In 2010, I went on a pre-marriage course. My now wife and I were engaged to be married that summer, and the course had been recommended to us as a way of exploring some of the things we perhaps hadn’t thought about yet.
One of the things I came away with was a book called The Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman. The premise was fairly simple: we don’t all give and receive love in the same way. Chapman described five broad languages: words of affirmation, quality time, receiving gifts, acts of service and physical touch.
At the time, I was mostly interested in not being terrible at marriage. Software testing certainly didn’t enter into it.
Years later, a Facebook memory reminded me of the book and got me thinking about it again. Somewhere along the way, I started wondering whether something I’d encountered in a completely different part of my life might help me think about communication at work. I started exploring some of that in my 2018 blog, In My Mind, My Body and My Soul, and the idea eventually became my first accepted conference talk: What’s love got to do with it? A communication heuristic.
One of the versions from the COVID years is still online, so you can watch 2020 me explain it if you fancy. You can also have a good laugh at the state of my lockdown video background, complete with my kids shouting at each other somewhere off camera. Lovely.
The reason I ended up back here was a conversation with my friend Kristoffer Nordström. We were rubber ducking ideas for conference abstracts for 2027 when this old talk resurfaced. That sent me back to the slides, handout and recording to see what I make of the ideas now.
Watching the recording was slightly strange. Remote interaction was still something many of us were figuring out at the time. Six years later, remote and distributed working is simply part of the landscape for many of us, and some of the signals available to us when we communicate have changed with it. That makes the question at the heart of all of this feel perhaps even more relevant now:
how often do we communicate with people in the way that works for us and assume it works for them too?
Why did this matter at work?
Around the time I started developing these ideas, I was in my first job as a manager. I was still a testing practitioner, now with responsibility for other people as well. That made some of the differences between people rather difficult to ignore.
Software development depends on people being able to communicate what they know. A lot of the work involves trying to understand things together, including things that might be uncertain, uncomfortable or contested. Much of what a team gets to learn depends on somebody feeling able to put information into the conversation in the first place.
How we communicate can influence what happens next. Someone who feels dismissed when they raise a concern might think twice about raising another. Feedback can lose some of its value when its delivery gets in the way. Even a well-intentioned attempt to help can leave somebody feeling that their work has been taken away from them.
Teams develop a culture around these interactions too. Expectations form around how directly people speak and what happens when somebody challenges something. We bring our own experiences and preferences into those environments, and it can be surprisingly easy to treat our version of normal as everyone else’s. The Five Love Languages gave me a way to explore some of that.
It was always supposed to be a heuristic
A heuristic helps us think without prescribing an answer. The question I used when I first explored this was: what might I do in this situation?
That word might matters. Discovering that Dave over here is a “quality time person” doesn’t suddenly unlock the secret to communicating with Dave forever. At best, we have another piece of information that might help us understand him. There’s still a person and a situation to account for.
That was part of the attraction for me. The Five Love Languages gave me something to think with. I wasn’t particularly interested in working methodically through all five, and I’m still not. Pulling on a few of them gives us enough to see where the questions start to get interesting.
Appreciation isn’t universal
Take words of affirmation. Someone has done something good and you want to recognise it. What do you actually do?
For one person, hearing their name called out in front of the entire company might be brilliant. They feel seen and their contribution has been recognised. Someone else might want the ground to swallow them up. That second person might appreciate a direct message or a conversation with somebody whose opinion they respect, particularly when that person can tell them specifically what they valued about their contribution.
Even once we think we’ve understood that somebody values words of affirmation, there’s still plenty we don’t know. A public shout-out and a quiet word can both be expressions of appreciation while feeling completely different to the person receiving them.
Words can also carry more than praise. Workplace banter is an obvious example. Something intended affectionately can land rather differently when the other person doesn’t share our understanding of the joke. Sarcasm and passive aggression make that territory more difficult again.
There’s a bias sitting underneath this that is easy to miss. I know how I would receive something, and that knowledge is immediately available to me. Those of us working in software are already accustomed to trying to think beyond ourselves through things like personas and different user perspectives. It’s curious how easily we can forget to do the same with the people on the other side of our communication.
What does your attention look like?
Quality time raises similar questions. You’re talking while the other person is typing on their laptop or looking at their phone. They’re physically present, and they might even be listening, but you have no idea whether you actually have their attention.
Perhaps that doesn’t bother you at all. Having somebody pair with you on a problem while you’re both doing things could be enormously valuable. In another situation, you might value ten uninterrupted minutes where the laptop closes and the person you’re speaking to is visibly focused on the conversation.
Distributed working gives us even more variations on what presence can look like. We can work closely with people we rarely meet in person and have rich conversations through text. We can also sit in the same video call and come away with completely different experiences of how engaged everybody was. There’s ambiguity in all of that, and I find it really interesting.
Something similar happens when somebody comes to us with a problem. They might want help working through it, or simply space to talk. I’ve certainly offered solutions to people who weren’t asking me to solve anything. Understanding what somebody needs from the conversation can be more useful than immediately demonstrating that we’re able to help.
