The Five Love Languages for men is a practical book on how we can further nurture our love for the most important person in our lives. Recommended for men who are looking to become better partners.

Learn to communicate caring

All couples should read this book. Especially the part about how to effectively apologize ( saying *I'm sorry*). Learning what's important in communicating love is a learning experience and is different for each person you love; partner, your child or friend.

Most people are already familiar with the five love languages from this book: words of affirmation, quality time, receiving gifts, acts of service, and physical touch. Each of those love languages is kind of self evident. So why read a whole book about them? Even more, why read a book targeted at men?

The best answers I can come up with are motivation and applicable examples.

The book is short enough that it isn't a huge time commitment. Shorter books also tend to be more on point to the main topic. That makes this book great for picking up, reading quickly, and getting a jolt of motivation to push you into action.

Taking action is made easier by the applicable examples provided in each chapter. There's even a two page spread at the conclusion of each chapter with more than enough suggestions on how to employ the love language. Even if you don't use the examples, they provide enough structure to let you come up with your own actions to take.

I often deride self-help books for including bullet point pages that could easily serve to replace the entire book. I don't think that's the case here. There is certainly filler. The longest chapter is dedicated not to a love language but to handling anger. And there's a fairly useless FAQ section that seems mostly geared to selling other versions of this book (e.g. for military, for children). But the five chapters on the five love languages are concise and actionable. That's an admirable trait in this type of nonfiction book.

I appreciate that the book focuses on some of the potentially problematic love languages. Someone who likes to receive gifts isn't a gold digger. Someone who enjoys physical touch isn't looking for just sex. Your acts of service might not be the acts of service your wife wants you to do. Quality time doesn't have to be spent holding hands while gazing into each other's eyes. Each negative aspect is addressed and explained.

Of course there's also the obligatory quiz at the end of the book. For some reason there's a version for him and a version for her. As far as I could tell, the questions are exactly the same with the pronouns changed from he/him to she/her. You can also take the quiz online to avoid manual score calculation. Or you can just observe your own behavior and your wife's reactions to judge your wife's love language.

I imagine there will be some people upset at the specific viewpoint of this book. It's written to address cisgender heterosexual males married to cisgender heterosexual females. But that's just in terms of pronouns and terms (e.g. "husband", "wife"). The love languages are applicable across all identities. There are even versions for the love languages of your kids.

Overall, the book does a good job of providing the definition of each love language, explaining the motivations of each love language, and laying out action plans to apply each love language.

Last year, I read the original Five Love Languages book, and my wife and I found it to be a powerful tool for improving an already strong relationship. She has since read it herself, and I found myself curious as to how a men-specific version might differ. With little surprise, I found that the content is identical, yet the direction is indeed shifted slightly, with the stories told chosen to be able to relate better to a male reader. Upon a second reflection of the love languages, I find myself to be rethinking how my love languages affect my day to day life, and how I can continue to improve my wife's by keeping her's in mind. Reading these books over every once in a while as a reminder will likely be a very good thing for my marriage.

Well, it was a good book, a lot of good tips to have a happy relationship. But I felt like if it was too shallow, it didn't really touch very sensitive topics. Not that it isn't of any help, maybe he just talks about other things in other books. Maybe it's just me. I expected a deeper dive into the love languages.
I recommend it, it's an interesting read though.

I looked this book and was glad it was available at my library (the original was not). I don't think I need to read both of them. It's interesting to get an understanding of this perspective from the source. I still am not confident I can detect a love language. There are several tests he recommends but I look at those and ask how many are dual love language tasks, like holding hands is touch and quality time. Is doing chores together acts of service and quality time? I feel like this could be a foundational step for couples in terms of speaking the same language, but I wouldn't limit myself to the constraints of the book. If s couple had something they like to do together, I think that's the important thing, not the question of which love language is it. And got finding future things to do together, I'd look for things similar to those that work and not necessarily just the love language.

