Michael. Peter. What do you know about the five love languages? Yes, this is one I had to update my deal breaker on dating sites from the Myers Briggs personality type indicators.

The core thesis of the five love languages is that people have different preferences in how they express and receive love and that those preferences fall generally into five categories.

Words of affirmation quality time receiving gifts physical touch and acts of service the basic lesson that Gary Chapman the author is teaching here is that if you want to be a good partner you need to learn to speak your spouses love language.

This is why I've been like slightly nervous about this episode because it honestly just seems so harmless and constructive to me. I don't know about like these five categories specifically but the idea of having this meta conversation with your partner about the ways that you appreciate them in the way that you appreciate being shown love seems like totally fine to me.

I actually agree and I think that of all the books we've covered so far this one is the least objectionable on its face right there is a real utility to this core concept of realizing that your partner may not receive affection the way that you do and trying to understand what makes them feel loved and appreciate it right and I think.

The sort of simplicity of that idea is the reason that everyone knows this book yeah it's just a useful way to think about relationships about how you and your spouse might differ and like what it means to be a good partner I never actually knew that this was based on a book I thought it was just something that started appearing in framed posters in air being these.

Like 2015 there are some other really good elements within this book chat and uses the love language idea to discuss how love is not just like a magical feeling but something that requires effort to maintain he says that being loved gives us a sense of purpose and makes us feel valued and significant which I do just for the purposes of our cannon want to point out is also what Fukuyama said about liberal democracy.

He's got the thymus section of the poster up in all the air being bees just trying to connect as many threads as I can.

So our episodes he also has some good real estate investing advice.

The book has sold over 15 million copies it was originally published in 1992 and was fairly popular but actually took off in the late

thoughts and early 2010s an updated version is published in 2015 which is important because I read the updated version and then I went back and read through the original version and several of my friends like you when I told them I was doing the book for the show they said they didn't think the book was too bad and they thought the ideas were good and when I said to them was I bet you read the 2015 version.

So it's like the misogyny minus version like they they cleaned it up for the hashtag blessed crowd.

Now interestingly the main way the love language is concept has been like absorbed by our popular culture is as like a self directed personality test right.

People love to describe their own love languages. It's it's functionally a meme now where people just tweet like having a giant laundry pile I never put away is my love language.

Yeah I think it's important to note that like that's not what Chapman was trying to get across he wanted people to understand their partners love language so that you can learn how to make them feel appreciated.

So our culture has sort of done a classic American culture thing of taking something and repackaging it and it's like shallowist and most selfish iteration right.

It's supposed to be how to be nice and it ends up being how other people can be nice to me.

Yes right no I want gifts I want gifts.

So when you did metaphor Mars you got suspicious of John Gray's credentials halfway through the book and you started digging around and found out that his PhD is pretty much fraudulent.

Gary Chapman does not put PhD on the cover but he holds himself out as Gary Chapman PhD and I was like okay you know fool us once right as of now there is a zero tolerance environment for

marriage counselor authors on this podcast his PhD is real okay he got his masters and PhD in religious education from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary as well as a masters in anthropology from Wake Forest one of those sounds real yeah look I didn't want to get into the merits of seminary schools but suffice it to say that we are trading in more legitimate waters than we were with Gray.

So Gary Chapman is a pastor essentially he's like he's coming to this from religious angle he is a pastor and yeah it's important framing because again the core concept of this book I think is quite good the actual book sucks and that's basically what we're going to talk about before we get into the substance of the book I think it would be useful at this point in our podcast to talk about the hallmarks of like shitty best cell.

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