From the liberal New York Times.

Excerpt:

“As a senior in high school, I had a strong sense that God wanted me in some kind of ministry,” he told me. “There were only two things I knew in a Christian framework that I could do. One would be the pastor of a church, the other would be a missionary. I didn’t particularly like snakes, so I decided I should probably be a pastor.”

As a young pastor in Winston-Salem, N.C., he began offering classes on marriage and family, and was stunned by the number of couples who asked if they could stop by his office to chat. “I had the personality that listens and empathizes,” he said.

But he also had the personality that sought out patterns of miscommunication. Combing through dozen of years of notes, he identified different ways that individuals express love. As he explained to the audience near Nashville: “Adults all have a love tank. If you feel loved by your spouse, the whole world is right. If the love tank is empty, the whole world can begin to look dark.”

The problem: individuals fill their tanks in different ways.

To illustrate, he told the crowd a story of a couple on the verge of divorce who came to see him. The man was dumbfounded. He cooked dinner every night for his wife; afterward he washed the dishes and took out the trash. “I don’t know what else do to,” the man said. “But she still tells me she doesn’t feel loved.”

The woman agreed. “He does all those things,” she said. Then she burst into tears. “But Dr. Chapman, we never talk. We haven’t talked in 30 years.”

In Dr. Chapman’s analysis, each one spoke a different love language: he liked to perform acts of service for his wife, while she was seeking quality time from him.

“Each of us has a primary love language,” Dr. Chapman said, and often secondary or tertiary ones. To help identify your language, he recommended focusing on the way you most frequently express love. What you give is often what you crave. Challenges in relationships arise because people tend to be attracted to their opposites, he said. “In a marriage, almost never do a husband and wife have the same language. The key is we have to learn to speak the language of the other person.”

He eventually labeled these different ways of expressing love “the five love languages”: words of affirmation; gifts; acts of service; quality time; and physical touch.

He outlined his ideas, along with some homespun wisdom and a sprinkling of homily, in the book, “The Five Love Languages: How to Express Heartfelt Commitment to Your Mate,” published in 1992 by Moody, a division of the Bible Institute. It sold 8,500 copies the first year, quadrupling the publisher’s expectation. The following year it sold 17,000; two years later, 137,000.

In a feat of endurance that would make New York publishers swoon, every year (except one) for the last 19 years, the book has outsold its haul for the previous year, putting total sales in North America at that 7.2 million figure; the book has also been translated into 40 languages.

Even more striking, those numbers were achieved without Oprah and without an appearance on a broadcast network. (Though in a rare bit of publicity, Elisabeth Hasselbeck held up the book on “The View” earlier this year and credited it with saving her marriage.)

I really recommend Gary Chapman’s book “The Five Love Languages“. My love language is words of affirmation. I like Gary Chapman because he is an evangelical Christian having an influence on the culture by defending marriage. It’s important for people to be thoughtful about marriage, and not to be swept along by emotions. To think about how the other person is and to be ready to treat them as a different person with different needs. It’s good to look at other people and to think “what’s my responsibility to you?”. When you make a commitment to love someone else for life, you have to think about actually achieving that goal, and that means knowing what counts as love to them.