Gary Chapman wrote a book titled, The 5 Love Languages. It divides love (the kind we have for one another) into 5 categories: Words of Affirmation, Acts of Service, Receiving Gifts, Quality Time, and Physical Touch. If you go to the book’s website, you can take this quiz to discover your “love language”. The quiz asks questions like…
Would you rather receive a note or a hug? Do you prefer someone to say a kind word or someone spend hours chatting with you? etc.
At the end, it will tell you on a scale of 1-12 where you fall into each “language”.
Back in January, my entire team took this quiz one night. It was fun to see how everyone scored. Some of the results were super obvious based on personalities. Other results were surprising. That night, we learned a lot of things about each other, our personalities, the way we operate, the way we tick. It was really cool to find out how other people see, feel, and express love.
Since that night, I realized I am starting to see love in terms of an actual language.
I have 5 teammates. For sake of the analogy, imagine that one of us speaks Chinese, one speaks French, one speaks Thai, one speaks English, and two of us speak Spanish. We all love each other, but each of us says it in a different way:
Wo ài ni.
Je t’aime.
Phm rak khun.
I love you.
Te amo.
When you study languages, you quickly find that some are similar and some are wildly different. By speaking Spanish, you can understand quite a bit of Italian, but neither one gets you any closer to reading a book in Mandarin. When I left for the race, I didn’t speak a word of Thai. Now, I know that “Sah Wah Di Kah” means “Hello”. It was something I was taught; it was something that I had to learn.
Take going to the movies. For me, while I enjoy going occasionally, it’s not my idea of a perfect date. I look forward more to the dinner before or the coffee that follows. I speak love in the “language” of conversation. That’s one of the “languages” it is easy for me to see love most present. However, the problem I had was that I used to think that time spent at the movies was the part of the night when love wasn’t being spoken at all. It wasn’t that I didn’t understand another “language”. The problem was that I wasn’t even listening for it.
I enjoy finding how things we know and experience on the daily can help explain things that are beyond words, like love. The more I think about it, the more similarities I can extrapolate, and the more excited I get talking about it.
Of course, the science is not exact. Unlike actual languages, just because I am not fluent in a particular love language does not mean I don’t understand it at all. For example, just because I scored higher on Quality Time (10) than Receiving Gifts (4) does not mean that when a teammate hands me a candy bar I feel any less loved. In fact, on the quiz, I score the lowest on Acts of Service (1), but in reality, I like to show my teammates love by serving them. That would be like not understand Japanese, but when I opened my mouth, I would speak it fluently. Again…not an exact science haha.
As I look back on my last 5 months living in a close-knit community of believers, I am realizing that I am learning more about languages than a couple of phrases in each country I visit. I am learning how to show love in different ways. My family here shows me every day how love can be expressed in countless ways.
Love is not only limited to the way I speak it.
Since I have started seeing the similarities between love languages and actual languages, I find myself approaching love in new way, a way that says, “Teach me what it means to love. I want to be fluent.”
