Bigotry, religion, and profit: The not-so hidden story behind "The 5 Love Languages"
A deep dive into the book and the man behind it, Gary Chapman.
Disclaimer: All opinions shared are my own and all facts are backed by linked and cited sources. This post is meant for educational purposes and not meant to personally attack an individual.
TW: Homophobia, abuse, racism
I’m sure you’ve been asked before, “What’s your love language?” Most people have a general idea of what the different love languages are and which one they most identify with.
“The 5 Love Languages” is an interesting phenomenon in the self-help industry because it’s something that’s been able to spread far beyond just the self-improvement sphere and has permeated into our everyday culture.
What’s interesting about this phenomonon is that most people don’t actually have any idea where the love languages come from and the truth is disturbing.
A small disclaimer: the facts about where “The 5 Love Languages” comes from doesn’t negate if this information has helped you navigate your relationships in any way. If it has, great! I’m not going to take that away from you.
However, I will always argue against this mentality that you should separate the art from the artist. This mentality forgets a key component of being an artist: making money. When you buy a book from an author, when you recommend that book to someone else, you are directly sending financial support to the author. Therefore, keeping the art and the artist at all times is crucial if we actually want to hold people accountable for harmful actions or ideas.
This is especially important to remember as we dive into the 5 Love Languages, a concept created by a bigoted religious counselor.
Who is Gary Chapman?
As I would hope that you wouldn’t come to me for mental health or relationship advice seeing as how I’m not an accredited therapist or psychiatrist, I would hope that you would treat the author of “The 5 Love Languages”, Gary Chapman, the same. Because, like me, he is not an accredited therapist or a psychiatrist.
His education is from the Moody Bible Institute where he has a Bachelor and Master of Arts in Anthropology and has a doctorate in Philosophy (hence the Dr. in front of his name) from the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. Gary Chapman is a Baptist minister at the Calvary Baptist Church in North Carolina. As I’m sure you’ve noticed, there’s a common thread running through his education and practice: Christianity.
The book itself, “The 5 Love Languages” was specifically written as a “counseling” book for Christian couples, specifically only for heteronormative, cis-gendered couples (as to be expected in this genre). This point is important to mention because Chapman himself holds homophobic beliefs that he showcases in both blatant and discrete ways, which makes it far more sinister.
In Chapman’s podcast, “A Love Language Minute with Dr. Gary Chapman”, you can see that his blatant homophobia. One of his episodes asks what to do if you find out your child is gay. Chapman’s response is:
“Disappointment is a common emotion when a parent hears one of their children indicate that he/she is gay. Men and women are made for each other—it is God’s design. Anything other than that is outside of that primary design of God.”
This is a blatant example of homophobia. But he continues in a Q&A answer on his website (that has since been deleted) to be a little more discrete with his homophobia:
He says that even if you disapprove of their (a gay child’s) lifestyle, that you should “demonstrate” love, implying that real love and understanding is impossible.
Unsurprisingly, Chapman also has a relationship with racism as well. In 2003, he wrote the forward to a book entitled “Winning the Race to Unity” which, in summary, is a book that blames “reverse racism” (an unfounded idea that says that white people are oppressed) for breaking apart the church. In his forward, Chapman basically spends his time letting the readers know that he had a Black friend once when he came to play basketball at his church and that only after talking to him, he gained respect for him. Chapman argues that to bring the church together, all races need to love each other “more overtly”, ignoring the idea that oppressed individuals shouldn’t have to prove that they love their oppressors in order to not be oppressed.
Now, due to Chapman’s religious upbringing, these instances are sadly not a huge shock and just a mirror of the overall teaching he was taught from a young age.
On top of his education above, Chapman also serves as a pastor and minister for the Baptist church. In fact, his experience advising couples in the church inspired him to write “The 5 Love Languages” which becomes a horrifying fact when we look at his “advice”, especially when it comes to his comments regarding physical abuse.
In 2019, Chapman sent out an email condoning physical abuse and then subsequently sent out an apology email explaining his stance. He states:
“In my last email, I shared about one couple’s experience with explosive anger and a pattern of abuse that fortunately worked out for them in the end…but not all situations are as fortunate.” In this story, the wife got back together with her abusive husband in order to work through their marriage. The word “fortunate” is holding a lot of weight in this email.
This type of thinking is quite common in churches that encourage members to go to “couples counseling” with their pastor/priest. In instances such as these, some pastors/priests will encourage couples to stay together, even in instances of abuse, because their marriage is sacred.
In the church’s eyes, and clearly Chapman’s eyes, the biggest tragedy in this situation isn’t the abuse itself, but in a marriage ending.
Inside the book itself
Again, if the basics of these love languages have helped you communicate better with your partners, amazing. There’s obviously a lot on the internet that simplifies these ideas without the added bigotry.