Helping can become unhelpful
Acts of service sounds uncomplicated. Somebody needs something, and you help them. What that help looks like is where things become less straightforward.
My dad gave me an example of this long before I had any reason to think about it in these terms. Before he became a vicar, he was a French and German teacher. When I took my French homework to him and effectively asked him to answer the question for me, he wouldn’t. He helped me work it out and find my own path. At the time, I’m fairly sure I’d have still preferred the answer. In hindsight, he gave me the chance to actually learn something.
People who are generous with their time or knowledge can also become the people everybody relies on. That can look positive for quite a while, particularly when we celebrate the workplace “rock star” who takes everything on. Eventually, the cost can start to show, and the team can become dependent on the very behaviour it has been celebrating.
Receiving gifts and physical touch can prompt their own questions, and I explored both in the original material. I don’t think we need to march through all five here to make the point. The value for me comes from what happens when we stop treating the label as the answer and start getting curious about the person.
Sometimes we simply don’t know
Early in my career, I worked in games testing. I remember some colleagues joking around one day when the conversation turned to priests, and it became pretty uncomfortable.
My dad’s a vicar, as I mentioned earlier, and they didn’t know that. I just sat there getting increasingly angry and offended. I didn’t say anything, so the conversation carried on.
I can still remember how that made me feel. They were missing a piece of context that was highly relevant to how I was experiencing the conversation. Offensive comments were still offensive. The experience showed me how easily people can be part of the same interaction while having very different information about what is happening between them.
We can’t know everything about the people we work with, and nor should we expect to. Getting to know them gives us more to work with. This matters because a team can only respond to the information that makes it into the conversation. Somebody who has been talked over enough times might eventually keep the next question to themselves. When challenging a decision repeatedly leads somewhere unpleasant, perhaps the next risk doesn’t get raised.
The Five Love Languages are not five types of people
There is a workplace-specific adaptation of the book called The 5 Languages of Appreciation in the Workplace by Gary Chapman and Paul White. I didn’t know it existed when I developed these ideas.
My route into this was the relationship book I’d encountered on the pre-marriage course in 2010. I also had a handout from that course, which I later adapted into ordinary workplace situations when I started exploring the idea through software testing.
The questions asked people to choose between different ways they might experience the languages. The score gave them somewhere to start, although comparing answers was where things became more useful. Why had two people chosen differently? What did one person see in an option that somebody else didn’t?
I’ve still got that handout, and I’ve included it here if you fancy having a go. Try it as a prompt, perhaps with somebody you work with, and see what the differences in your answers give you to talk about.
Even people who appear to share a language can have very different preferences. Someone who values words of affirmation might love a public shout-out while somebody else would much rather receive a private message. Someone who relates to physical touch might enjoy a high five and have absolutely no interest in being hugged.
The category gets the conversation started. The conversation tells us far more about the person.
Communication has a context
Communication at work happens inside teams with their own dynamics and cultures, between people who bring different experiences and expectations with them. Increasingly, those interactions also happen across locations and through a mixture of written and spoken communication.
That changes what’s available to us. Intonation can completely alter the meaning of a few words when they’re spoken, then disappear when the same words are typed into a chat window. A short, direct message might feel wonderfully clear to one person and abrupt to another. Expectations can also differ around how quickly a message needs a response or whether a disagreement is better handled in writing or through a conversation.
Culture plays into this in ways that go well beyond geography. Teams and organisations develop habits around how people communicate. New people arrive and have to make sense of those signals while bringing expectations of their own. How comfortable somebody feels saying that they don’t understand something can be influenced by what they have already seen happen when other people do it.
Remote and distributed working adds more variation to something that was already complicated. Some signals become harder to see while other forms of interaction become possible. A carefully written message can give somebody time to think before responding. There are other conversations where hearing somebody’s voice might make all the difference.
There isn’t a universally better way to communicate. We need enough awareness of the people and the situation to choose something appropriate, accepting that we won’t always get it right.
So, what’s love got to do with it?
Coming back to these ideas seven years later, identifying somebody’s “love language” feels less important to me than it once did. What has stuck with me is how easily we can mistake our own communication preferences for something universal.
I was relatively new to management when I first started thinking about this in a workplace context, and perhaps that’s part of why it resonated with me. I was learning how much of working with people involved paying attention, adjusting and sometimes recognising that the way I’d approached something hadn’t landed as I expected.
That lesson reaches well beyond management. Software development depends on people sharing what they know, particularly when that information introduces uncertainty or disagreement. Quality depends on useful information being surfaced and acted upon. How we communicate around the work can influence which signals make it through and which disappear.
The Five Love Languages helped me notice some of those differences. They also gave me a reason to talk to people about them, which has proved considerably more useful than knowing which label came out on top.
That brings me back to the word I chose for the original title: heuristic. I wanted something that could help me think about what I might do in the situation I was actually in. Looking back, I think that’s why the idea has stayed with me.
Seven years later, the question still feels useful: what might I do in this situation?
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