Treating men who hire prostitutes with respect is kind, but not necessarily honest. More or less a requirement is that they not care if the person they're having sex with hates it. They're a distinct class of people and not reflective of all men.
I'm honestly not sure how I feel about it. I don't like the weird denial about that aspect of the transaction. It makes it difficult to trust the rest of her writing.
"The Five Love Languages" is literally trademarked. It's a framework that's designed to sound plausible, like a horoscope. It's not designed to be accurate, it's designed to make you go, "oooooh" and repeat the trademark. "Having relationship issues? Oh, have you heard of the Love Languages®? I read about it the other day..."
If your partner doesn't want to touch you, what's the most likely explanation? That they "don't speak your love language", or that they aren't attracted to you?
Ok, and if you are that partner, but you don't want to lose the relationship, what's an easy response? "I don't want to touch you because I don't find you attractive," or "I'm sorry babe, I do love you, but we just don't speak the same love language"?
The whole thing is very Cosmo. It's designed to sell in the same way as Cosmo.
> "The Five Love Languages" is literally trademarked.
So?
> It's a framework that's designed to sound plausible, like a horoscope. It's not designed to be accurate, it's designed to make you go, "oooooh" and repeat the trademark. "Having relationship issues? Oh, have you heard of the Love Languages®? I read about it the other day..."
That sounds like you think it was constructed in bad faith. Do you have any evidence for that?
A model that's simplified can still have value even if it doesn't perfectly fit every situation.
> If your partner doesn't want to touch you, what's the most likely explanation? That they "don't speak your love language", or that they aren't attracted to you?
I'm only passingly familiar with the love languages thing, but I think it does have a point, and I've experienced some of the differences in relationships that is schematizes. Reducing it to sexual attraction is kinda missing the point.
Plenty of it has a point - so does Cosmo. The problem is that it's a psychological model written primarily to be sold. You're welcome to put your trust in that, but I think that's a mistake, and the way that type of stuff usually hurts people is that the model being peddled cuts off deeper understanding of human relationships.
You're probably right but does that mean it can't also contain some useful truths? Personally, these types of frameworks do help me break out of my own self centered paradigm and appreciate differences in friends, coworkers and partners. For work teams I highly recommend the DISC survey.
I do agree with the part about not touching though. It seems like a lot of problems are invented in marriages because people are unwilling or unable to say or even think the ugly truth that they simply don't want to have sex with their partner anymore.
In my opinion the issue with pop-psych marketing constructs is that there are kernels of truth embedded within a misleading superstructure. They tend to leave you worse off because the structure (which is wrong, incomplete, misleading) is bundled with the kernels of truth. They also usually purport to be rosetta stones. There are exactly five love languages, and humans happen to each speak a different variety of them? Hmmmmm.
Another example: what if someone feels "loved" when they're bought gifts, but that's because they're materialistic, a gold digger? Likewise if someone wants to be touched because they're more interested in sex than a relationship, and they derive validation from your sexual interest. "It's just their Love Language" is technically correct, but it's the wrong lens to apply to those situations.
One thing is that those aspects map to quite real needs, and the book does provide a set of reasonable metaphors to talk about those needs between partners in a way that gets the point across where previous attempts didn't succeed. It's genuinely hard for many people to define and communicate their own feelings and expectations, and even more so for someone else's feelings and expectations, complicated by the natural tendency to presume that other's preferences work similarly to yours, so a framework that helps this communication is really useful in those cases where relationship problems involve a misunderstanding about those expectations; which is not all relationship problems but certainly a meaningful part of them.
In the examples you provide, I would say that it's exactly the right lens to apply to those situations - it's imperative for both parties to understand that those are the factors that matter instead of trying to work out a relationship around them, ignoring those core issues; and this lens allows to understand/specify/communicate it better.
Like, if someone does derive validation from your sexual interest, then that's a quite important thing to understand for the partner (even if for them personally the concept of needing such validation is a bit alien, because their self-worth is filled differently), because that's not going to change easily and is going to be a big factor in making the relationship work. And if someone is materialistic, pretending otherwise won't be helpful and neither will trying to change someone's values, that generally takes huge time and effort and/or crisis events. Of course, obtaining a proper understanding may also mean understanding that the relationship should not continue, but for such relationships that's also a beneficial result.
