorities because your happiness as my partner is the top of my list of priorities two things if you want to communicate early on like ways you like to be loved is either just talk about things you really traits or behaviors you really love and admire and you can just talk in general in a person or i love the idea of a relationship

where blah blah blah or i love it you know when i feel taken care of by x and y or just if they do something that makes you feel loved like hand them the blueprint there and then like either you can text them in the day and be when you did that this morning it made me feel so special and i loved it so much or like just tell them in the moment like that's so attractive it's so sexy when you did that or that was a really like you know that was a really amazing move you did earlier when you came and you brought blah blah it's like people just need the blueprint given and the more confidently you do that and map out like here's the needs and you can you can try and meet them or see see what you can do with this blueprint tell me what to do i think for everyone out there you can think of that in terms of either pre-framing or signaling or affirming when something happens positive reinforcement goes a

long long way pre-framing is when you do it before it's happened so that you can point to the thing that would mean a lot to you if it happened and affirming or signaling is when something happens someone has said something to you and afterwards you say you know that really meant a lot when you said that to me tonight like i i really felt touched by that you know or i love that thing you did last week um you know you're you're giving them that that validation for that thing that happened and saying do it again so it's like pre-framing is a way of saying, I'd love you to do that. Affirming or signaling is a way of saying, I'd love you to do that again. By the way, guys, for anyone who is interested in coming to be with us on this year's retreat,

it is happening in September from the 9th to the 15th, and we have less than 50 spaces left. This is our most subscribed retreat in quite a long time. I think the book coming out has meant that a lot of people have newly learned about us and really wanna join us on the retreat. So it's looking to be a sold out event and we only have a certain number of seats in the room, so we can't add more spaces. If you want to come and join us, go to mhretreat.com,

find out more and apply while there is still time. Matt i say i've been enjoying some of the emails coming into the inbox lately so if people do want to get in touch with the show or give some feedback or just questions podcast at matthewhussie.com send us an email there have been some lovely emails that have been coming they have yeah and um lastly if you want a free training from us um we put together a really cool free training that i know so many of you have not taken yet called dating with results and it's a one hour training for anybody who wants to build a foundation for a successful love life this year if you're tired of the current dating culture, and frankly, you're sick of dating, but you really want to find love, this program is for you. It's free. It's one hour of your life, but it is one hour well spent for anybody who is serious

about finding love this year. Go to datingwithresults.com to sign up and we will see you in next week's episode of love life thank you steven thank you audrey be well everybody and love life Bye.