It’s More Than a Love Language: Communication Beyond Categories
00:00Hey, everyone. Welcome to Unzipping Taboos, candid conversations about sex with Dr. Sueand Charlie. We're here to explore the questions you've always been curious about, but don'talways feel comfortable asking out loud. No judgment, no shame, just open, honest conversation.So zip down and let's get candid. Before we get started, I do want to remind everyonethat we have partnered with JackandJillAdult.com, one of the top online adult stores. And becauseyou're here with us, you get 20% off with code UNZIPPING20. So go check them out. So now thatI've got that out of the way, today, we are unzipping love languages. If you're watching,you've seen Dr. Sue drop her head on her microphone. But I mean, I knew this was coming.
00:50but yeah uh before we unzip love languages dr sue would you like to share a little bit aboutyourself with our listeners sure so and i think this is really important for our conversationthat i give my actual educational background because that's going to be part of the conversationyeah so i have a bachelor's degree in health education i was actually certified to teachk-12 for hopman in new york state like i was going to be a teacher and then i went to i wentto master's program and got a degree in health education you see that health education pathand then for my phd i decided i wanted to specialize and so i have a phd in human sexualityeducation um i do the professor thing i write the textbooks co-write the textbooks i teach i
01:36research i speak places i love how i can talk i can boil all that down to like four verbsbut then in my spare time i i think it's really important that we have conversations aboutthings like this like things that are topical and things that if you even if you had fantasticsex education which puts you in the vast minority in this country it probably stopped in high schooland so now if you're in your 20s your 30s your 40s and you know you're reading things like imean the love languages aren't new but when things come out like people don't have places to discussit and so i try to continue sex education for folks as long as they want to listen so um i dowork in the community i'll basically talk to anyone who wants me to come out and talk about
02:23sex and sometimes that's youth groups sometimes it's youth and parents which is always amusingfor me um and sometimes it's folks in their 70s and 80s so and everyone in between um because ithink we all need to keep learning about this stuff because things change yeah that's enoughof an intro and that's me um but now you need to to meet a little more than just the introductionthat we had to the show from charlie so for those of you who do and do not know charliecharlie is our curious co-host who's always ready to explore just the ins and outs of all this stuffthat is i don't i mean i have to say taboo because it's in the title but i also want i i don't wantto say controversial at challenging. We'll say challenging, um, around all the things that we
03:10talk about with sex and sexuality and relationships and love and everything, but you should tell usmore. I don't know what more I can add to that. You can always find more. Um, I am Charlie. Iam all those things Dr. Sue said and more. Um, I am someone who, who does in, uh, I have, I havejust always felt comfortable challenging notions and things that are expected of meand expected of others, especially as a woman in society, messages that were given, conditioningthat were taught. A lot of our longtime listeners will know that that's a term I use a lot,social conditioning and unpacking it and I think my kind of gateway into waking up a little bitwas my first communications class in college and just digging into comms 101 and and having an
04:11understanding that if if you you've got to dig deeper to understand what you're what you'reconsuming the messages we're consuming and um and consumption just means how we're taking ineverything, all, all the stimuli that, that we encounter throughout the day. Um,so understanding that, um, and just always, it's always nice to, to meet with Dr. Sueand have these conversations. Um, we've been friends for many years and, and having theseconversations in an open, honest way, having these types of conversations where we're not tryingto convince but rather just daylight some different ways of looking at at different issuesi'm waiting for the day goes from running to us but that's okay especially surrounding the taboo
05:04the unnecessarily taboo topic of sex and sex sex health yeah i just say i'm waiting for the manyto become many many years like i'm waiting for that i don't know when that qualifies yeah we'llhave to determine what what integer that is all right so dr c what's your love language oh godmy love language is shut the hell up i mean that would track that's brooklyni don't even remember why i mean i know we put this in like our list of things to do and i thinkit came up somewhere at some point but i don't i don't remember what it was that triggered us to dothis yeah i don't remember yeah if anyone out there remembers because people anyone out thereremembers from our one-on-one no i'm pretty sure it came up in an episode i don't know whatever
05:57we're doing love languages today where we're talking about love languages today um and idon't want to say why i hate them because i don't think they're all bad but i think they can beproblematic should we talk about what they are i have them written down for the because some peoplemay not know what i mean that book came out like 20 30 years ago so some people may be who likethey they've heard the term love language but they don't actually know that it was like a bookum so the book i have them written down i did come prep today i don't usually write things downum acts of service receiving gifts quality time words of affirmation and physical touchyou're not gonna give me much today are you
