On The Five Love Languages and Building Universal Empathy
I read The Five Love Languages in June 2015 thanks to the encouragement of my brilliant, high EQ wife. She had started to read it, suggested I read it, which I did, and 5 years later I believe she never finished the book.
But that’s fine because she already has the skill set espoused in the book and her encouragement was a net positive for me as an individual just as much as it was for us as a couple, so it served both of us well regardless.
The premise of The Five Love Languages, written in 1992 by Gary Chapman, is that each individual has ways in which he or she expresses and receives love: words of affirmation, quality time, receiving gifts, acts of service, and physical touch. For example, acts of service is something I appreciate, so my partner planning a special trip for us and finding ways to do things that I enjoy means a lot to me. On the other hand, I grew up receiving a good share of affirmation, and often like to be alone, so in my situation, words of affirmation and quality time are less well received.
Notably, the way one expresses and receives love should most likely be different, and this is where the lesson of empathy comes in. The adage “Treat others as you would like to be treated” could perhaps be reconsidered here as “Treat others as they would like to be treated”. It’s a subtle but crucial difference. This flips the way we treat people from mirroring our wants and needs to rather understanding and reflecting that person’s wants and needs instead.
Reading this book and recognizing that this maxim applies to virtually any relationship was transformative for me. Intuitively I had known for decades that people I interacted with had specific ways they’d like to be treated. Simple social cues like a joke landing flat, body language that expresses lack of enthusiasm, or just the inability to persuade or build rapport with someone had always been present in my life, but I never had a lens to process this in the manner of “slow thinking” from Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow but now I did.
The lesson is like most important lessons: obvious and well-known yet rarely practiced. There are a series of tactics one can use to behave this way, but this essay is written principally as self-expression rather than a self-help article, so I won’t spend time on that. But I will say that flipping one’s mindset to focus on treating others as they’d like to be treated - hopefully as part of being a good person rather than any attempt to manipulate people - is crucial. Thinking this way increases the proportion of times you will be a partner to those you interact with rather than forcing your own wants and desires on those people subconsciously. If for no other purpose than being a good person, this is key.
PS: Upon last-minute research before publishing this, I noticed that the author has gone onto publish books addressing not just couples, but parents with their children, employees with their coworkers, and so on. Clearly, practicing this approach of empathy is something that is universally beneficial in all relationships.