Love Languages

 I'm late to the party but that's okay. Dr. Gary Chapman wrote a book back in 1992 called The 5 Love Languages. (It was republished in 2015.) Wikipedia says, 

According to Chapman, the five ways to express and experience love called "love languages" are:

• words of affirmation,
• quality time,
• receiving gifts,
• acts of service,
• physical touch.

 For some reason, this topic arose while I was in Calgary, and when I returned home, I took the free online quiz from the Love Languages website. Every member of my immediate family took the quiz and posted the results to our family Discord channel. Here were my results:

This has interesting implications for me in my family as well as for me as a teacher. It's important to note that I have neither read the original book, nor have I read any of the relevant sequels (e.g. The 5 Love Languages of Children, Discovering the 5 Love Languages at School, or The 5 Languages of Appreciation in the Workplace). Maybe some of my answers might be found in those publications, but in the meantime, here are my insights and further questions.

If you cannot read the visual, my top two results were for Words of Affirmation, at a whopping 37%, followed by Physical Touch at 30%. Quality Time and Acts of Service were tied at 13% and Receiving Gifts was the lowest at 7%. This feels like an accurate profile. Even just perusing my blog shows me that I love to hug (while still respecting boundaries and consent, even at ECOO conferences and as early as in 2014 when I hypothesized that my inclination for embraces was partly due to my upbringing) and that many of my "tribute posts" are essentially words of affirmation for colleagues that I admire. It's why my favourite end-of-the-year gifts from students always involve some sort of words - one of my classroom students obviously inferred this quite well, as her gift included a six-page letter. 

Guess what? Even though my husband's statistics are in the exact same order (with a much more even spread between the top four), my own children have different priorities - their top result was Quality Time. It made me more aware that they might feel a bit drowned or smothered by the constant barrage of hugs/kisses/pats, and flood of compliments, praise and warms words of affection that I frequently direct toward them. So, lately I've been trying to show how much I care more by doing things with them. I hang out in the living room with them. My daughter and I go out on errands together - she's been putting together a new cosplay outfit and we've driven all over the GTA collecting parts. 

My husband also theorizes that after living with me for so long (July 5, 2022 will be our 25th wedding anniversary), he's actually learned to be more like me in terms of affection-giving and -receiving. I'm curious to see what his "pre-Diana statistics" would have been. 

As a teacher, there are some definite lessons for me to learn. I searched but couldn't find the joke tweet by a male teacher who said there was no way he was revealing to his students and staff that his primary love language was physical touch. That's a big no-no for several reasons. I was going to try to encapsulate some of my ideas in a series of "I will" and "I will not" statements, but they mostly boil down to "respect and honour the ways students and colleagues show they appreciate you, and when appropriate, reciprocate in similar ways". Maybe this is why I've been spending time over the summer with some of my delightful colleagues, visiting retired teachers, shopping at farmers' markets, and chatting together via the House Party app.

I tell my friends and family that I love them (using the L word) and I do. (Apologies to any of my pals who get weirded out by the practice.) If I have time, I should see if I can get my hands on a copy of one of those other Chapman books to see if I gain any further clarifications. (Maybe I should try to finish Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain by Zaretta Hammond before I start a new read!)