The “love languages” are a hoax by a Southern Baptist pastor
Let’s look at Gary Chapman’s famous theory
In 1992, a self-help book by a man calling himself a “marriage counselor” was published that laid out a theory of human relationships. It became a phenomenon.
As famous as The 5 Love Languages has been, few seem to know that Gary Chapman was never a marriage counselor. He presented as a “Dr.,” with many assuming he was a mental health professional.
He was one thing: a Southern Baptist pastor.
Gary Chapman’s story seemed to be that he was a marriage counselor who had a startling insight.
People in relationships, he explained, express affection in five distinct modes, and everyone has a ‘primary’ mode. For some it’s words, for others it’s ‘acts of service’. Or they might give gifts, spend time, or touch.
These were his five “love languages,” and he said that marriages improve drastically if people learn to ‘speak’ their partner’s language.
Did that seem like great relationship advice?
Problems have been noticed. Owing to the popularity of The 5 Love Languages, many psychologists have studied its claims. It turns out that Chapman’s theories can’t be documented.
A study in 2013, for example, found no benefit when couples claimed the same ‘love language’, and those whose self-assessed ‘love languages’ were mismatched “reported high relational quality.”
Many have been skeptical of the ‘love language’ concept.
I’m looking over social media, and noting various observations made over time. The psychologist Dr. Raquel Martin offers that the “love languages” model is a “neat box” that isn’t really “how human beings work.”
She adds: “Everyone is unique and as a result you are going to have to put the work in to build meaningful relationships.”
Scott Adams calls the book “useless bullshit.” As he puts it: “If you ask a man what his love language is, he’s very likely to say touch. Do you know why? Because he’s a man.”
It turns out that men often have the ‘love language’ of touch.
That observation is regularly made by both men and women, with varying inflections.
The feminist commentator Feminista Jones is succinct:
“Many men who say physical touch is their ‘love language’ just really like to fuck and this pseudoscience gives it a nice flower”
What’s less noticed is how Southern Baptist it all is.
To learn about Gary Chapman is to find only religious references. He has lived in white Southern Baptist communities all his life. He was born in 1938 in a small town in North Carolina. He determined to be a missionary.
At the time, missionaries were very glamorous in Evangelical culture. In his 2021 memoir, Life Lessons and Love Languages, he name-checks his heroes, Jim Elliot and Billy Graham. Like them, he went to Wheaton College, and like them, he realized he didn’t much care for actual missionary work.
He decided to be an administrator for a missionary organization.
He went to Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary for a Ph.D. in “Christian education,” i.e. teaching Southern Baptist theology.
He got married, and was planning to ship out to Africa. He was doing a pastoral internship when his marriage hit the skids.
Gary Chapman is a man who likes a quiet, methodical existence. But his wife’s work in the kitchen drove him crazy. He liked the dishwasher loaded one way. She loaded it in another. She left cabinet and drawer doors open.
He was near the breaking point, when he had a mystic vision of Jesus washing the feet of the disciples.
That’s the story that he tells, anyway.
A new idea of service to his wife, he says, came over him.
He writes in his memoir: “I went home and told Karolyn that she no longer had to worry about the doors and drawers.”
Or maybe it happened in another way?
I read this as a story about a woman who probably did not want to go to Africa, and was acting out. If she divorced her weird OCD husband, however, his career as a pastor would’ve been over.
He went into a mode of total submission to appease her.
But a 2006 profile in his local newspaper, I notice, gives their marital struggles some different suggestion. As it’s narrated there:
“She came into the marriage feeling self-sufficient and not interested in having a husband tell her what to do. He came into the marriage with what, in retrospect, he sees as some misguided notions about a husband’s leadership role.”
That’s a real story? A Southern Baptist man often imagines he’s lord of the universe. His wife can disagree, curiously enough, and warfare breaks out.
But Chapman’s shift to “counseling” was mostly just in keeping with religious trends.
What he doesn’t explain is that, by the 1970s, Southern Baptists had gotten bored with missionaries. The Baby Boomers were having kids, and local church membership was surging.