06:46those those are the five love languages that were named um and yeah so the idea behind thelove languages it was a book that was written by his last name is chapman it was a um i want toa gary it is gary there we go it was a book that was written by gary chapman it it did come out doyou happen to have the year it came out right in front of you because i don't know i don't but ican okay you'll do that while i talk about the book um so the idea was that you there were quizzesand you could take the quiz and you could figure out it did believe um that you had a primary lovelanguage which is the primary way that someone could communicate with you or do things in yourrelationship to make you feel loved and i do believe i have to admit i never read the book
07:29someone gave it to me i started reading it someone borrowed it and never gave it backand i don't think i cared enough to track it down um but i have heard excerpts over the years and irevisited um some of the stuff that you can find online that's straight from the book and so theidea is that you have a primary love language but also that you may have a secondary love languageuh so it came out in 1992 oh i have to math that's 33 years ago 34 so i was i was kind ofi said 20 30 years ago and it was updated in 2015 oh i didn't know about the update okay so for yeahso that may be in our consciousness but for some of our listeners that may have come out beforeyou were born so um but yeah that's the idea and the idea was that you kind of look at what it is
08:12that you would want from a partner as a way that they could communicate that they or show youbecause it wasn't always about communication in a verbal perspective um how you know thatthey love you at least that's what it was supposed to be and yeah and how you love them right yes iwe take the quiz i tell you my love language or two and you tell me your love language too andthen everything is solved now it was never as basic as that um but that's kind of how peoplewere boiling it down like people would just take the quiz and be like oh this is my love languagemm-hmm yeah and so what are some of the challenges with something like thisbecause i know one thing is that it was built off of his experience as a pastor and a marriage
09:05counselor which he doesn't i believe have a certification as okay i was gonna say thatmarriage counselor if you heard some hesitation in my in me saying that is i'm assuming it waswithin the framework of his church yes he was doing from what i remember from reading bios hewas doing counseling which is pretty common i mean i know people for pastors yeah yeah to goback to their church for for counseling for their couples um so i do think it's important to talkabout his background because as the academic in me and the academic in me does not usually itchthings the academic part like part of me was itching at this um so he has a bachelor's degreei wrote all this down i was so prepped for this one he's a bachelor's degree in anthropology
09:51a master's degree in religious education and a phd in adult education so there is no counselingbackground not to say that people don't finish you know a buttload of degrees and then go yepi'm gonna do something else um because he was doing counseling and he was working with couplesin his role as areligious advisor, but I thinkit's important to keep in mind thatthis is not based onany kind of scientific work.
10:18This is based off who he was seeing, which is a veryselectedgroup. I'm guessingthey were all straight or straight-appearingor in a heteronormativerelationship structure.I'm sure a lot of them subscribeto pretty traditional
10:34gender stereotypes.and so his experience was going to be limited from that so and that's why it was so importantto me that I give my background like I have a PhD in human sexuality education it's why I feelcomfortable doing this it's why I feel comfortable teaching classes in this I have a doctorate butif you ask me anything about like biomechanics I'm just going to stare blankly at you and maybeblink a lot because I don't have a degree in that I and I think it's and I think we've talked aboutthis before probably one of the foundational episodes we did at the beginning that part ofmy frustration with the field of sexology or sex education is people like oh yeah like i have a
11:11degree in something like something i mean always i have a degree in business but i'm a certifiedsex health educator yeah and and i mean you can get certified if you go through the process umbut like people will be like yeah i have a degree in like something that's adjacent and i'm likehow is math adjacent to like so i do think it's important that we're owning when people seecredentials i think it's important for us to dig into those credentials a little bit yeah so forthe academic in me i was a little itchy and then it got a little worse because there's nothing hereexcept his own anecdotes and experiences and again those are valid but they're not quantified theyweren't quantifiable they weren't studied they didn't go through any kind of rigorous like can
12:00we prove this um the folks i always think of are the gotmans they run the gotman institute likethey do a lot of research on on relationships they have the the horseman of it's the horsemanof the apocalypse was like the horseman of the relationship apocalypse but they will like bringcouples in and give them surveys and hook them up to machines and watch how their heart races asthey talk about experiences like there is legit research in what we're doing and what they'redoing excuse me i'm not affiliated with them so so while some people are like oh well these likerelationships can you really study them and the answer is you can you can actually do researchon this and there is none that was done on the love languages when he put it out i'm sure there
