Whether it’s your spouse, significant other, family, friends, or even business associates, each individual speaks his or her own love language. “The Five Love Languages” are: Words of Affirmation, Quality Time, Receiving Gifts, Acts of Service, and Physical Touch.

Understanding which of these languages makes that special someone feel loved can be essential to the success of any relationship. Join Jason Hartman and renowned author, Dr. Gary Chapman as they discuss these timeless concepts and how our primary language affects our interactions in our relationships.

Dr. Gary Chapman seeks to fulfill his call to the ministry as a pastor, speaker, and author. He speaks extensively throughout the U.S. and internationally on marriage, family, and relationships. The government of Singapore invited him to present his marriage seminar there and the Chaplain’s Office of NATO issued a special invitation for Dr. Chapman to speak to the NATO forces in Germany. Other engagements have taken him to England, Africa, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Mexico and Hong Kong.

Sales exceeding 5 million copies earned him the Platinum Book Award from the Evangelical Publishers Association for The Five Love Languages, which has been translated into over thirty-six languages. Twenty-seven other books and five video series are also among his publications.

Narrator: Welcome to the American Monetary Association’s podcast. Where we explore how monetary policy impacts the real lives of real people, and the action steps necessary to preserve wealth and enhance one’s lifestyle.

Jason Hartman: Welcome to today’s show. This is Jason Hartman, your host and as you may or may not know, every tenth show we kind of do a special tradition here that originated with my Creating Wealth show where we do a topic that is actually off topic on purpose. Something just to do with general life and more successful living, and that’s exactly what we’re going to do today with our special guest. Again, tenth show is off topic and it is very much intentional just for personal enrichment, and I hope you enjoy today’s show. We will be back with our guest in just a moment.

Start of Interview with Dr. Gary Chapman

Jason Hartman: It’s my pleasure to welcome Dr. Gary Chapman to the show. He is a very well-known marriage counselor and director of marriage seminars. His very famous work, he has many of them, but his probably most famous is The Five Love Languages. It has sold upwards of six million copies, translated into four languages, and has been on the number one spot of the New York Times best seller list and on many other best seller lists. It’s a pleasure to have Gary from North Carolina today. Gary, welcome. How are you?

Dr. Gary Chapman: Well, thank you Jason. It’s good to be with you. I am doing great.

Jason Hartman: Good, good. So tell us about the five love languages, and we want to hear from the perspective of people looking for a relationship, and people in a relationship as well. I know you’ve got The Five Love Languages for Singles, you’ve got a new book about what people should have known or wished they’d known before getting married and so forth, but start wherever you like Gary.

Dr. Gary Chapman: What I discovered years ago in counseling is that what makes one person feel loved doesn’t necessarily make another person feel loved. So they would sit in my office, husband and wife. She would say, “I just feel like he doesn’t love me” and he would say, “I don’t know what else to do. I do this, and this and this and she doesn’t feel loved.” So he was sincere, he was loving her, she didn’t get it. And I realized that people were hearing each other.

I kept hearing these similar stories over and over again and I knew there was a pattern, I just didn’t know what it was. So I went through about twelve years of my counseling notes and asked myself, when someone sat in my office, I feel like my spouse doesn’t love me, what did they want? What were they complaining about? And their answers fell into five categories and I later called them the five love languages. And I’ve started sharing that in small groups and then I started sharing it in my counseling that we each have a different love language and you have to learn to speak the other person’s language.

After about five years of using that in small groups and counseling, I decided to write the book. Because I knew that it would help people learn how to connect with each other emotionally. And then I was thinking primarily in the marriage relationship, and the original book does say it’s addressed to married couples. But I had a lot of singles say, you know I know you wrote that book for couples but I read it and it helped me in all of my relationships. Why don’t you write one for singles? So that’s how the singles addition was born. Because I do think that this applies in all human relationships.

Jason Hartman: Yeah, and you even addressed dealing with your children, probably your friends, everything, right? The five languages apply in intimate relationships and non-intimate relationships too, right?

Dr. Gary Chapman: Yeah, you know Jason, let’s face it. The deepest emotional need we have is the need to feel loved. Everybody wants to feel loved by the significant people in their lives. If you do feel loved, life is beautiful. If you don’t feel loved, life can be very complex. So whether you’re talking about a parent/child relationship, or whether you’re talking about a dating relationship or married relationship, learning how to communicate love in a language the other person will feel. It’s meeting that emotional need for love. That’s what this book is all about. That’s why I think this book has been so successful.

Jason Hartman: You know, Gary, I can’t help but kind of make the connection here. All of the listeners of course know what the golden rule is, hopefully they practice the golden rule but I had Tony Alessandra on one of my shows and you probably know his work. He talks about the platinum rule. And that is treating people the way they want to be treated. And I think that ties in pretty well with the five love languages doesn’t it? Because you’ve got to communicate with the person on their own preference, their own modality, right?

Dr. Gary Chapman: Yes, that’s exactly right Jason. Typically we speak our own language. Whatever makes me feel loved is what I’m going to do for the other person. But if that’s not their language it won’t mean to them what it would mean to me. So let’s say that my language is words of affirmation, and what I want to hear my wife say is I love you, you’re wonderful, I appreciate what you did, all these positive things. So that’s what I do for her. Because it makes me feel loved. But her language may be acts of service, doing things for her. So here I am giving her all these words, and after a while she’s going to say to me, you know you keep saying I love you, I love you. I’m kind of sick of the words. If you love me why don’t you do something to help me?

Jason Hartman: She wants you to show it to her, right?

Dr. Gary Chapman: Absolutely, and I’m blown away. I was loving the woman! What’s wrong?

Jason Hartman: You can’t figure out why she’s upset. Makes sense. Well, you just told us two of the five languages. What are the other three?

Dr. Gary Chapman: Receiving gifts, universal to receive gifts as an expression of love. My academic background is anthropology, especially cultural anthropology. We’ve never discovered a culture where gift giving was not an expression of love. So giving gifts and receiving gifts. Then quality time. Giving the person your undivided attention. I’m not talking about sitting in the same room watching television. TV is off, you’re looking at each other, you’re interacting, you’re sharing, you’re listening. Quality time where they have your undivided attention. And then number five is physical touch. And we’ve long known the emotional power of physical touch. And in every culture there are appropriate touches between males and females, whether they’re married or whether they’re single. And it’s physical touch that communicated love to some people. This is their primary language.

Jason Hartman: I love the way Denis Waitley says that. He says, “Touch is the magic wand of intimacy.” So that’s definitely important. How do we discover what someone else’s language is? You don’t just ask them, do you? Or what is the best way to go about that?

Dr. Gary Chapman: Well if you are discussing the topic with them and they’re open, you can go online and take a little quiz or they can go online and take a little quiz, then it will tell them and they can tell you. That’s one way, and that would be at FiveLoveLanguages.com. But another way, there’s two or three other clues. One is you observe their behavior. How do they respond to other people? If they’re always, when they greet people giving them a pat on the back or a hug, then physical touch is probably their language. If they’re speaking that to others on a regular basis, it’s probably what they want. If they’re always giving encouraging words to people, then words of affirmation is probably their language. So observe their behavior.

Secondly, what do they complain about most often? The wife who says to the husband, “We don’t ever spend any time together. We’re like two ships passing in the night!” She’s saying quality time is my love language and I’m not gett