Examining the ‘5 Love Languages’ with Louis Hickman

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Travis

Have you ever heard of the five love languages? This was a super popular book that came about in the 90s and it described different ways that individuals generally like to give and receive affection from their significant others. If you have heard of this subject, have you ever wondered how much this approach is actually a predictor of whether or not a relationship will be successful? Well, as a person who was often told to read that book and never did, I was very curious about that.

And thankfully Virginia Tech's Lewis Hickman has done research on this very topic and was kind enough to share his findings. Lewis is an assistant professor of industrial organizational psychology in the College of Science at Virginia Tech. His research interests include applying machine learning and natural language processing to psychological research and investigating various forms of bias. Lewis and I chatted a little about what he sees as the appeal of this approach to relationships and he of course shared the findings from his research as to whether or not these are actually a good predictor of how successful relationships will be. We also chatted a little about how machine learning fit into his part of the research, and he shared some insights from psychology as to what he thinks can help us all develop some stronger relationships. And spoiler alert, there is some conversation about burritos and tacos related to this topic, which is probably for the best, since I think that actually is my wife's love language. As always, be sure to rate, follow, and or subscribe to the podcast.

I'm Travis Williams and this is Virginia Tech's Curious Conversations.

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Travis

But I guess that's a really good place to start. Maybe just simply what are the five love languages? How did this come about and how did it kind of become this thing that I feel like everybody that I talk to kind of knows a little bit about.

Louis

Yeah, this guy Chapman wrote a book and now has written several books, right? Made a kind of cottage industry for himself out of it on this idea that if you can speak your partner's primary love language, that you're going to have eternal matrimonial bliss or eternal relationship bliss. Right. And so the five love languages are acts of service. Do I do things for you, such as do I spend time making you a burrito?

Gift giving, do I give you gifts like after I make the burrito, I give it to you. Physical touch, like I wrap you in my arms like a burrito. Quality time, like let's eat burritos together. And words of affirmation, you made a very nice burrito.

Travis

Were all of his love languages related to burritos or?

Louis

It's just an easy way to understand them. And I know that before Valentine's Day or either for or before Valentine's Day, I have to buy my wife a burrito because it's a tradition.

 

Travis

That is a wonderful tradition that I believe, my wife is not a big burrito person, but I think tacos, she definitely would be down for, so I may be stealing that.

Louis

The tacos are good, too.

Travis

Louis

Sure, I think that what it provides is a simple solution to a very complex problem. And simple solutions are very, very attractive to people, right? Whether it's about relationships or their personal health, macroeconomics, right? If we promote a simple solution, a lot of people are attracted to that because it takes something really complex and boils it down to say, here's the one secret to doing X.

The problem with simple solutions, think, is that usually complex problems do not have simple solutions. So it's a very attractive concept. And I think people can also relate if they think, yeah, I really like getting gifts from my partner. If my partner would give me more gifts, I'd be happier. I think easy to think that's an attractive notion, but I think that relationships are really complex phenomena that aren't necessarily static the way that love languages suggest they might be.

Travis

I know a couple years ago you and some of your colleagues did some research to try to, I think, figure out, like, how much does this, how true is this, how applicable is this, does it really pan out? What part of the research did you partake in? What role did you play in that?

Louis

Yes, I was mainly a methodologist providing a set of machine learning methods for seeing if we can predict relationship satisfaction for about a thousand couples, folks ranging in age from 18 to 89, who have been together from five months to 70 years and see one, do the big five personality traits, extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability and openness, predict relationship satisfaction and two, Do the love languages predict relationship satisfaction beyond them? And in particular, does the match in love language? Meaning, if your partner, their most preferred and desired love language, say, is physical touch, do you adequately supply physical touch and that match of their desire and your supply predict relationship satisfaction?

Travis

And I want to know what you found out related to that. But first, I'm really curious, how did the, what did the machine learning part of this look like? What was that?

Louis

 

Sure. So this was just one of three methods that we use to try to examine these relationships. And what the machine learning does is give us a separation between when we derive the predictor weights and then when we test their accuracy. So it's just a way of developing a predictive model. Then we can see on new data, does this predictive model predict relationship satisfaction and how do these different models compare?

Travis

So I guess I'm curious those questions that you sought to understand, what did you all discover? What did you learn? What were the answers that you found?

Louis

So the match in love languages, for the most part, did not have much predictive power. What did have predictive power was each person's big five traits and each person's expressions of love languages. How do we explain this? Well, the big five traits include things like agreeableness and emotional stability. Or would you rather be in a relationship with someone who's nice and supportive and friendly, agreeable, or someone who's mean, doesn't really help you out when you need help, and is overall disagreeable? Probably you're going to have better relationship satisfaction with a more agreeable person. With emotional stability, right? Would you rather be with someone who most of the time is relatively stable in their emotions and more on the positive side of things? Or would you like to be with someone who fluctuates wildly in their emotions and goes down to the depths of depression? and anxiety and fear, and then back out of it and, you know, it has a kind of Jekyll and Hyde type of personality, right? I think we can see how the big five traits would be relevant here. And then when it came to the love languages, some of the expressions mattered. Things like words of affirmation. You have nice things to say for your partner, right? You have a supportive word here and there, probably related to agreeableness also. But then also the extent to which they engage in physical touch. There's a problem though, right? This study is cross-sectional. We can't experimentally manipulate how much physical touch couples do. That's big ethical issues there, right? So it's also possible that more satisfied couples engage in more physical touch as opposed to more physical touch leading to greater satisfaction. There's obviously gonna be situations where it's true that more physical touch leads to greater satisfaction. But I think it's going to be just as common, not more so, that greater relationship satisfaction means more physical touch. So, you know, we get a kind of mixed bag. But what we get out of this is, right, if you do nice things, you're nice and supportive to your partner, turn out to have better relationship satisfaction.

