The Five Love Languages Singles Edition – Gary Chapman

The Five Love Languages Singles Gary Chapman
The 5 Love Languages: Singles Edition by Gary Chapman
Also by this author: Holding on to Love After You've Lost a Baby: The 5 Love Languages for Grieving Parents, The 5 Apology Languages: The Secret to Healthy Relationships
Series: The Five Love Languages #4
Published by Northfield Publishing on January 3, 2017
Genres: Non-Fiction, Christian Life
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two-half-stars

This simple concept can revolutionize all your relationships!
With more than 10 million copies sold, The 5 Love Languages® continues to strengthen relationships worldwide. Although originally crafted for married couples, the love languages have proven themselves to be universal, whether in dating relationships, friendships, the family, or the workplace.
The premise is simple: Different people with different personalities express love in different ways. Therefore, if you want to give and receive love most effectively, you've got to learn to speak the right language.
The 5 Love Languages® Singles Edition will help you . . .
Discover the missing ingredient in past relationships.
Learn how to communicate love in a way that can transform any relationship>
Grow closer to the people you care about the most.
Understand why you may not feel loved by those who genuinely care about you.
Gain the courage to express your emotions and affection to others

Over a decade after the original Five Love Languages book was released, Dr. Gary Chapman found that an increasing number of people were reading the book not for marriage advice but for relationship advice in general. The principles first conceived as love languages within marriage had proven to extend outward into all relationships in life. Of course, the marriage relationship is a unique relationship. The boundaries in that relationship within the love languages—most obviously in physical touch, for instance—are quite different.

To help bring clarity and to formally extend the love languages out into the more generalized world of interpersonal relationships, Chapman reworked the system so that it made sense outside the marriage context. I’m not convinced “Singles Edition” is the best title for this version, because it’s not as if married people don’t have coworkers and friends to relate to in their lives. Also, a fair portion covers the dating relationship—which is sort of a gray area in singleness as well. Perhaps it would have been better to expand the material and create two books: Love Languages in Dating and Love Languages in Friendships. (That’s a free idea, Dr. Chapman, just put me in the acknowledgements or something.)

The book can be divided into two sections. The first is the reiteration of the five love languages—words of affirmation, gifts, acts of service, quality time, and physical touch—with their specific implementation in dating and platonic relationships. In this section, you get some idea of how to pursue another person’s love language but do so within the appropriate boundaries of the relationship.

The second part is a discussion of the specific types of relationships that can benefit from understanding and utilizing the love languages. One chapter deals with you, yourself. Discovering your own love language is a prerequisite to discovering others’. Next is a chapter on family. This is a diverse chapter that I wish had been subdivided, because there’s quite the difference in how one relates to parents, siblings, and distant relatives. All groups have different boundaries and different expectations/implementations of the love languages.

Two chapters cover the dating relationship. The first chapter deals with discovering a partner’s love language and using that to further deepen the relationship to grow it to the point you determine where the relationship should lead. The second answers the question of if love should always lead to marriage and how romantic relationship should progress—or regress—from the “in love” phase.

One more chapter covers relationships with friends, coworkers, and others. And, in the most underrated chapter of the book, Chapman deals with the issue of single parenthood. All the vignettes and case studies fit the appropriate profiles, making the book more suited for these relationships than Chapman’s original study.

That said, there’s not much else that differentiates it from the original. It’s not an in-depth as it could have been and is pretty simplistic. It didn’t rise to the standard I’ve come to expect from Dr. Chapman.

two-half-stars