I have trouble identifying what my preferred love languages are, point-blank. I don’t always know how I most like to give or receive love. Maybe that’s had a telling impact on my romantic and platonic connections. Maybe it hasn’t. It’s up to you to decide if you buy into the pseudo-social science of there being a distinct language you can speak to maximize your relationship returns. I’m personally a firm believer in the strong, hard science of communication. Everyone could stand to get a little better at asking for what they need from other people, or asking someone about their own needs and wants in return. But today, I’d like to question why we don’t talk about love languages in the context of friendship very often.
In friendships, there’s no deep-seated requirement to meet all of your friends’ emotional needs. But, it should be encouraged to discuss and decide how to do that for the people you spend your time with. One of the beautiful things about friendships is that you have multiple (I hope, for our collective sake). That goes back to not having all of your specific needs addressed by one connection, but rather, different ones being met by a whole network of people.
My best friendships are the ones where I can identify how we’ve settled into patterns of loving each other distinctly and decisively. One of my friends and I are very physically touchy with each other in a 95 percent platonic way: through hugging, holding hands, and occasionally biting (kidding?). That’s how we show what we mean to each other while also having independent love languages. But there are other friends I’ve probably hugged nine times over three years. For example, in one of my other closest friendships, we show love by having five-hour philosophical conversations and me forcing him to come to all of my club meetings.
Another one of my closest friends is a massive gift-giver and loves a grand personalized gesture. Gift-giving gives me hives. People who can accept that about me make my anxious heart very, very happy. I’d write a handwritten note or offer to take a part of an assignment off someone’s plate any day if it meant I didn’t have to shop for any more Secret Santa or birthday presents. But we have found that spending mundane quality time together keeps us going. Miraculously, it takes a lot for us to get sick of each other. We’re always asking to get dinner after our respective classes or planning “Teen Wolf” rewatch dates days in advance.
Examples and rave reviews aside, this all goes to very briefly, very sappily say, when you meet your friends where they’re at, and “speak” different love languages with different people, you unlock so much more in terms of an emotional connection than deeming yourself compatible or incompatible solely based on what your love languages are. This can go for romantic relationships as well. But the magic of taking note with your friendships means you can open your mind to what love looks like to different people — and learn how to communicate with anyone to feel supported in your unique relationship.
I also say love languages are too narrow! If we’re going to label our ways of showing care and put them in five little boxes, maybe we should just give them an unnecessary bunch of subtypes. I’m all for promoting my personalized love languages of making playlists, exchanging media recommendations, texting back paragraphs in response to four words, and spending floor time together. And I love discovering more.
Leave a Reply