There may be more effective ways of facilitating this communication and common understanding of the partner's inner needs, e.g. perhaps couple's therapy can do it faster, but that's a quite expensive process and a simplified set of metaphors can be a cheap and useful approach ("A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points") if there's sufficient material to ensure that both partners, likely coming from very different perspectives given that they have this communications problem, get a common understanding of how they understand them.
I don't mean this disrespectfully, but your comment is a perfect example of someone falling into the trap I was describing. If someone's using you, they don't love you. They won't love you. It doesn't matter what their "love language" is - giving them the thing they're looking to extract isn't going to help, it's just going to get you exploited.
That case doesn't apply because it's not love and that partner is not committed to the relationship. In fact I would go so far to say it's pathological.
I think GP would agree that this type of self help book is not a Rosetta Stone and its core truth may be somewhat banal ie think about what makes your partner feel special not only what makes you feel special. Maybe part of the success formula for these pop psyc books is that we need these truths to be wrapped in a story and labeled so we can remember them more easily.
My point is that he's trying to shoehorn the "Love Languages" framework onto that situation, because the model is designed to encourage you to do that - it's the same thing that makes it sell. You shouldn't dismiss that as a coincidence, it's not as simple as divorcing that from the legitimate insights. The framework is designed to be a brain worm.
Here's a question: you like the framework. Have you ever seen a specific relationship be saved by it?
While it's hard to attribute "saving a relationship" to any one thing, yes, I've seen multiple relationships where this book helped the couple's communication during a crisis in a very long-term relationship; surfacing some things that (with hindsight) could and needed to be communicated and fixed many years ago but which simply were not; because they lacked "skill"(? or had ingrained/cultural barriers?) to meaningfully talk with their partner about the specific issues and unmet needs they had.
However, your objections seem to be about something other than what I'm talking about - what I hear in your responses is something like equivocating "Understand that it's their love language" with "you should accept it unconditionally", especially in the context of abusive relationships, which is definitely not what I'm arguing about. The decision whether a particular relationship is good for both people involved and whether should continue is orthogonal to that aspect, and "love languages" don't/shouldn't affect that decision; But in the context of various one-sided and possibly relationships, however, understanding that (for example) one partner really only cares about sex in this relationship and doesn't care about the other aspects - well, that's useful information to make the decision whether to move on away from the relationship.
I see it's use solely as a means of improving communication, and it's scope limited for couples which have a problem with that communication (which is common) and also a mutual desire to improve it (which is not that common, and already excludes many destined-to-fail relationships), in this regard, it's useful only if applied by the couple, not by one of them. It's definitely not an universal solution - it solves a particular type (though IMHO popular) of miscommunication, and if the couple has fixed those, this book will be useless for any other types of problems in their relationship.
I think this is true, but it really comes down to: how much do you and your spouse like each other?
If you both like each other, you'll want to give, and the relationship is probably going to feel mutually fulfilling. If it's not mutual, you won't want to give, even if you force yourself, and you'll resent doing things for them.
Honestly I think all these reframings are a way of avoiding the basic fact that the main source of satisfaction in a relationship is just: how much you're romantically into the other person, and how much they return that. Throw trust in too, since that's sort of separate, but that's the meat and potatoes of the dish. Romance is romance, vast majority of relationship dissatisfaction I see comes from a lack of desire from one person.
Romance is not the basis of marriage or any relationship. Romance is affective. It can coax us into a relationship, but it isn’t the basis. That is a sign of immaturity. You also end up in the absurd situation where you seek divorce because you’re no longer in “love”.
I'm not talking about the thrill of a new relationship. I would define a feeling of old, secure warmth towards your partner of 50 years as romance, and your satisfaction in a 50-year-old relationship is primarily a function of whether you have that. That's the kind of thing that makes someone happy to take care of their wife for 5 or 10 years as she suffers through alzheimers.
But in any case, romance is absolutely the basis of a relationship, otherwise you could marry your best friend. If you don't have it, you're likely to be dissatisfied. Of course it can wane - but that's also why you work to get it back, because if it goes away for good, your relationship is going to suck.
