How Did You Acquire Your Love Language?
If you’re into the world of personality types, self-awareness and spirituality, you may have noticed that your love languages carry some interesting insights into your personality. So, you may be wondering how exactly you acquired your native love language.
There are several theories that attempt to explain why we prefer some expressions of love over others, and they all go back to childhood.
Most of our perceptions, defences, habits, coping mechanisms, behavioral patterns, and ways of relating to others were, in fact, strategies we developed as children to adapt to the environment(s) we grew up in.
Considering that a love language is a way of getting our needs for love, connection and security met, it is not surprising that they would have emerged out of our early experiences and been reinforced throughout the rest of our lives.
The process of acquiring a love language exists on a polarity — abundance and lack. An excess of something and not enough. I find it fascinating that two opposing roads lead to love, so in this article, we are going to walk down both of them and look at how we learned to receive love.
Abundance
When we are abundant in something, whether it be money, energy, time or love, we have more than enough to fulfill our needs. We are overflowing with resources. When we are in an abundant mindset, we often have an urge to share what we have with others. We are not afraid that giving will take away from us, but that it will make us feel even better. That is why, in self-help circles, they often say to “give from a place of abundance.”
When it comes to the love languages, abundance looks like frequent exposure and positive reinforcement.
The abundance theory claims that our dominant love languages are the ones we were exposed to the most growing up. It is based on the idea that our psyche is drawn to the familiar because the familiar is safe and predictable, and we know how to respond to it. So, for better or worse, the things we were the most commonly exposed to as children tend to become our subconscious comfort zones.
Let’s take gift-receiving as an example. Say, your loved ones consistently and genuinely expressed their love to you through gifts. They were enthusiastic and passionate about the act of gift-giving, and their presents demonstrated how well they knew you, what you liked, wanted, needed, were interested in and cared about.
Your overall experience of receiving gifts was positive and uplifting. You felt seen, heard, and understood by your loved ones when they gave you a gift. And so eventually, you came to associate gifts with love and began to look forward to them. You also learned to trust gifts as an honest, reliable and safe expression of love.
Meanwhile, if the practice of gift-giving was either absent, uninspired, or looked down upon in your childhood environment, then you likely formed either no association between gifts and love or you formed a negative one. That is why some people think gifts are materialistic, useless or a waste of money.
Or perhaps, you did receive a lot of gifts, but it was always the wrong gift — one that showed you that they did not know you very well. Then, you probably developed a negative or conflicted relationship with gifts.
If you had to pretend to like the gifts to avoid hurting their feelings, you may have come to associate gift-giving/receiving with inauthenticity, guilt and discomfort. And so, you would rather avoid the practice altogether than receive a gift that serves as a constant reminder of how unseen you really are by your loved ones.
Lack
The second theory suggests that our dominant love languages are the things we felt we lacked throughout our lives, especially in childhood.
It is important to note that lack is not the same as absence. Absence means it was not there at all. If you don’t know that something exists, you can’t really want it.
In order to want and need something, you have to know that it exists, that it is valuable and that it is possible to attain. Lack is the desire to close the perceived distance between you and the thing worth having.
In this view, your dominant love language is one that you were exposed to occasionally, and it felt really good. You felt genuinely seen, loved, valued and connected whenever you had it. But it was not something you received as much as you would have liked. That is why the moments when you do receive it feel so special.
Meanwhile, you learned to perceive the other languages as ordinary, commonplace or neutral parts of life. You may have even formed positive associations with them, but they didn’t really mean anything special to you. Perhaps because they did not align with your personality needs, interests and values.
For example, gift-giving is a common, if not obligatory, practice in most societies. And most people enjoy receiving a good gift. But for those who don’t speak it as their native love language, giving and receiving gifts is just a nice, customary thing to do. But to native speakers, the right gift is the perfect way to let someone know that you know them.
It is important to keep in mind that experiencing a lack doesn’t necessarily mean that you were unloved. It is likely that you grew up around people who spoke a love language that you did not understand.
In fact, when people learn about the existence of different ways of expressing love, they often come to realize just how loved they really are.
Take care, guys.
Hi, I’m Noemi, a certified relationship coach. I help you understand your patterns and cultivate self-love, confidence, and compassion to create the deep, fulfilling conscious relationships your heart desires.
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