‘The 5 Love Languages’ Is a Perennial Best Seller Because It Helps You Read Your Partner’s Weird Mind

So: People are simultaneously totally overconfident and totally insecure about their ability to read the minds of their partners. People are complicated. And so it is little wonder that a straightforward concept like “love languages” has caught on the way it has: It’s comforting to think that there are “types” of people, “who behave in stable and predictable ways, and you can classify them as one type or another,” Epley explained to me in an email. Perhaps the best current example of this is the MBTI, which was itself inspired by Carl Jung’s theory of personality archetypes. “Jung’s basic theory has clearly been discredited, as personality is much more fluid than simple type-based theories would predict, and the MBTI therefore has a host of problems that would take too long to detail,” Epley told me. “But any book that claims there are X types of people easily resonates with people’s intuitions about each other. We prefer categories, not continuums.”

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Frameworks like these are an incredibly helpful place to start, a foggy window through which you can begin to see at least the shadows of thoughts and feelings within another mind. “It gave people a vocabulary that they didn’t have before,” said Nicole Egbert, a communications professor at Kent State University who has published two scholarly papers examining the love languages from an academic perspective. In these papers, she argues that Chapman’s model is like a plain-English version of something researchers call relational maintenance — that is, the things couples do to stay happy over the long-term. “This is so important, but it’s really hard to explain,” she said. “And I think Chapman found a very sort of intuitive framework … and all of a sudden people could talk about it. People felt like, ‘Okay, I can use this to explain why it is I’m frustrated even though you feel like you’re trying so hard.'” (Egbert said her papers are rarely cited by other academics, but they’re far and away her most-viewed work on ResearchGate, a sort of social-networking site for scientists.)