I think if I’m interpreting your comment correctly you are correct. Physical attraction is what you mean instead of romance. Romance by itself is simply a series of steps you use to express your continuing interest in a partner or possible partner. Small gifts, kind words, charming activities. Those are romance, and I think are critical to Maintaining a solid relationship (all couples may find different things romantic—-some people may want sunset sails on the harbor, some people might want kebabs from round the corner).
Probably because what most people call "love" is really just the first stage of it, and if it has not been replaced by something deeper (i.e. respect) by the time the initial love fades, then it wasn't love but infatuation - or, more precisely passion was not nurtured carefully enough to become respect, and so it was just an infatuation.
In short, it would be absurd to mix up infatuation with love.
Sometimes. The entire problem is that the infatuation stage just doesn't last that long, which of course makes one ask...why did you get married too soon?
The bigger problem as I've seen over the years with people is that they confuse the two with -other- people. A person married for 5 years becomes infatuated with someone else, which of course means they love them and not their spouse anymore. In their eyes, at least. And the problem with that thinking should be immediately apparent.
It's a complicated subject and I'm not an expert by any means, just sharing my observations.
Presumably this could be sussed out long before marriage. And if that deeper love and respect should disintegrate, there would be some sort of catalyst.
My expectation is that it's unlikely in the long-run to fall out of love if both parties still nurture the relationship and invest themselves. But maybe I'm wrong and it happens anyway.
Because that's reacting in surprise to an expected inevitable thing (infatuation fading), and presumably afterwards trying again with a different partner with an unrealistic expectation that in those relationships they might permanently stay "in love" i.e. the infatuated feeling of falling in love, which is quite distinct from long term relationships that we call "love" but IMHO don't apply the label of "fallen in love" anymore.
In this case, if reality doesn't meet expectations, then divorcing just to try the same thing again to get the same result is absurd insanity, instead the expectations should be adjusted.
It is actually less harder than FIAT (except Monero), if you want to track spending of corrupt politicians, not fungible cryptocurrencies as BTC are great tools.
Drugs are the thing people have a strong incentive to accept crypto for, not pizzas.
All black markets have an incentive to use it - including state actors (e.g. weapons deals). Getting caught laundering Monero is preferable to getting caught selling missiles to the Saudis.
I would argue the average person is terrible at assessing bureaucratic ability but pretty good at assessing personality, so I think they're better off voting with their gut.
A few elections ago in the UK, a site like this got popular, where you'd answer a quiz and it would recommend the party most closely "matched" your preferences. A lot of people ended up getting recommended the green party, despite the fact the party is fairly fringe and has no real voting record. Turns out the site was set up by the Green party. Go figure.
I did not read the results, but this definitely depends on the effect size and the variance of whatever they are studying. If 31 people were raised from the dead, for example, it's plenty of sample size.
The issue is that the sample might be highly biased. If it's just 31 white males from Lubbock Texas then what does it even say? Stoners in that town speak different?
With such a small sample size, formal methods break down. The sample could be biased. In fact, it's almost guaranteed. The ability to p-hack (even inadvertently) is extremely high. Publication bias is also practically guaranteed. These kinds of issues void significance to a reasonably high degree.
At these kinds of sample sizes, the biggest issues are not going to be included or visible in the study. Unless the reported significance is extremely high, it's not meaningful.
I don't really participate in scientific literature or journals, but I see a lot of notes in HN around papers that appear to be overblowing the significance of their findings.
Is there a way for researchers to publish 'interesting observations' as just that, something that they measured that may or may not be noteworthy but felt worth sharing with the broader community?
The traditional solution to this problem is to insert a paragraph in the conclusion saying something along the lines of "this merits further study". However, that particular phrase has been overused in journal articles, to the point that it doesn't mean anything anymore.
It's not really something researchers can control. I was commenting on the news release, and it being posted on Hacker News, because that's more of an issue.
I'm honestly not sure how I feel about it. I don't like the weird denial about that aspect of the transaction. It makes it difficult to trust the rest of her writing.