12:40are people who have done research using that as a basis but there's no research to support him whenhe put it out so that was like the academic like yeah that that didn't sit right with meyou're making faces and I don't know what that means no that's okay I'm smiling at what you'resaying about how it didn't sit right with you um and then I also looked up the Gottman Instituteoh yeah yeah they do great I mean they will literally hook you up they will study theliving daylights out of you and your partner they will hook you up to machines they'llmeasure your breathing rate and like there's like hardcore science there yeah umyeah sorry I was just getting distracted by I was gonna go on a whole thing about the
13:22horseman of the relationship but that's that's not what this one's about no it's not so fromthe academic perspective and it wasn't meant to be an academic book it was meant to be a pop culturebook and it and it was and it succeeded and it was coming out around the same time that we wereseeing things like men are from mars and women are from venus and it's not like it's not likewe were seeing people question the heteronormative conversation on a larger scale which is happeninga lot more now in a much bigger way which i'm really excited about because we learn differentlywhen we acknowledge different perspectives so i do want to acknowledge that at the time it wascoming out it wasn't like it was out of left field that it was oh very heteronormative and
14:04very gender stereotyped like that's what we were doing back in the 90s it's very heteronormativeand in the math in the pop culture so so one of one of the things though that so that's that's whythis made dr sue itch twitch itchy twitchy itchy twitchyand and full disclosure for me as well i haven't read it i've engaged with it in that kind of likeastrology quiz kind of way but not not letting it necessarily define how i'mlooking at myself and doing self-reflection and and work um so I think so I want to pivot a littlebit if I may to some of the ways that this was helpful I was just about to ask you do we wantto start with the positives or negatives so because I'm sure we do have listeners that were
15:07like that book was a game changer for me that theory that what he presented was a game changerfor me and it's really helped me and it's helped me teach my kids all of these things um so and inin one of the ways that i think it was helpful was providing some kind of common language to usethat two people could go to and have the same set of standards for self-evaluation evaluationevaluating the relationship etc yeah um i think that it was really helpful and people realizingthat their relationship may have been struggling but not because they weren't a good fit they justweren't communicating the same way or they weren't demonstrating i don't even want to saydemonstrating because that sounds showy they weren't they weren't doing things for their
16:02partner the way their partner wanted it to be done i don't know why i didn't like that phrasing justgo with it folks the way the way maybe the way that their partner was hoping to have thatinteraction or yeah or demonstration of love or something along those lines and I think it was areally good way of being like okay well this works for me but now I understand why it's not workingfor my partner and it's not that our relationship is essentially flawed you know could have beenlike oh well this relationship sucks it's not the right one no no it could have been the right oneyou just you needed to kind of take a look at it and realize that we're just communicatingdifferently and I actually think that people who are in relationships who grew up in different
16:44cultures or different parts of the world or different religious backgrounds I think theyactually do better at that naturally because they already know there's a difference like if that'sa great point yeah if I'm coming from from Brooklyn and I'm in a relationship with someonefrom the Midwest like we definitely there's definitely a difference in values of beingpolite unicorn yeah um but like i feel like we would know that going into it and be like oh yeahokay this is this is a culture thing or um again people coming from listen different culturalethnic backgrounds you kind of already know there's going to be differences i think for peoplelike i don't understand like why are we not getting along we're we're such a great fit we have all the
17:26same characteristics we have the same background this may have been why you may have had thecomplete same background but you still wanted something different and so i thought i think itwas good for shedding light on that like two more good things I think two one two I don't know holdon I'm thinking let me sorry let me do you want to chime in I'm all over the I had all these notesand now there's just yeah I mean I that to me for this episode I don't want to diminish the impactthat it had for many people and that it became part of the zeitgeist it became a part of popularculture and it is it is those moments and those things that are introduced to us that when we canall say okay this resonates with me on some level so i we now have a common language to
18:19to use to talk to each other and to be vulnerable yeah um it i think it gave in in its kind of firstgeneration, it gave space for that vulnerability of self-reflection and reflecting on thepartnership. And then listening, I think, was the other part that it helped. It helped to say,okay, well, this is what resonates with me, and I find out something different resonates with you.Now I need to be curious, and I need to be present and listen to what that is.yeah so i think that's i i think that there's a good impact there yeah but it becomes popularso but i want you to get to your two i wrote them down so we're good now threehowever many number of positive things before we go into how it evolved well and what you were
