Your bag is empty.
In 1992 a Baptist pastor from North Carolina named Gary Chapman wrote The Five Love Languages: The Secret to Love that Lasts, explaining why married people sometimes want to smother each other with a decorative pillow. His theory was that everyone on earth gives and receives love in a handful of specific ways and that most couples are just two people screaming at each other in different dialects until one of them dies. Words of affirmation: you need to be told. Quality time: you need him in the room with his eyes pointed at you and not at a video of a guy pressure washing a driveway. Acts of service: you feel loved when the dishwasher is emptied and nobody holds a press conference about it. Gifts: gifts. There is a fifth one, physical touch, which every man I have ever let near me has claimed as his own with the confidence of a toddler announcing he likes candy, so we can skip it.
The thing about this book is that it was written by a pastor, for wives, about chores. It has nothing to say about what any of it means when you are naked and a man is on top of you breathing through his mouth, which is the only context in which I have ever needed a manual. A man can know for a fact that your love language is gifts and still arrive to put his penis in you carrying nothing but his phone and a vape.
I suspect, dear reader, you may have encountered something much the same. If you’ve ever met a woman who professed her love language much to your confusion, let’s decode it, shall we?
Gifts
For this woman, the sex starts around 6 p.m. and it better start with flowers. It starts with her favorite restaurant, or the theatre, or a concert, or a murder tour, because some of us want to be walked past the site of a triple homicide and then fingered in the car. Put your hand on her thigh under the table by the second drink and leave it there like it pays rent. By the time you get her home she has been getting fucked by you for four hours and is soaked through before you’ve figured out which key it is.
Or a lingerie trip. Even just the lingerie trip. Guys, those things are expensive, and you expect them to just appear on a woman? Like she molted and it was underneath? No. Agent Provocateur. La Perla. She has spent the GDP of a small coastal nation on tiny scraps of French lace that you rip off in nine seconds like a raccoon getting into a bag of bread. So go with her. Sit in the little velvet chair outside the fitting room with your knees apart like the pervert you are. She opens the curtain in something black with 40 straps and asks what you think, and you get to tell her, out loud, at two in the afternoon, in front of a saleswoman named Margaux. Then you pay, and you get to sit through all of dinner knowing exactly what is under that dress. Guys, help yourselves and help us out.
Words of Affirmation
This woman needs to hear it and she needs to hear it hours before you are anywhere near her. Text her at two in the afternoon and tell her what you’ve been thinking about. “Thinking about you” does not count, that is what you say to someone whose dog died. Instead, try: Where your mouth is going first. She will read it 11times in a budget meeting with her legs crossed so tight she loses feeling in one foot, and by the time you see her your job is basically done.
Then, and I cannot stress this enough, keep talking. So many of you go dead silent the moment your pants come off, just pumping away in the dark like a man trying to get a stuck drawer open, and she is lying there with no information at all. She doesn’t know if you’re in ecstasy or doing long division. Get your mouth against her ear. Tell her how she looks on top of you. Tell her how she tastes. Say her name like it’s the only word you were taught. You will narrate an entire football game to an empty room, so you can manage one sentence about how she is ruining your life while you’re inside her. Watch what it does to her. It’s like putting a quarter in something.
Quality Time
For her the enemy is the phone. Put it in another room. Face down on the nightstand is nothing, she can feel it sitting there glowing with other women and fantasy football. She wants the entire night and she wants to believe you have nowhere else to be, including the back of your own skull where you keep the porn.
So slow down. No one is timing you, there’s no ribbon. Kiss her in the kitchen until dinner burns and the smoke alarm goes off and you just keep going. Take her clothes off one item at a time and actually look at what you’ve uncovered each time like you paid admission. Keep your eyes open and on hers, even though I know that’s scarier to you than death. Spend half an hour on her before you so much as think about yourself, and when she’s close, do not speed up, do not get creative, stay exactly where you are. And when it’s over, stay there too. Stay inside her for a minute. Keep your hands on her. Those 20 minutes after, her leg slung over you, both of you sticky and stupid, is what she’ll be thinking about tomorrow at a red light. Guys, it’s 20 minutes. You have spent longer than that choosing a podcast.
Acts of Service
This woman has been running the entire operation since seven a.m. Work, the house, the calendar, your mother’s birthday, a group chat about someone’s shower. If she gets into bed and has to project manage her own orgasm she would rather take a gummy and lose consciousness.
So change the sheets before she gets home. Run the bath and wash her back like she’s something valuable you found. Then in bed you are in charge of her. Don’t ask what she wants, she has answered four hundred questions today and one more will make her cry. Put her where you want her. Watch her breathing and her hips and work it out yourself like an adult. Get on your knees and go down on her without being asked, and stay down there, through the first one and past it, until her thighs are shaking against your ears and she’s got a fistful of your hair and couldn’t tell you her own zip code. That is the act of service. Guys, she’s been telling you this one the whole time.
I’ve got a feeling any woman would say any of these languages are hers. Love is love. And don’t bother telling her you read about this in Playboy. She already knows a woman told you to look after her.