The public has something of an obsession with love languages, believing that the key to lasting love is for partners to express love in each other’s preferred language. Despite the popularity of Chapman’s book The 5 Love Languages, there is a paucity of empirical work on love languages, and collectively, it does not provide strong empirical support for the book’s three central assumptions that (a) each person has a preferred love language, (b) there are five love languages, and (c) couples are more satisfied when partners speak one another’s preferred language. We discuss potential reasons for the popularity of the love languages, including the fact that it enables people to identify important relationship needs, provides an intuitive metaphor that resonates with people, and offers a straightforward way to improve relationships. We offer an alternative metaphor that we believe more accurately reflects a large body of empirical research on relationships: Love is not akin to a language one needs to learn to speak but can be more appropriately understood as a balanced diet in which people need a full range of essential nutrients to cultivate lasting love.

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从科学的角度看大众心理学：从关系科学的角度评估爱情语言

公众对爱情语言有一种痴迷，认为爱情持久的关键是伴侣用彼此喜欢的语言表达爱情。尽管查普曼的《五种爱情语言》一书很受欢迎，但关于爱情语言的实证研究却很少，总的来说，它没有为该书的三个中心假设提供强有力的实证支持，即（a）每个人都有一种偏好的爱情语言， (b) 有五种爱情语言，(c) 当伴侣说彼此喜欢的语言时，夫妻会更满意。我们讨论了爱情语言流行的潜在原因，包括它使人们能够识别重要的关系需求，提供了与人们产生共鸣的直观隐喻，并提供了改善关系的直接方法。我们提供了另一种隐喻，我们认为它更准确地反映了关于关系的大量实证研究：爱并不类似于人们需要学习说话的语言，而是可以更恰当地理解为人们需要全方位的均衡饮食。培养持久爱情的必需营养素。