19:15saying i mean that's my answer to everything right it's all about communication that's that's the easybutton in life if we could just keep communication don't be a dick yeah actually i do someone mademe uh an easy button that you just push it and it says communication so i have that now thank youum so so i think anything that promotes communication is going to be helpful in arelationship whether it's especially if it resonates with you right yeah like if you findthe thing that resonates with you and then you find another person that that resonates withyou've got something in common and you've got like i like i've been saying that common languageand that common communication common vocabulary surrounding something that can be really tough
19:56yeah and i think for something like this like the ideal for me if a couple were using this book tohelp them out or not yeah just to help them out assuming it wasn't a library book that needed tobe returned i would love the book to be marked up like like people starring and like no likehighlighting in different colors be like this this made sense to me and like oh i never thought ofthat and like using that as a communication tool but yeah i think that's great for any kind ofself-help book for relationships when people use it as an actual physical like aid this is what i'vebeen trying to say words and i didn't know them yeah um i think you touched on the other thingone of the things which was the vulnerability piece like the ability to really do that
20:37introspection and be like what do i like do i do i like that that's hard to do and i think kudos toany system that gets you to sit there and be like huh why don't i like it when my partner brings meflowers why do i want to kill them when they decide that they you know i'm trying to look atthe things again sorry you know when when they're when they're like doing doing chores for me insteadof spending time with me you know if if i didn't get it before yeah that takes a lot of thoughtand there's a lot of vulnerability in that and there's a lot of introspection and i think that'salso really important and you brought that up so thank you for that yeah and the third thing thati love is that it has become part of our lexicon um i have a friend who likes to cook and she will
21:26joke that cooking is her love language and before that book i may have been like what is a lovelanguage now i'm like oh this is how you show me love and so that's great thank you and i've heardlike the most random things like yeah yeah this is my love language or like bad jokeme sending you every meme i can find is a is my love language you know but we all know what thatmeans now and i think we didn't have that commonality before and for those of us whoremember the book coming out it's it feels like it's always been part of our languageum so yeah so i think it gives us a way to communicate things and i love that peopleare pushing past the five and being like no like sending you every bad dad joke i can find that's
22:09my love language and beyond and in their relationships in their life beyond romanticrelationships yeah because sometimes some of your strongest longest relationships are with yourclose friends yeah and we are human and we change and we evolve and so if you met in college or highschool you've been friends since high school or college um and you've been friends for 20 30 yearsyou are not the same people because of lived experience in those 20 to 30 years and they'reyou're not wholly different you may be but there are little tweaks here and there and preferenceschange and communication styles change cadence changes and so I think that's the other benefitit is that this has expanded people looking at their key relationships in their life and if
23:05they're upset with them or not satisfied with the friendship or or the sibling relationship or whathave you this has also given language to that yeah the opportunity to apply it to those thosenon-romantic relationships but i think you also just hit on like some of the biggest drawbacksof this thing. Like how I did that transition? Yeah, that was really good. Thank you. Do wehave anything else positive to add? I do. And I've talked about this somewhere. I think I'vedone this on another episode. I know I've had this conversation in my own personal lifevery recently. A lot of us were brought up with the golden rule, right? Do you run to others asyou would have done unto your son what did i miss that to you thank you i missed the last word which
24:00is the important one and i know that for me and especially when i talk to students and when italk to family and when i talk to some of my friends like i we've been moving over the yearsi can't even give you when i started using this it's got to be about five years now uh the platinumrule and the platinum rule is do unto others as they would like done unto themselves and i thinkwe talked about this with the shovelry episode sorry i think i just said that backwards i'mgonna say that again because i was already thinking so the platinum rule is do unto othersas they would like done that means i need to know what you want and i think there's value inseeing it that way now this isn't going to happen on the street right like you're not
24:38going to hold the door open and be like oh is this gesture going to be what they wanti'm not talking about those casual interactions but if if i just do something for someone becauseIt's how I would want to end a fight or start a relationship or communicate.And they're like, no, like that's a big problem.And so I think that the evolution, I think the theory behind this, though he didn't name it, is the platinum rule, which I think is better for intimate relationships, whether it's with a partner or your friends or family.What do they want?And the way I think about this is a lot.I have a friend who I think despises, this is actually a strong enough word, surprises.
