Every man should read this book that truly loves his woman. It is the same message as the original, but it is written in such a way that men can understand. The examples are given in a language and way that speaks to us. Baseball, and football terms and the like. It all makes sense.

I HAVE GIVEN HIS BOOKS AWAY AND HAVE PREACHED THE THEMES TO MANY PEOPLE AND TRIED TO APPLY IT EVEN IN MY PROFESSIONAL LIFE. GOOD TO GO BACK THROUGH AND READ THE LOVE LANGUAGES AS IT IS GEARED FROM THE MAN'S POINT OF VIEW PARTICULARLY AS IT RELATES TO MARRIAGE. HE GIVES LOTS OF EXAMPLES OF HOW THE CONCEPTS HAVE WORKED IN MARRIED COUPLE'S LIVES OVER THE YEARS. JUST ABOUT EVERYTIME I BRING UP THE SUBJECT IT IS A NEW CONCEPT TO PEOPLE. I NEED TO KEEP SHARING THE MESSAGE.

I previously read the original version "The Five Love Languages" and loved it.

This version is specifically written with Men in mind. There's a lot of repeat information in here, and if you're like me and you really like points being driven home, then you'll be ok with this. There's also some specific guidance for Men provided, which I also found useful. Unfortunately, there is no current version for Women.

There are additional sections covering how to deal with Anger in your relationship, and the Art of the Apology. I feel like these are pretty valuable sections that were not included in the original version that I read. Likely the best part of this read.

I feel that if you've read the original version of the book, then you do not likely "need" to read this one. If you're looking to add some flavor to the original, then I would recommend picking this one up and rolling through it. Between the two, I would recommend the original over this version as I feel like it speaks to everyone, and having a full rounded perspective is pretty important.

Conversely, this might be a good read for Women in relationships/marriages as well. Perspective is everything.

I am not a man I am female, but I wanted to see the views of the opposite sex. This book is almost an duplicate of the Original 5 love languages. Not surprising.

Holiday Reading 2010

My desk is famous gathering point for family friends and colleagues to park lot’s of things, and whilst it’s sometimes just where people abandon things for me to put away after they use them, it’s also where people put things they want me to give attention to! It occurs to me that this book was in the latter category! One theme, multiple books, seminars and marketing campaigns latter and I tend to approach it from the perspective of a cynical Brit. I shouldn’t have. It’s a well written book, an easy and a quick read. I won’t make sensationalist claims about it saving marriages or changing mine, even though there is much I should be learning. This book should help me continue in doing that. My own hobbyhorse would be to say that it majors on presenting a cross cultural missionaries skills set. That is, realise that something you do with one meaning in your own frame of reference and values, is often read by others very differently, or perhaps to be without meaning. The challenge is to communicate to others that our different to you, your message in a language they can most easily embrace and be touched by…. And which may mean doing so in a way that didn’t come naturally to you until you started to better understand who the person or people that you are trying to communicate with.

It's always a good reminder to spend time, energy, and thought focusing on your relationship/marriage. I read the original book many years ago but decided to read the "men's edition" for 2020. While some of the advice feels dated for our era (e.g. gender roles), anyone in a relationship could benefit from awareness of the framework and the specific action steps.

In short, the five love languages presupposes that each of us has a primary love language through which we feel loved (and we likely project outward whatever love language we need onto the world, whether our partner needs that love language or not). At its core, this theory is about communicating better, because communicating involves observing/listening and THEN acting.

The languages are:
-acts of service
-words of affirmation
-physical touch
-receiving gifts
-quality time

Key insights for me personally:
(1) find ways every day to speak your partner's language
(2) to achieve next level relationship connection, look for ways to align the values of your partner to their love language
(3) if you are a parent, think about your children in terms of the framework and focus intentionally on their primary love languages (which will be different for each child, naturally)

Happy Reading!

This is one of those books that while you are reading it you think to yourself "well of course" and "I knew that". Yet at the same time realizing that you've never really considering the ideas that Chapman presents about the way two people express and more importantly receive love from one another.

I pretty quickly discovered that my primary love language is definitely Words of Affirmation. Most men, and Chapman points this out often, assume they operate from the Physical Touch language but that is usually not the case. But what I enjoyed more than figure out my primary language was that it also allowed me to appreciate when the other languages are expressed to me that I would have otherwise not noticed.

I think every one should read this (or the original though I didn't think this edition was too focused on the male perspective) but especially those that are engaged or newly married such as myself.

Written for men. Read by a woman to understand her man. It was a good quick read and written w love for all of out there doing our best to love someone but failing, whether in their view or our own view.

I still don't know his love language. I've read the love languages before and I know my type and I've talked w my man about this but he won't say his type! Is that a type indication right there?

He says his type is not in the book. He wants me to listen better (which is a struggle having ADD and his not believing in it) and I'm doing my best. As far as I can tell its quality time (listening during a conversation is giving him my undivided attention) and if I go w what he complains about, its that and how he likes a clean, orderly home and things done the right way. I'm guessing that's acts of service.

Good luck figuring your mate out. I sure wish he could figure out mine, words of affirmation. Wish he would talk to me, tell me his type, tell me encouraging words so I know how I'm doing in loving him.