But even within the basics of the five languages, there is also an opportunity for manipulation (which Chapman actually does acknowledge in some parts of his book, though I would argue that his examples of couples don’t really support his warning):
For example, if one partner’s love language is touch, they may manipulate or shame their partners into being intimate when they don’t want to because they need to feel loved.
Another example could be that if one partner’s love language is acts of service, maybe the other partner will tell them they should do all of the chores to show their love.
At surface level, these love languages all make sense as things people need to have in their relationships to some degree or another. There’s nothing inherently broken about this idea, so I’m not going to say that this idea is wrong or dangerous at its core, disregarding the extreme instances I talked about above.
However, the way that these ideas are presented in the book itself, is a cause for concern.
The first concern is how Chapman positions himself in the book. He makes himself out to be, not just a guru, but almost a spiritual figure. In one chapter, he gives an example of how his seminar was a “miracle” to a couple and ended up saving their marriage. Throughout the book, he referenced people calling his practice a “miracle” and him a “miracle worker”.
The most concerning thing in this book is the use of couples as examples that Chapman has helped in the past. Every single one of these examples portrays an incredibly unhealthy marriage based in traditional gender roles and expectations. Some examples include a wife who shares that her husband said that he hated her, one in which the husband had a long-term affair, and one where the husband expected to come home from work to a clean house and have dinner waiting.
The goal of all of these examples is to share how the 5 Love Languages and Chapman himself “saved” these marriages. Due to Chapman’s religious background, it’s no surprise that his ultimate goal is to keep marriages together, no matter the environment of the relationship. As a side-note, the book is filled with religious messages and bible quotes, which isn’t a surprise.
In one example of a wife whose husband consistently treated her with contempt and hate, the wife stated that all of her friends were telling her to get out.
Chapman states, “I can understand the advice of your friends and there is a time to ‘get out.’ However, many people ‘get out’ too soon.”
He tells this woman, who is also religious: “It seems to me that you are torn between your religious and moral beliefs that tell you it is wrong to get out of a marriage, and your emotional pain, which tells you that getting out is the only way to survive.”
This kind of faith manipulation is rampant throughout this book and is weaponized, I believe, into pressuring wives to stay with husbands who, at best, don’t love them and, at worse, are emotionally abusive.
Another example of this is Chapman’s push for forgiveness.
The book states that not forgiving your partner is living in resentment and revenge and that forgiveness is the only way to love. This is such a blanket and dangerous statement that we’ve seen play out in Chapman’s email newsletter itself (forgiveness in an abusive relationship). In his book Chapman states, “The best thing we can do with the failures of the past is to let them be history.”
Of course, this can be true for some things. Maybe your partner said something unintentionally hurtful to you. Sure, forgiveness (and more importantly having a productive conversation around healing and understanding) is not dangerous. “Failures” in other aspects such as abuse in any form, deception, intentionally hurtful behavior, etc? The “failures” are not rooted in love and a partner should never have to forgive in order to showcase an unreciprocated love at their expense.
In a more basic sense of this all, again, it’s clear that Chapman’s religious beliefs believe that the most important thing about a marriage is to stay in it. In my more cynical viewpoint, I do wonder if there’s a financial motivation to keeping these couples together. As a marriage counselor, Chapman needed couples to stay in marriages in order to maintain these clients.
Within the self-help industry, this isn’t a far-fetched conjecture to say that a self-help guru’s main motivation is money, and Chapman doesn’t even try to hide it.
The end goal of profit
The most unsurprising part about reading “The 5 Love Languages” was the capitalism of it all. The edition I read was the 2024 edition in which the entire introduction was an ad for the Love Languages Premium Assessment coming in at $39.99 (but that’s 29% off! What a deal!). At the end of every single chapter, there was an ad for it again.
And of course at the end of the book that provides readers with action steps, the biggest action the reader can take is through purchasing additional tools from Chapman’s website.
This is of no surprise. We see this happen all the time in self-help books, most recently in Jenna Kutcher’s “How Are You, Really?”.
Like all self-help gurus I’ve covered, Chapman not only seems to be in it to spread the good word of the Lord, but he’s also in it to make money. He’s profited around $5 million off of his “counseling” and self-help empire. His empire includes countless books, online courses, online resources, and in-person events which are hosted by churches across the country that charge $60 for couples to attend.
While it looks like Chapman isn’t accepting new clients for counseling, he does recommend that people turn to counselors in their church and is still making a profit through his public speaking gigs, charging anywhere from $10,000-20,000 to speak at a live event.
At the end of the day, it's important to take a look at ideas we’ve adopted into modern culture and not just where they come from, but the people behind them—especially when those people profit. “The 5 Love Languages” may have helped you in your relationships, but that doesn’t mean we should ignore the harmful ideology and financial motivations behind its creation.