25:21She hates surprises.Absolutely hates them.And her partner loves them and tried to throw her a surprise party.And it went down.Yep.It went down like a lead balloon.It went down exactly as you think it went down.And there was a good, you know, I wasn't in the middle of their fights, but she was telling
25:42me a lot about it afterwards and she's like it's just it just showed that he didn't know me andhis feeling is like but this is what i would want and i'm like that's that's the thing that's thegolden rule you need to think about what the person wants and sort of think anything thatenables us to step back and be like okay i am doing for someone else what do they want rightthat's a powerful thing and it didn't get named that way in the book but i think that's theunderlying thing and i think that's a really strong idea yeah that couple is still togetherby the way I feel like I need to say that like they did survive that there has never been anothersurprise party for her for her or for him I think ah yeah I think they both got scared off of it
26:21yeah like I think about that with proposals you know I have friends who and we've talked aboutthis before as well like I have friends who are like if someone ever proposed to me and did itin public I'm walking away and the other person's like I'm gonna see this big show and it's gonnato be fantastic and it's really thinking about what does the other person want and if it'ssomeone that you're trying to be in a in a relationship with it feels like that shouldbe important right yeah all right on to the bad on on on to how it i i would say maybenot uh yeah troublesome the challenges with it so i think part of the problem if you just readthe book and again i have not read the full original i've definitely read some excerpts
27:13of it and i did not read anything from the 2015 call out but i know a lot of the examples thatwas given were very heteronormative and so it may not feel safe for folks who aren't in thatsituation and a lot of what came out in the original book in 92 was really based on thegender stereotypes so like a lot of men are of course gonna want more physical touch yeah umand so i think that anything that promotes those stereotypes can be harmful and the lack ofinclusive inclusivity is harmful and so i think if you're just reading the book without maybethinking beyond that it can be a problem and some people do like this is the one thing they read andthey take the quiz and that's it we would like people's minds to be opened so yeah i think it's
28:02that for me it's that um that simplification and then the iterations and the adoption of it inthe pop in pop culture and and society um there's that that piece of this is this is meant to be agateway not the the by the relationship bible yeah this is one tool to get you to understandhow what one what your needs are and two how to communicate what your needs are and how tolisten to what your partner's needs are yeah to me that i i would like to believe that was thethe overall intent of this book but when when something like this catches on it doeswind up becoming um a simple i didn't realize it disappeared sorry yeah you were teleporting umum but what what winds up happening is then you have like these also these offshoots
29:11right and I joked a little bit ago about like an astrology quiz then you have these offshoots ofthese quizzes based loosely based off of the love languages disguising themselves as something thatis very based in the love language book and and that simplification sometime for some can signalokay I did the work I read the book I finished the book I did the work and took the quiz it'snot working so it's not me because I did the work yeah yeah and I and and that's and that's where itit starts to become problematic yeah and I think it's also we you had talked about this I want youto finish talking about it now you we were talking about this in the pre-show the idea of like wellI did the thing you wanted oh yeah yeah so so if you're in a relationship and you're doing this
30:07you're you've you've hit some kind of patch that you want to fix and or you come into thisrelationship and you say oh like you both know the love languages and you share oh this is mylove language and as the relationship evolves and maybe some disconnect happens or someone'schecking out of the relationship there can be a way to use that that love languages as kind ofmanipulation of like, well, they're always doing they, they always do these things that I like,so they must still be in it. When really, I'm just doing it to keep you hooked, because maybe I'mlazy. And I just don't want it to end. Because then I have to, then I have to do work and I haveto move and I have to all these things. So it can become something that is a static, like checklist
30:59thing. And then the person says, you know what, this isn't working for me anymore. And that personthat was just kind of phoning it in i'll say well well then weaponize it so well i was doing allthese things that you wanted yeah i spoke your love language yep oh yeah yes to all of thati had written it down because i had the same thought before we even met up today um it waslike this idea of of doing the token gesture well like you like gifts so yeah i was a dick all weekbut here's your gift like it doesn't erase all the other things that happens um it it's the startof it's not the end all be all it's the start of and and i think one of the really big problemsbecause i've heard people say this they'll be like my my life language is this it's it's it's
31:46a relationship yeah you you don't just get to be like this is my love language it's not aboutthey have to you know they have to suddenly be like oh okay that's how i'm gonna do all mycommunication or all my all my ways of showing i love you it has to go both ways and so you mayhave to become fluent in someone else's language if your language is keep looking at the notesif your language is acts of service and there's this quality time you're gonna have to learn howto do quality time you don't get an well it's not my love language learn a new language you have tolearn how to do this in a two-way relationship setting and i think for some folks it was justlike oh well you you need to figure out how to make me happy but I don't have to do the other
32:28way around no no everyone's gonna learn that's that's the other thing too to add on to thisand in a little bit of a different way is you you may I I feel like a we are whole people weare holistic people. And so the other way of simple, having this simplified to five thingsgives an implication that really only one or two apply to you. Yeah. Really resonate with youwhen there is, and I, I don't know, cause I just learned about the Cotman's today. Um,Thank you, Dr. Sue. But I would venture to say that the most fulfilling, healthy relationshipsover time have a combination. If we were to look at these five languages, there's a combinationof those happening constantly in the relationship for and from the two people in the relationship.