The new focus of the religion became counseling and lifestyle gurus. Chapman doesn’t discuss the church leaders who were his obvious models: James Dobson, Jay E. Adams, and the infamous Bill Gothard.
He got a job as an associate pastor in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. That gave him clerical standing and the ability to skip out on most church duties. He developed his “Biblical Seminar on Marriage” and went on the road.
I see so many newspaper ads for his seminar across America that I suspect any improvement to his marriage owed largely to him being gone.
Chapman’s ideas were elaborated out of period Evangelical “biblical counseling.”
This was nothing even close to a mental health practice. Typically done with no training other than reading a book or two, it mostly involved, as the religion scholar Charles Marsh would recall:
“…listening to your pastor ramble about sin and how, he is convinced, most mental problems are the result of disobedience to God. You might then be encouraged to take a cleansing dive into the Psalms and to check back a month later.”
The active assumptions were explicitly eugenic. The great teacher of Evangelical marriage counseling was Paul Popenoe, the Nazi apologist who developed marriage counseling to get “fit” couples to breed more.
“Biblical counseling” was also theocratic.
The idea was to bring you in line with all authorities that were over you—from husband to pastor to president. As the Christian scholar David Powlison writes in a study, “biblical counseling” was founded on:
“…the notion that human life is meant to be lived under benign authority — parental, pastoral, ecclesiastical, and, ultimately, immediate theocratic authority as articulated in the Bible…”
By the early 1980s—at the dawn of the “Religious Right”—Gary Chapman was willing to do his part to enact this divine social order.
He was more creative than most clerics of his era.
He’d seen in his own marriage that just giving women orders, in the usual Southern Baptist style, wasn’t working anymore. He passed himself off as a ‘marriage counselor’ to make himself seem more credible.
He seemed kind, reasonable, insightful. He presented his “language theory” as the result of long experience with couples in crisis.
He explained to women that they were not appreciating male labor. The practical effect of the “love languages” discourse is to make women value men more. Then women will see what they have to do in return.
He clearly imagines a largely female readership, and gives instructions on being a “good wife.”
A famous passage from The 5 Love Languages has Chapman instructing women not to nag their husbands. Rather, he says:
“…the next time your husband does anything good, give him a verbal compliment. If he takes the garbage out, say, ‘Dan, I want you to know that I really appreciate your taking the garbage out.’”
For the scholar Jane Ward, it reads as women being given “husband-centered emotional labor, a kind of ‘intensive wifing’…”
But that’s a Southern Baptist wife?
The religion puts women in a strange position: both worshipping a husband as God’s representative on earth, and dealing with the reality: an emotionally stunted man-child.
By 1992, Chapman had already published a few books, and with The 5 Love Languages he set out to write a book that would cloak the religious references and be received into the “self-help” genre.
His publisher was helping out. Moody Publishers was the most die-hard Evangelical publisher. They created a de-Christianized imprint, ‘Northfield Publishing’, to conceal the religion.
The book went over big—with few realizing Chapman’s claim to being a “marriage counselor” was false, and that he was merely a local pastor.
In later books, Chapman slipped in more and more overt Southern Baptist theology.
He is wearyingly anti-gay, and has often argued for reparative therapy. The obsessive concern with anti-gay theology, as Valentine Wiggin has noted, suggests less a love language than a ‘hate language’.
But it was, on the whole, a bold strategy of smuggling the most basic idea in all Southern Baptist theology into the “self-help” genre. Gary Chapman asserted that the man’s needs and interests were the highest priority.
Then he gave couples a means of bartering for sex.
That’s the game playing out. The husband will ‘learn’ his wife’s “love language” in taking out the trash, spending time with her, giving her gifts, etc. She’ll feel seen and heard.
Then the man’s “love language” will have to be ‘learned’ by his wife, and they’ll have sex.
It was never actually a ‘language’—or loving. 🔶
Added: The podcast If Books Could Kill podcast did an episode about The 5 Love Languages, and many problems with it are evoked.
