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You’ve probably heard all about the five love languages by now — physical touch, words of affirmation, quality time, giving gifts and acts of service — and how they can improve lives and relationships by helping you learn more about yourself and the ways you prefer to give and receive love. If you know your love languages already, that’s fantastic! If you don’t, there’s a quiz you can take to figure it out.
Although love languages can improve so many areas of life, much of the conversation involving love languages centers around relationships. This can be a little disheartening, especially if you happen to be single. But there’s no need to worry. In fact, using the five love languages in your broader life is the best way to apply the principle. If you want to bring it a bit more into your life, here are a few ways you can do it.
Your family are probably some of the most important people in your life, and it makes sense that you’d want to love them as best as you can. This being said, family relationships often fall by the wayside when discussing love languages. But learning your family’s love languages can help strengthen the family bond as well as individual relationships within the family dynamic.
When you learn more about how your parents, siblings, children or other family members prefer to give and receive love, it can help you find a closer bond with them so you can understand one another even better than before. Just like partners often have different love languages, the same goes for families.
Friendships are a great way to exercise your love language skills. People often take friendships for granted, but it’s important for friends to show love to one another, just like family and romantic partners. Learning about your friends’ love languages can help them feel seen and appreciated while making your bond much stronger.
Since friends are often on the same page, you can even take the quiz together or talk about love languages openly in your friendship as a fun activity. Just like relationships, learning and utilizing love languages can strengthen friendships and even help you work through disagreements smoothly.
But what about one of the most important kinds of love — self love? When you’re single, you might just be in the perfect spot to focus on your own needs and care more than ever before, and bringing your love language in is just another way to do that. While it can be easy to think about love languages in terms of transactions — the terms “giving” and “receiving” love evoke this feeling even more — but that’s hardly the beginning and end of it.
By learning about your own love languages and how you prefer to experience love, you can apply that to the time and care you spend with yourself. If quality time is your love language, for example, a night in spent watching movies and cooking a nice meal could be your ideal form of self care. On the other hand, if your love language is gifts, you might fair better treating yourself to something nice. No matter what it looks like for you, you can use love languages to direct your self care practice.
Ah, yes, the one plenty of people have been waiting for. While spending too much time on this one might not be in everyone’s benefit — for example, those who are single and loving it — but it’s worth at least mentioning. By being aware of love languages when you look for love or date around, you can get a better understanding of people and how to interact with them in order to see if you mesh well together.
Many people hold the misunderstanding that in order to have a positive and healthy relationship, you need to share the same love languages with your partner. This is actually untrue. When you date around, you don’t need to turn away potential partners because they prefer to receive love differently. Instead, you can assess whether you can work together to meet one another’s needs, even if they are different from each other.
While love languages are all about love, they don’t need to be all about romance. By using the love languages in your family, friendships and even in your relationship with yourself, you can enhance so many areas of your life and get a start on stronger, happier relationships. How do you use love languages in your life?
