[MillenialMan]

I don't mean this disrespectfully, but your comment is a perfect example of someone falling into the trap I was describing. If someone's using you, they don't love you. They won't love you. It doesn't matter what their "love language" is - giving them the thing they're looking to extract isn't going to help, it's just going to get you exploited.

[hallway_monitor]

That case doesn't apply because it's not love and that partner is not committed to the relationship. In fact I would go so far to say it's pathological.

I think GP would agree that this type of self help book is not a Rosetta Stone and its core truth may be somewhat banal ie think about what makes your partner feel special not only what makes you feel special. Maybe part of the success formula for these pop psyc books is that we need these truths to be wrapped in a story and labeled so we can remember them more easily.

[MillenialMan]

My point is that he's trying to shoehorn the "Love Languages" framework onto that situation, because the model is designed to encourage you to do that - it's the same thing that makes it sell. You shouldn't dismiss that as a coincidence, it's not as simple as divorcing that from the legitimate insights. The framework is designed to be a brain worm.

Here's a question: you like the framework. Have you ever seen a specific relationship be saved by it?

[PeterisP]

While it's hard to attribute "saving a relationship" to any one thing, yes, I've seen multiple relationships where this book helped the couple's communication during a crisis in a very long-term relationship; surfacing some things that (with hindsight) could and needed to be communicated and fixed many years ago but which simply were not; because they lacked "skill"(? or had ingrained/cultural barriers?) to meaningfully talk with their partner about the specific issues and unmet needs they had.

However, your objections seem to be about something other than what I'm talking about - what I hear in your responses is something like equivocating "Understand that it's their love language" with "you should accept it unconditionally", especially in the context of abusive relationships, which is definitely not what I'm arguing about. The decision whether a particular relationship is good for both people involved and whether should continue is orthogonal to that aspect, and "love languages" don't/shouldn't affect that decision; But in the context of various one-sided and possibly relationships, however, understanding that (for example) one partner really only cares about sex in this relationship and doesn't care about the other aspects - well, that's useful information to make the decision whether to move on away from the relationship.

I see it's use solely as a means of improving communication, and it's scope limited for couples which have a problem with that communication (which is common) and also a mutual desire to improve it (which is not that common, and already excludes many destined-to-fail relationships), in this regard, it's useful only if applied by the couple, not by one of them. It's definitely not an universal solution - it solves a particular type (though IMHO popular) of miscommunication, and if the couple has fixed those, this book will be useless for any other types of problems in their relationship.