33:38it yeah i mean i don't want to i don't want to break the gotman's work down into like a singlething but i always joke that a lot of it's about don't be a dick um which works perfectly for usit's really about like when you are nasty to each other that's like yeah it's about respect andrespect is built into the five like languages but it's not named as a love language like respectingme as a human you could be like yeah i got you a gift but that's not respecting me as a person likeyeah you check the box but where's that respect for me as a person yeah we are we are way morenuanced than just than just one yeah one check box yeah and I think that's the thing for mewith it is that uh that I that I never really engaged with reading the book or anything like
34:26that because to me it was but sometimes sometimes I want something done for me sometimes I just wantto sit on the couch together sometimes sometimes I don't want to be touched yeah we were talkingyou know yeah exactly we were joking about that before like there you know let's say that my lovelanguage is physical touch and I've had a really really bad day and you're gonna touch me I'll belike don't fucking touch me like yeah the last thing I want right now is human contact I wantto be angry I want to throw things in a safe way not hurting people in a rage room right yeah likeI want to and and that's the thing we don't always respond to the same thing all the timeand then as our bodies change if if over time I'm getting older or I've had an injury or an
35:13illness that means that I'm not feeling touch the same way or experiencing touch the same waywhere touch may have grown great before now it doesn't it doesn't work for me anymoreand so I think that's the other thing to keep in mind like as a relation and you talked a littlebit about this as we grow and as our bodies change and as our experiences change we we may find thatthat thing doesn't work for us anymore we maybe we never thought we needed acts of service but nowwe're sick and we need someone to take care of us in a way that we never thought we'd need or maybei'm looking at the list again maybe maybe the gifts were a thing but now you know maybe resourcesare tight and maybe gifts can still happen like a handmade gift or something small um but maybe now
35:59it's more about feeling like i'm not physically alone maybe i didn't love physical touch beforebut now the world is scary and i don't know what's going on and and and sometimes someone just wantsthat skin hunger fed but they never thought physical touch was their thing so yeah yeah soSo that's the thing for me is that if it's been looked at as the Bible, the relationship Bible, so to speak, rather than one of many tools, then you start to limit your fulfillment, being able to seek fulfillment.because that's what this boils down to if someone is reaching out to a resource like thisthere is there are unmet needs and all of us are just looking for a fulfilled life and fulfilledrelationships and wanting to bring fulfillment to the people that we care about that's what thisall boils down to yeah and i think that's the other thing is that the where we get it from
37:01other people if if I go through if I go through my love languages the most obvious cheat sheetever as I just looked at and I've decided that my physical love language is touch that may begreat for my partner not so great with my friends and family like so so realizing that we have thesedifferent relationships that we may value and it may be I'm just gonna pick one randomly let's sayaccess service is really important to me for my partner but words of affirmation are reallyimportant to me for my friends or maybe not using words i know i joked about this sometimes incertain situations with family me shutting my mouth is the biggest biggest love i love youum but i think that's the other thing is that we are these really complex humans who have
37:49multiple relationships and as you said sometimes they are longer lasting than our romanticrelationships and that's when you and i get to the many many years of friendship many many manymany many many um that it changes with the people we're around and it changes over timeoh sorry i just had another one oh it's not really exciting for some folks who are um whoare neurodivergent they may view touch very differently on very different days and verydifferent stress levels yeah i never i didn't yeah so there's that as well yeah um so yeahif we think about some of the some of the folks who yeah some some folks may may be like wellthis worked for me on monday but not on tuesday and now my partner's really confused because i