Travis

It sounds almost like what really matters is kind of what's going on with the individual, maybe like what their internal makeup is. And if that's good, then they'll probably practice these languages no matter what they are in a better way.

Louis

Well, and it's important to note, I think, that while we often think of personality traits as kind of a neat and fixed within us, we have the power to change them, Personalities defined as our characteristic ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving, right? We control how we behave. It might be hard to control how we behave, and I think many of us find it so at certain times, but we do control how we behave, right?

If we are upset, we don't have to take that out on others. If something happens at home that we don't like, we can hopefully choose how we engage with our partner to discuss that. And so our personality is not fixed, right? We can determine and decide what we're going to do, how we're going to act. Doesn't mean it's easy to do. It's not easy always being a supportive partner and really taking care of the other person the way that you want to be taken care of. And part of that is because Life is not easy for most of us, right? It's exhausting, it's tiring. We're tired, our partner's tired. And so we have to try to keep some of that compassion and empathy in mind when we're coming to our relationship. And to your point though, the people who are more prone to do that are probably going to be the more desirable partners in a long-term relationship.

Travis

I'm curious, this study, it seemed to kind of be like a, I don't want to say like a cheat code to figure out how to do relationships, but it kind of felt, kind of like you said earlier, simple fix to a very complex problem. What do you think is a better way to maybe approach having a good solid relationship?

Louis

Part of what I think is so challenging for people, I think the best way to be a good partner is to first make sure that you're in the mental and emotional place that you need to be in. But that can be very difficult for people when they're young and single and desiring a relationship, right? People kind of joke, They joke, but also they're serious that if you come off as kind of desperate or really feeling like you need a relationship, that's the hardest time to get into a relationship. Whereas if you're Johnny cool and you don't need that relationship, it can be easier to then start a relationship with someone because you don't have that same anxiety inside of you that's leading you maybe to some suboptimal behaviors in those situations. So if you can take care of yourself, find a like Taoism or Confucianism I call right practice and take care of yourself on that daily basis. I think that's the foundation then for being a supportive partner. How can you be effective at taking care of and supporting someone else if your mind and emotions and feelings are in disarray? think that's an important foundation, but that means there is no easy answer, unfortunately, to this important question.

Travis

Yeah, think that that's actually, I think that that's great advice. reminds me something that my wife told me once about how you can't take care of other people unless you take care of yourself. It was kind of the oxygen mask, I guess, metaphor.

Louis

And the other advice I would give for people with wives is listen to your wife is usually really good advice as well.

Travis

I'm going to co-sign that as I feel like is important for me to do. I guess I should say too, it sounds like that no matter where you are in this relationship, it probably can be made better with either tacos or burritos.

Louis

Well, I think it depends where you're at in the relationship, right? Maybe early on, right? Maybe like gifts and physical touch are really important in a relationship. Maybe later on, it's more about quality time and acts of service, right? If you get into the point of you've got a house together and you've got kids, I feel like my life at home is a constant act of service, right? But it's what's necessary for us to keep us and our family healthy and well.

The quality time, the physical touch, the gift giving, that gets kind of pushed to the backside and we sneak in the words of affirmation. But it changes, right? As the relationship goes on, that's not a function of, I have a primary love language that never changes and it's what I want. It's that we are all in different places in our life and our relationships and relationships like almost everything else, right? Need different things at different times. You need different fuel for the fire depending on where you're at.

And so I think it's important to recognize that, you know, maybe today it's making a taco, tomorrow it's giving somebody one, tomorrow it's telling them how good a job they did making the tacos. Maybe it's making tacos together, right? Depending on when and where you're at in your relationship, because they are not static, right? We are constantly changing. Every four years or so, every molecule in our body is different than it was four years ago. So to expect that anything is fixed and permanent and that what worked today will work tomorrow just can't be true.

Travis

So it sounds like we need to be aware of ourselves and also be aware that things are constantly changing and pay attention to stuff.

Louis

Yeah. And right. So the the attractive part of love languages is if I can figure out my partner's love language, I can supply that and we'll be happy. Well, what you're saying and what I'm saying is there's some truth to that. But what the truth is, is I have to be in a place where I can recognize what my partner needs, what our relationship needs, what our family needs. If you're in that situation and from there try to figure that out and provide that on a daily basis as a daily practice as something that requires constant work, relationships or work. There's nothing easy about them. I think for most people, well, there's easy things about them. I shouldn't say there's nothing easy about them, especially in case my wife watches this. But it's to say that it is not always easy, right? It's not easy to keep it maintained over the long term. It requires effort and adaptation so people can recognize that it's to recognize that there are not easy answers just like to most of our most of the parts of our lives.

Travis

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Thank you so much for talking to me about this.

Louis

Yeah, it's my pleasure. I hope that it can maybe help some folks as we go through the Valentine's Day season. know, as a reminder, right, don't be desperate. Just do what you can for now. Do what you can to take care of yourself and improve yourself. And if you can do that, eventually that person will arise out of the world that you've been looking for.

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Travis

Then thanks to Lewis for sharing his insights related to the five love languages and how we can all have healthier relationships. If you or someone you know would make for a great curious conversation, email me at traviskw at vt.edu. And because I don't want you to miss any other great conversations, be sure to rate, follow, and or subscribe to the podcast. I'm Travis Williams and this is Virginia Tech's Curious Conversations.

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