Love Languages

Love languages are the ways people express and/or like to receive affection. A while back, someone wrote a bestselling book about the more common ones. And the book’s main themes struck a strong chord with the public.

Sadly, there’s something inherently misleading about the whole notion of love languages. First and foremost, real love has only one true identity. And second, it’s risky to confuse affection, which is what the so-called “love languages” involve, with love. True, folks who understand love and who show it can be very affectionate. But affection itself is not love. (See also: Things That Seem Like Love But Aren’t.) It’s a frequent companion of love, to be sure. But it’s not the essence of love.

The various ways we come to believe that someone really cares about us can impair our understanding love’s true nature. And we can get stuck in those erroneous beliefs. That makes us believe that certain actions, words, and manner of relating indicate that someone has real love for us, even when they don’t or aren’t actually very capable of it.

A Poignant Example

For many years, “Jane” struggled with feelings of low self-worth. And she came by those feelings quite honestly. As a child she learned early on that her father had no real use for women, other than as an object of personal satisfaction. And he desperately wanted a son whom he could mold in his own image. But fate and nature graced him with 5 daughters. He never hid his disdain or disappointment about this. To Jane, the message came through loud and clear: if you were every bit a woman, and you were clearly different from him in other ways too, you had little to no value.

For Jane, words of affirmation, especially from men, became the ultimate of love languages. Let a man tell Jane how wonderful she was or how much value he saw in her, and before you knew it, she was giving her heart away. She would have to learn many painful lessons about the risks associated with that. Not everyone who sees value in you, and who readily tells you, has the desire, or even the capacity, to genuinely love you. Real love is much more than affirmation. And it’s certainly much more than manipulative “ego-massaging.” But it would take many heartbreaks for Jane to learn that lesson. And it would take her some time before she made any man earn the right to her precious heart. For too long, she equated love with affirming language, and that would do her in many times.

Character Matters

Character Matters will be a live program once again on 12-18-24. Our topic will be the nature of love as defined in Essentials for the Journey.

You can participate in real time by following this link to the broadcast studio waiting room. Find this link also on the Character Matters and Media blog page. Also, find on the aforementioned page, and here,  a link to Dr. Simon’s YouTube Channel to view the program in real time and also to access the recording.