38:33told them that touch was my love language um so yeah sorry i wanted to make sure i got that inthat's okay i like it so i really i think that's what this boils down to and the itchy twitchyis that it is it there's a cream for thatYeah, that's a different episode.But it's just that when some, as I've said, when something like this latches on to thepublic consciousness in the way that it has for the past 30, almost 35 years now, it canbecome reductive because then people always point to the list and always point to thebook when really the, to use it, in my opinion, to use it effectively, you have to see it as one
39:26of many tools. And it is, um, it is a framework that gives you an invitation to self-evaluate,um, to explore, be open and curious about what your partner's needs are or anyone in your,anyone near and dear to you um it's it's really that invitation yeah to to heal to find words tofind to to just make that relationship or uh richer but it's not the only thing yeah it is acomponent and or and whatever it shouldn't be used once in a long-term relationship no like you weresaying you know if two people met in high school or college or whatever maybe or it's been 20 yearsi would love if people are like this thing really helped me it helped us at the beginning ofrelationship i'd love to see people like just checking in for 10 15 20 years they may find
40:25that what what they think is important has changed um so yeah i think it can be a good tool if thisis the tool if this is the quiz you're gonna take if this is the book you're gonna read because itfeel safe to you maybe it matches your religious beliefs um it's something you've heard of andyou're gonna give it a go give it a go i'm not telling anyone not to do it just just realizethat there's there's some drawbacks to it um but again i think anything that can make us more awareof what we need and better able to communicate it because it's all about communication yeah that'sgoing to be a that's going to be a tool in the toolbox and receive and receive that communicationas well right it's because it's it's the it's the giving and receiving yeah that's that's what's
41:12there and and it's it's a simplified version um maybe maybe a little pop psychology maybe a littlepop psychology which is fine but that if if you want to take it deeper and and get get more justknow that it is look at it as one step yep one piece of the journey yep because because thereare probably likely and again i even though i esteem myself to be a psychology hobbyist i don'timagine that i'm writing any books like this anytime soon um but but there are deeper meaningsto if your love language is words of affirmation there could be some really deep things that havebeen hidden for a minute that will help that knowing if words of affirmation are thatunderstanding why words of affirmation are resonates with you and then you know if you
42:15if you have the ability um going to a counselor to explore explore some of that because it could bemaybe maybe praise and and stuff like that was was transactional or withheld from you as a childand so that's why you seek it from your partner so so there are deeper meanings to why some ofthese things resonate with you and again if you have the means or the capability to explore thosebut it can also feel overwhelming and i want to make sure that i acknowledge the space for thattoo like sometimes having this simplified thing is perfectly fine I don't need to go deeper as tothe whys I just need to know how to communicate it because I haven't had the tools to communicateeffectively what I want and how to listen to what my partner wants yeah because if you if you think
43:07about it there's one thing I do want to come back to if you think about it when do we ever teachthat exactly right like we're already I've disparaged sex out in this country for a year nowum but it's also about like we learn from what we see we model that's what we do we model whatwe saw and so if we grew up in a household where there was um dysfunctional relationships or weour first relationships were really not maybe the greatest healthiest thing we we learned what wedidn't like but but we may not have we may have learned like i hate this thing but we may notI've ever found the words to be like, but I want this instead.We just know what we don't want.
43:47And I think the quiz is phrased in such a way that it will help identify maybe thosethings that you really want.The thing I was going to come back to, and it was interesting you were talking aboutgoing through some of those changes.For folks who've been working through trauma, whether that's sexual trauma or relationshiptrauma or family dysfunctional trauma or addiction trauma, like whatever that trauma is, as you'reworking through it, you are becoming a different person.Your needs and wants will change.
