This is feminist wellness and I'm your host, nurse practitioner, functional medicine expert and life coach Victoria Albina. I'll be full heart. Welcome my love let's get started.

Hello hello my love I hope this finds you doing so well. As someone who reads thinks and talks a lot about

relationships, I think it's high time that we talk about the five love languages,

which is a framework for thinking about how we give and receive

love popularized by Gary Chapman in his 1992 book, which has been a New York Times bestseller

for about 100, thousand years now.

This framework posits that we all give and receive love in five different ways.

Words of affirmation, acts of service, receiving gifts, quality time, and physical touch.

Per Chapman, you can have one or more predominant ways, but tend to have one main way that works best for you.

While many poo-poo this whole framework, a 2006 study by Nicole Egbert and Denise Polk suggests that there may in fact be some degree of

psychometric validity to the Five Love Languages and that means my nerds that there's a study that shows that the five love languages may indeed be legit.

And while I am not here in support of or to negate the validity of the love languages framework, what I am here to say is that these kinds of tools can be a super helpful starting place, particularly in a new relationship or one that needs some reinvigoration, and that it really behooves us to relate to them as such, a starting off point, instead of making them into absolutes, instead of saying, this is the only way to show up and show me love.

Because as humans we are not static animals.

We are dynamic and ever changing.

And our preferences and relationship to loving and being loved will change as we change.

And because we can use thought work to relate differently to the ways we are shown

love by ourselves and others, we can create so much change in all of these

rubrics. Finally, as someone who is all about that neuroplasticity, I believe we should be careful, to not box ourselves in and to say a definitive,

this love language works for me, this other one is garbage.

I believe that the love language's framework can be a super helpful tool that we can take to our

thought work to help reveal the ways in which our habitual thought patterns allow or

block us from experiencing the gestures of love, kindness and generosity others offer us from their own framework for loving, which is often quite different from our own.

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