Btw - a suggestion in the book is to list your top 10 happy memories as a couple and its not only given me insight into how I liked to be loved and what he has done for me that's been meaningful and touched my heart, but its also helped me focus on the good and realize how great a guy he is when I fail to see it everyday. I'm hoping he will list his happiest so I can see what makes him feel loved!

If you are married and or a father this is something you NEED to read! I lived it!

This is a easy to read book with eye-opening material. It focuses on the five love languages: words of affirmation, quality time, receiving gifts, acts of service, and physical touch. It is specifically written for men to help them learn to recognize their own love language and also their wife's. It gives tips on how to communicate the love language to create a happier marriage. I was about halfway through the book when I realized that this is men's edition and I am not a man. Haha. However, I still enjoyed reading it. It helped me understand how men struggle with love languages because it was written in a mans perspective and for men. One of the books strengths is that it included personal stories of the applications of the love languages. There is a quiz in the book to help you figure out you and your spouses love language. Throughout the book, there are also lists of things to do to speak your spouses love language. I think this is helpful to the reader because they can actually see how to speak someones love language in practical, everyday things. This book also helped me realize that my love language is "receiving gifts." I think I can recognize others love languages easier now that I have read this book.

This should be in every man’s bookshelf as a read book with plans to read again. I put this book in our car and read it to my husband every time we went anywhere that took more than 15 minutes of driving time. We have a strong marriage and we still grew and learned so much about each other as we read and discussed this book together.
I strongly recommend this book or the original five love languages book.

I am not a reader of self help books, but this book came recommended to me as a text that is helpful in the areas of communication with a lover or a spouse and can have a drastic impact in many areas of my relationships.

While I think that this book says many valuable things, there are also some places that I think that this book is complete nonsense and totally misses the mark.

First, trying to figure out what you best respond to and what your spouse or lover best responds to is definitely an important aspect of any relationship. Furthermore, define what you want and understand what they want is really important, otherwise your efforts are wasted, and your concept of what you think is compatible is just based on some metric that you have devised rather than truth. There is a quiz to figure out what you are. Then you take it, and your spouse or lover takes theirs, and you start trying to figure out what the other person needs.

This book says some awesome things about relationships as well. One is that there is no magic to it, and that there is no fairytale perfect person. Rather, we are able to build our relationship with anyone, and there are things that you can do to keep the relationship and the intimacy strong through communicating in the right way with the other person. Don’t buy them flowers if flowers aren’t important, rather, do deeds, or take walks if they are a quality time person. Makes sense - you just need to figure out what they need.

That said, it misses the mark in many places, and I think the book could have either been more clinical OR a lot shorter and the skills fit on a pamphlet that can be read in a sitting.

First, there is a strange preoccupation with “everything will work out okay” and the strange religious road that the book steers down about halfway through. I was somewhat disillusioned and confused when I got to the chapter that seemed to lay out a scenario where there was a woman who was deeply religious, went to church every week, and her husband ignored her for months, and she hated sex. The solution in this anecdote, totally open ended, started with quoting Jesus and somehow Jesus wanting her to please her husband even if she hated him and hated sex, and that if her intentions were good it would all work out. Frankly, I got to the end of that chapter and wasn’t even sure what it was telling me. Jesus, church, and other religious things come up a lot, and for someone who is not religious and even can’t see the connection (and even if I was, would find difficulty in including religion if I was having relationship problems since I see it as unrelated), I found the constant referencing distracting.

I also felt like the book was talking down to me - in a manner like, ‘well, guys don’t read, so we need to snatch up the dumb apes’ attention with this. I read voraciously, and know myself, and felt dumb reading it if only for those reasons. I found non-technical, basic, and simplistic approached and suggestions in this ‘men’s edition.’ Furthermore, many contradictions. In one place the author is talking about men’s biological need to have sex, and two paragraphs later that they may be mistaken for needing ‘quality time.’ I often found myself scratching my head that this would make sense to anyone and where the science was in some of the science things the author seemed to be referencing.

Finally, I come from a somewhat dysfunctional childhood, and at times I was wishing that some of this was as easy as that. I am not saying that a book needs to specifically address trauma and assume everyone has some sort of complex, but at the same rate in many ways our childhood has a lot to do with my reactions to things. That said, the chapter about receiving gifts, and seeing them as an investment in me and my relationship rather than an investment in the thing, really hit home. Poverty can really mess you up.

So, my review is simple. The book has a lot of great things to say about communication with your spouse and using a system of cues (the languages) to figure out what they need and expect from the relationship. Oftentimes we miss this information and do a bad job communicating it, and it is through recognizing this that we can figure out what we expect from ourselves, and what our significant other expects from us. There was some really interesting realistic stuff the author presented (you can fall in love with anyone, television may relax you but it is not quality time), but alongside some really weird inclusions (pray, go to church, a good gift is naming a star after someone from one of those shyster companies, among other suggestions, and an absolute dearth of anecdotal evidence). I also think that the avoidance of physical intimacy - rather than the importance of sex it suggests that just putting your arm around one another or touching a shoulder and explaining sex as a mysterious pseudoscience of emotional literacy - was strange. Finally, the “for men” edition, I thought, was insulting to men and to me as a reader, so I wonder if the original is a little more compatible for humans, but I also have no plans to ever pick it up. In short, it was okay, but I could have gotten the gist of it in a tenth of the pages.