Love Languages

Gary Chapman

The desire for romantic love in marriage is deeply rooted in our psychological makeup. Almost every popular magazine has at least one article each issue on keeping love alive in a marriage. Books abound on the subject. Television and radio talk shows deal with it. Keeping love alive in our marriages is serious business.

With all the books, magazines, and practical help available, why is it that so few couples seem to have found the secret to keeping love alive after the wedding? The problem is that we have overlooked one fundamental truth: People speak different love languages.

Your emotional love language and the language of your spouse may be as different as Chinese from English. No matter how hard you try to express love in English, if your spouse understands only Chinese, you will never understand how to love each other. We must be willing to learn our spouse’s primary love language if we are to be effective communicators of love.

My conclusion after twenty years of marriage counseling is that there are basically five emotional love languages—five ways that people speak and understand emotional love:

Words of Affirmation
Physical Touch
Acts of Service
Quality Time
Receiving Gifts

Seldom do a husband and wife have the same primary emotional love language. We tend to speak our primary love language, and we become confused when our spouse does not understand what we are communicating. We are expressing our love, but the message does not come through because we are speaking what, to them, is a foreign language.

Once you identify and learn to speak your spouse’s primary love language, I believe that you will have discovered the key to a long-lasting, loving marriage. Love need not evaporate after the wedding, but in order to keep it alive most of us will have to put forth the effort to learn a secondary love language. We cannot rely on our native tongue if our spouse does not understand it. If we want him/her to feel the love we are trying to communicate, we must express it in his or her primary love language.

We can learn a lot about loving our spouses, and others, from the way Jesus loves us. He speaks all the love languages:

Words of Affirmation—“Well done, good and faithful servant” (Matthew 25:21).
Physical Touch—“He touched her hand, and the fever left her” (Matthew 8:15)z; “And he took them in his arms and blessed them, laying his hands on them” (Mark 10:16).
Acts of Service—“Even as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Matthew 20:28); “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8).
Quality Time—“For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them” (Matthew 18:20); “And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:20).
Gifts—“For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus” (Romans 3:23-24); “For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 6:23).

The greatest act of love ever performed was Jesus’ death on the cross. Even though Jesus lived a sinless life, He willingly laid it down so that we could be reconciled with God. In doing this He suffered as our substitute and paid the price of our sins. Through Jesus’ words and actions we are assured of God’s love for us, and if we accept His love and grace we can one day experience the joy of eternal life. If you desire the incomparable love of Jesus in your life, you can say a prayer like this:

Dear Jesus, I know I have sinned; please forgive me. I know You love me so much that You died for me—suffered in my place. I put my trust in You as my Savior, and I ask You to come into my heart and show me what love really is. Amen.

© 2002 - 2007 Good News Publishers. Used by permission.
Translated by permission of Good News Publishers
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