TL;DR This book should be titled: The 5 Love Languages for Sis-gendered Men in Hetero-normative Marriages Who Go to Church

Wait, now hear me out on why this actually matters with a book like this. I'm not virtue-signaling.. The author goes out of their way to unnecessarily focus the audience to a niche most associated with the Christian right. And it reads like a choice. For a book about effectively connecting emotionally to another, its audience, as indicated by the author's language, is shockingly narrow. Limited to hetero-normative sis churchgoing males who are only interested in the conventional marriage paradigm. Essentially excluding all LGBTQ+ individuals, as well as solos and friendships. At the end (last pages end) of the book they mention they have an edition for singles. But by then you have enough data to know that that book will focus on how to get the single married. Fun fact: more than 50% of people are single, and a majority of those have zero interest in marriage (but may have an interest in better relationships). Me.

Framing it within the framework of marriages (not even romantic partnerships) misses an enormous opportunity to reach a much broader audience, with a much broader application. Which is what makes its narrow focus feel very much like a choice. One that is typical of the Christian right that it brings to mind. An act of defiance. And this is recognized by me, a sis hetero male with zero interest in being 'politically correct'. It just seems to me that it would be valuable to an author trying to change the world with their nifty concept that inclusiveness would be much higher on the objectives list for their book. Apparently, they are only interested in changing the lives of 'certain' people. Which hangs over every page of this book, to a distracting degree.

Approaches to problem-solving in this book are also clunky and uninspired, distracting from what was sometimes a sound concept. It might come from the lack of creativity and openness that made the previous critique possible.

Also perplexing is that the chapter on understanding which of the love languages applies to 'my wife' is at the *end* of the book, rather than the beginning, preceding the in-depth for each. To my logic, it would make more sense to propose this divination process early so I can focus my attention on the languages that are deemed most relevant when we dive into the details. This oddity in short-sightedness happens again in that chapter; at the *end* he says "if you don't have time to read this whole chapter, the takeaway is...". At the end of the chapter... Brilliant.

The idea has merit. Like the MBTI, it's utterly unscientific with no basis in provable fact. Yet also like the MBTI, it could prove to be quite useful to a person trying to understand the world around them if used properly. It's just a shame how poor the execution is here. If nothing else, I'm inspired to seek out other authors who may attempt to approach this concept in a better way. Unfortunately, this series is big enough that they may blot out better voices on the topic.

Very Insightful and Resourcedul

There’s not much about this book that I couldn’t like. It was an astonishing read by very good insight for those of us “soul searching” to be the better “version” of ourselves in a relationship. It’s a page turner and it provides one an opportunity to self reflect.

امنح هذا الكتاب ٤ نجوم والخامسة جاءت لانه انقذني من فتور القراءة الذي كنت امر به خلال الثلاث اسابيع الماضية
استعرت هذا الكتاب من المكتبة العامة ولم انتبهت لكلمة للرجال حتى عدت للمنزل لذا بقي ملقا جانبا دوان اكتراث حتى قررت ان اتناوله قبل يومين ووجدت رغم نيتي في القاء نظرة عليه اني وصلت للصفحة ٨٠ منه .. اعتقد انه المرة القادمة التي سأقرا فيها ل جاري تشابمان لن يكون الكتاب مستعارا

Let me just say one thing about this book. It claims itself to be a special edition for men. Well, I don't know what type of man this author is used to (maybe one that doesn't like to keep any dormant mushy side from being exposed to the world), but just because this book has a brown cover doesn't make it very "manly". I don't have many other books in my library that have big hearts with arrows through them on the cover. Every, and I mean EVERY, new chapter has the same big sweetie-pie picture on the left-hand page opposite the text on the right. This was a real double whammy for me since I had to use one arm to cover up the sappy picture and the other hand to cover up whatever embarassing words made up the title of the new chapter of this fine work. Let's just say that this book didn't make mee feel my manliest as I read it on the train each day. I'm not sure that I was able to hide the subject of my reading. That's okay, I followed up this book with one on fighting to get my manly credentials back.

Great model, not only for couples and children, but also for relationships in general, private or business.


Bonus for the audiobook: author has a great voice with a nice southern accent :)

There are some very good ideas and tools that can really improve your relationships in this book.

However, I feel like the male audience the authour had in mind when writing this was composed of nothing but crude homer simpson/peter griffin-esque caricatures, mostly from the overabundance of sports analogies.

This book is definitely out of touch with the amount of suggestions/examples that involve church-going.

Also, I really wish Chapman would consider unmarried men in a relationship and gay men in a relationship, even if only in a tokenistic way. This book is offputting to read when I keep hearing "my wife" mentioned (I don't have one, only a girlfriend).