A hidden factor in healthy love

You and your sweetheart likely have different love languages

“The key to healthy aging is relationships, relationships, relationships.” — Dr. George Vaillant

Today marks the holiday devoted to relationships: Valentine’s Day, the Feast Day of St. Valentine, the patron saint of lovers (and people with epilepsy and beekeepers!). Studies have repeatedly shown that strong relationships are a key factor in our health, including how long we live.

Here’s what one meta-analytic review that crunched the data across 148 studies found:

“Data across 308,849 individuals, followed for an average of 7.5 years, indicate that individuals with adequate social relationships have a 50% greater likelihood of survival compared to those with poor or insufficient social relationships. The magnitude of this effect is comparable with quitting smoking and it exceeds many well-known risk factors for mortality (e.g., obesity, physical inactivity).”

Another famous longitudinal study, based at Harvard, followed 268 men from college through their entire lives and then expanded to include more men, children, and spouses. (Dr. Valliant, quoted at the top of this post, ran the study from 1972 to 2004.) The study been a remarkable treasure trove of the factors that matter in health and happiness. As one article explains:

“Close relationships, more than money or fame, are what keep people happy throughout their lives, the study revealed. Those ties protect people from life’s discontents, help to delay mental and physical decline, and are better predictors of long and happy lives than social class, IQ, or even genes.”

Relationships matter. Yet for all the tools designed around diet, exercise, movement, meditation, blood pressure, where are the tools designed to help nurture relationships?

How exactly do we keep our partnerships and friendships healthy and strong?

I’d love to hear about any tools you recommend. Here is one guiding framework, from a book my brother gifted me ahead of my wedding, a bestselling book first published in 1992: The 5 Love Languages.

The author, Gary Chapman, has been a marriage counselor for more than 30 years. (He’s also a Baptist minister, so his language is rooted in a husband-wife scenario, but I think his concept is applicable and useful to partners and friendships of all types.)

His epiphany from decades of observing both troubled and joyful relationships was that each person has a primary love language.

Your primary love language is how you perceive love from others.

For example, some people are greatly moved by gifts; others don’t care much about the gifts, but they crave time together. Some people like to be touched — hugs, holding hands — but that’s not that important to other people. Some people might show their love in taking care of their family through work, chores, and other acts. And some people feel loved when they hear words of encouragement, appreciation, or compliments.

All love languages are nice, but they matter to us individually in vastly different magnitudes.

In his decades talking with couples, Gary noticed five categories of how people perceived love, which he named “love languages”:

• Words of Affirmation

• Quality Time

• Receiving Gifts

• Acts of Service

• Physical Touch

Here’s the big problem: Seldom do partners have the same primary emotional love language, he writes. And we tend to show love in the way we like to receive love.

As you can imagine, this mismatch can lead to confusion, misunderstanding, and, eventually, resentment.

Without steady communication in our primary love language, we can feel unloved. Whether it is unintentional or not, it still hurts.

Such a mismatch can be hidden for years, because we are each typically acting in the language we best understand. We are showing our love in the best way we know — how could that not be enough?

This is another critical area of health that isn’t obvious! Learning your beloved’s primary love language can make a major difference in your long-term trajectory of health and happiness. It’s not especially difficult, but it requires intention and then persistence, especially if your partner’s primary love language doesn’t come naturally to you.

Most of the categories seem self-explanatory, but when I reread the book, I was struck by the nuances within each, and how they could require more digging for each of us.

For example: Which particular “acts of service” matter to your partner? Maybe they don’t care at all if you mow the lawn, which is what you’ve been keeping on top of diligently, but they really want you to take an equal turn in changing the baby’s diapers, which you have been, oh, maybe avoiding. It might seem silly and inconsequential, but small resentments hinge on these small moments. Like drips of water, little resentments can erode a relationship over months, years, and decades.

Here’s another example of nuances within a love language. Words of Affirmation can be viewed in many distinct ways, including:

• Compliments

• Encouragement

• Validation

• Kindness

• Appreciation

Big difference! Yet they were all lumped into a single “language,” with different “dialects,” as Gary put it. Which one matters to your beloved might not be the one you expect.

So how do you discover someone else’s primary love language?

One starting point is this free quiz (no email address required). Even if the results don’t seem spot on to you, you’ll have an entryway for talking about why the results are off and what actually resonates with you.

Finally, Happy Valentine’s Day to all of you. Thank you for being in this space with me, exploring health in a million different ways. I’m grateful you are here, and wish you much love ahead.

To our journeys and better health,

Brianne