(RNS) — When Katie Frugé and her husband, Lafayette, decided to get married in 2007, they were 21 and did not know what they did not know.
“We were too young to get married and too young really to care,” said Frugé, who is now director of the Center for Cultural Engagement for the Baptist General Convention of Texas.
For guidance, the young couple turned to “The Five Love Languages,” a popular book by North Carolina author and pastor Gary Chapman. First published in 1992, the book explores different ways people express love — words of affirmation, physical touch, quality time, acts of service and giving gifts — in hopes of helping couples find happiness.
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The book claims understanding each other’s love language can help create healthy marriages. Frugé recalls thinking the book held the key to a bright future.
“We thought, we’ll just learn each other’s love languages and everything’s going be hunky-dory,” she said. “We’re not going to ever have any fights and we’re both going to feel fully satisfied all the time.”
Married life proved more complicated.
Frugé said she and her husband are still happily married 17 years later but there were a lot of bumps, including several health crises — “We had the sickness and health part,” she said. And they needed more love along the way than a formula could provide.
“When I’m diagnosed with cancer, I don’t need my husband to go out and buy me a gift at that moment,” she said.
Once popular mostly in evangelical Christian circles, the Five Love Languages have exploded into a pop culture phenomenon. The dating app Bumble offers a Five Love Languages quiz, the concept has been featured on “The Bachelorette” and in major media outlets, while the Five Love Languages channel on TikTok has attracted tens of millions of views. Chapman has sold more than 20 million copies of his books and launched a cottage industry of conferences, related books and an online quiz taken tens of millions of times.
All of that attention has led researchers such as Emily Impett, a psychology professor and director of the Relationships and Well-Being Laboratory at the University of Toronto Mississauga, to ask if the claims of the Five Love Languages stand up to scientific scrutiny, and perhaps nearly as important — what can scholars learn from the popularity of Chapman’s work?
A new paper in “Current Directions in Psychological Science” suggests Chapman’s theory about how love works doesn’t quite add up. For the paper, Impett and a pair of colleagues looked at a series of studies that tried to test three key ideas about the Five Love Languages: that people have a primary love language, that five love languages exist and that people are happier with a partner who speaks their primary love language.
The studies, said Impett and her colleagues, don’t support that theory.
