These two love languages are least likely to last, according to expert (2024)

Do you like to offer your partner kind words and compliments? Or do you prefer to express your affection with gifts, or by taking care of the daily chores?

An important aspect of romantic relationships is the way each partner likes to receive and give love. A few years ago, in a bestselling book, Gary Chapman identified five different "languages of love" that we all unconsciously use: words of affirmation, physical touch, receiving gifts, acts of service, and quality time.

Learning your partner's love language will help your relationship, according to Chapman. When you know what makes your partner feel loved, you can show your love the way your partner needs to feel it.

But are some of the five particularly compatible with others or especially ill-suited? And how can you learn them?

Newsweek asked relationship and psychology experts how you can become fluent in love languages.

Andrew Bland, a professor of psychology from Millersville University in Pennsylvania, told Newsweek: "Chapman proposed that each person has a primary love language by which they prefer to receive affection and that relational distress occurs when individuals do not express affection using their partner's primary love language, and the message of affection becomes lost."

In other words, we don't all perceive love the same way—and what makes you feel cherished may not necessarily work for your partner. This doesn't mean you don't belong together, it just means you have to find the right way to make each other feel loved.

The 5 Love Languages Explained

1. Words of Affirmation

Some individuals feel most loved when receiving kind words, compliments or words of encouragement from their partner. In other words, they need their partner to give them the reassurance that they're looking for.

Bland described words of affirmation as an "individual's preference for their partner to regularly communicate affection, via compliments and other words of appreciation/encouragement, and kindness versus insistences."

2. Quality Time

"Undivided, focused attention" is the key to quality time as a love language, according to Bland.

The idea is to hang out together without any distractions and with plenty of "uninterrupted empathetic, reflective listening and self-disclosure" or "intentional engagement in mutually enjoyable activities."

3. Receiving Gifts

Some people feel most loved when their partners give them a gift that is meaningful. Before dismissing this as materialistic, remember that the gifts don't need to be expensive. It's more about the meaning than the price tag.

This love language includes "the gift of one's presence during times of crisis," Bland said, as well as a "preference for one's partner to creatively provide a stream of visual symbols of affection that can either be purchased, found or made, and that need not be expensive."

4. Acts of Service

Helping out with daily tasks, to make your partner's life bit easier, is a powerful symbol of affection for some.

Sejal Mehta Barden, executive director of the Marriage and Family Research Institute at the University of Central Florida, told Newsweek that these tasks could be as simple as filling the gas tank in your partner's car, doing the dishes or taking out the trash. "Acts that make us feel loved," she said.

5. Physical Touch

Finally, there is what Bland defines as "the preference for tactile expressions of love via both sexual and non-sexual touch."

It could just be a hug, a caress or even just a pat on the back—something that makes them feel your presence.

What Are The Least Compatible Love Languages?

A couple does not need to be speaking the same love language to be happy, but some pairings require more effort than others, said Rabbi Shlomo Slatkin, a counselor and founder of The Marriage Restoration Project.

"Words of affirmation and acts of service are often incompatible as the former is more focused on talk while the latter on action," he told Newsweek.

"Some people want verbal affection and appreciation, dry acts will not suffice. On the other hand those who want action feel that talk is cheap, so there can be a lot of conflict in this area."

Couples shouldn't be put off by this seeming mismatch, Slatkin added. They should instead see it as an "opportunity for growth and healing" as it compels a person to stretch to meet their partner's needs, "despite it being the hardest thing to do and most out of character."

He also explained that love languages are often rooted in unmet needs from childhood. "So, if one did not get physical affection growing up, they may seek that in a partner and that could be their love language."

Barden recommends that couples discuss their love languages so they can work out how to spend time together in a way that makes both feel loved.

"A classic example might be one of the partners has quality time as a love language and another partner has physical touch," she said.

"You can easily put both of those together of having quality time, watching a movie, and making sure that you're not sitting on separate chairs, but you're choosing to sit on a sofa where you can also have physical touch associated together."

For Bland, focusing on whether your partner's love language is compatible with yours is less helpful than making an effort to express love the way your partner wants to experience it.

"What matters is the degree to which each partner is committed to accepting the other as they are and transcending their own self-narrative and, thus, complementing and integrating the other's worldview into their own," he said.

In Bland's research into Chapman's model, he found that each partner reported greater levels of relationship satisfaction when incorporation of the other's values and worldview into their own had taken place.

How to Determine Your or Your Partner's Love Language

Understanding your own or your partner's love language requires self-reflection in conjunction with careful observations of and conversations with your partner, according to Bland. If there is distress in the relationship, a licensed therapist may be needed to facilitate dialogue.

When you push yourself out of your "egocentric comfort zone" to use your partner's love language, both individuals benefit.

"Each partner develops under-developed possibilities within themselves and integrates those into their existing personality, while also contributing to the other's growth. Paradoxically, through this process, individuality of both partners, as well as of the couple, is not lost but rather enhanced."