44:11and and those was not going through trauma we're going to change over time and i think that's thethat's the piece for me is just making sure that we check in with ourselves and see is is this stillright for me and also just if you do use the book and i think it's a great point like if i don't idon't want to go to counselor i don't want to do that like i just want to start somewhere i justwant you to realize that maybe the five don't work for you and that's okay and that's okay so ifyou're reading it doesn't mean you don't want love or you're not worthy of love it just meansyou didn't fall into one of the five categories and i think that's really important for peoplewho are trying to figure out like who they are and what they want and they do the quiz and like
44:51none of those just none of those it's okay it may be sending memes and bad dad jokes umand then it's definitely not a category you could tell them my categories arei've created my own that's in the 2015 update yeah um so i do just want to put that out asa warning if you do decide like this is going to be my foray into figuring out how to be a betterpartner or learn more about your partner a good for you great for you for taking the step whetheryou're new to this partnership or whether you're trying to reconnect after some time kudos to youbut there's nothing that's ever perfect for everybody so if you're reading through it andyou're like and then in the instant i would say take the bigger lesson away how do i communicate
45:33with my partner how do how do I get them to hear me how do they how do I hear them and try to dowhat makes them happy not just what makes you happy so don't don't worry if you don't fit intothe five categories easily yeah yeah if you don't go go to that maybe the broader framework the levelabove it a little bit which is what what am I feeling that's missing that is that has promptedme to want to fix this yeah and what am i looking for and what is my partner looking for or myfriend or my family member like what are they looking for what where is this disconnect whati'll go back to that fulfillment what is not making me feel fulfilled in this relationshipyeah i don't i'm thinking about one of the things that's coming up a lot in pop culture right now
46:25which is this idea of invisible work the invisible labor so if you've got a couple where one personfeels like they're doing all the invisible labor and they really just want their partner to helpand their partner helps but in a way that's not helpful like give me a list or like i did thatonce yeah it feels like they were doing tell me what you want me to do yeah so that's again itfeels like it was being done but it's not really being done it's that tokenism of it and that'sthat's a problem yeah and and i would say that's that's the that's the kind of nuance that somethinglike this can miss yes because there are the day-to-day things there are the habits theemotional habits that are built in a relationship from day one that this can miss yeah and i but
47:15again we're not saying the whole thing sucks we are saying that some of the underpinnings of itmay be questionable because of some of the stereotypes and also the fact that this isn'tfrom proven data um but but if it works for you as a start of something then great if it doesn'twork for you as a start of something that's okay too yeah nothing wrong with you well just therecould be just keep who knows dr sue no what is the opposite of words of affirmationwell i can't diagnose people that's not my there's a joke somewhere there isso so i i know that i roll my eyes and like when you first brought up the love languages i was likebut i think it has a place and i think the guiding theory behind it is good the communication is
48:04important hearing your partner being heard by your partner um and also just thinking about whatthey want and need those are core i think to most relationships and it's something that you justneed to continue working on because we change and we evolve because that's what humans door are supposed to do yeah and and know that you are so much more than one core language as wellall the languages all the languages oh and the dad jokes well just um it just i want to throwthat out there because sometimes when we do that when we when we simplify this when we oversimplifyit it can stunt growth and emotional connection deepening emotional connections yeah um souse it as a tool not the only tool you are way too fascinating people listening and watching
49:00you are way too fascinating to be boiled down to one thing to one of five choices yesall right well with that i want to thank you all for joining us on this episodehold on let me leave my list because i had a lot that i wrote got the things got the things got theway good oh good okay sorry now you may take us out take twoi made a lot of notes this time i'm so proud of you words of affirmationacts of service someone is going to watch this and like count it up for us and be likethis is how many times you responded to this a touch is definitely not happening right now sowe have to rule that one out but anyway go ahead sorry without consent um all right and not
49:50i okay do it everyone thank you for joining us on today's episode of unzipping tabooswe really hope that today's episode sparked some new thoughts. We'll open up conversations worthhaving. And remember, all of this begins with your curiosity. And that is the key to breakingdown these barriers, embracing a healthier understanding of sex and relationships.If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe, leave a review, share it with someone who you think mightneed to hear this. And if you've got a question or a topic you want us to unzip, please reach outto us via the link in the episode description. A huge thanks to jackandjilladult.com for supportingUnzipping Taboos. Don't forget, you can get 20% off your order with code UNZIPPING20. So please
50:39go check them out. We want to give a very special shout out to best friend of the show, Allie O'Brienfor our incredible theme music. Thank you so much, Allie. It really does bring a smile to my facewhen I hear it. And until next time, everyone keep the conversation going, keep unzipping thoseTaboos, and take care.
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