Is there a universal language of love or is the key to relationship success simply hard work?

Ukraine has seen a wartime surge in weddings as couples rush to tie the knot in the face of Russia’s invasion – Copyright AFP Sergei SUPINSKY

What is the best approach to take for fostering and nurturing high-quality, loving relationships? This is a question that psychologist Louis Hickman has been weighing up recently. The findings of his research come at the right time, just ahead of Valentine’s Day.

To understand Louis Hickman’s perspective, it is necessary to explore the concept of so-called ‘love languages’. Hickman is an assistant professor of industrial-organizational psychology in the College of Science at Virginia Tech and he has been researching this area for many years.

Hickman says: “In the theory, there are five languages: words of affirmation, physical touch, gifts, quality time, and acts of service… we all have a ‘primary’ love language, and we will experience a high quality relationship when our primary language matches our partner’s.” These languages were first coined by a psychologist called Gary Chapman in 1992.

But do these languages actually exist and function in a meaningful way? Hickman presents a simple solution to what is ostensibly a complex problem: “It may have some usefulness for helping people understand one part of the problem, but it is not a silver bullet.”

Hickman presented his love languages research last spring at the International Association for Relationship Research’s Mini-Conference on Resilience in Interpersonal and Social Environments.

The researcher found that matching on your love languages did not predict relationship satisfaction in any meaningful sense, with a few caveats. Here Hickman finds: “Relationship satisfaction suffers when a person strongly desires something their partner does not provide, or when they strongly dislike something that their partner provides.”

Expanding on this, Hickman continues: “While a match between a person and their partner’s love language predicted relationship satisfaction, the partners’ big five traits – extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, and openness, better predicted relationship satisfaction. In other words, you can predict relationship satisfaction better from your partner’s self-reported big five traits than with your and your partner’s love languages.”

As how this works is no surprise, Hickman explains: “People experience higher relationship satisfaction when they and their partner are more emotionally stable and agreeable.” 

Hickman is not entirely opposed to the concept of love languages. He indicates: “They could potentially be helpful if perhaps your partner feels that you are not providing enough of or too much of one of those types of behaviours.”

The key to success says Hickman is the building a successful relationship through both people putting in the effort.

Hickman reasons: “Open, honest communication is necessary and that is not captured in love languages. You must be motivated to improve or maintain the quality of your relationship, know how to effectively do so, and enact that knowledge into behaviour.”