Love Languages: Wedding Edition

What are love languages?

A concept coined by Gary Chapman provides individuals with five ways of categorizing the way they give and receive love, which most know as love languages. Each love language highlights and reflects a unique way individuals feel loved and valued in a relationship. These expressions of love can show that emotional connection is most important. These include:

• Physical touch: such as holding hands, cuddling, or rubbing your partner’s back
• Acts of service: cooking a meal, filling the gas tank, or making coffee 
• Quality time: regular date nights, taking walks, or deeper conversations  
• Words of affirmation: compliments, words of appreciation or encouragement 
• Receiving or giving gifts a favorite treat, tickets to see an artist, or handmade items

What is the significance of love languages? 

The significance of love languages is in helping couples ensure that love is not only expressed, but genuinely and truly received instead of assuming your partner already knows that they’re loved. While partners often care deeply for each other, many feel quite disconnected, misunderstood or underappreciated at times. It’s important to highlight that this misalignment is often not due to the lack of effort, instead it’s a mismatch between how people express their love and how their partner is experiencing or interpreting that expression of love. Understanding your partner’s love language is just as important as discovering your own. Bridging this gap allows each partner to feel more seen, valued, and emotionally connected. 

How can love languages help us? 

Reduce Misinterpretations 

Understanding love languages allows for a decrease in misinterpretation by giving partners a framework to understand the intention behind each other’s behaviors. Partners may personalize actions or assume lack of care without the awareness. Using these languages encourages couples to interpret their partners’ behaviors with generosity and curiosity rather than assuming criticism, allowing partners to recognize love, even when it’s not expressed in their own preferred way of receiving love. 

Decrease Resentment

Love languages play a huge role in decreasing resentment within couples. When you start to feel that you’re not receiving love or care, you may begin to feel unseen, unappreciated, or emotionally exhausted. Your partner may start to feel discouraged or believe their efforts do not matter or aren’t being recognized. Learning to express love in ways that meet each other’s emotional needs allows for both partners to feel valued and understood, which ultimately leads to reducing frustration, emotional tension, and resentment over time. 

Improve Communication during Stressful Times

Love languages can significantly improve communication during high stress situations, periods such as wedding planning, when time, energy, and emotional bandwidth are stretched thin. Understanding how your partner gives and receives love helps couples communicate more clearly and offer support more effectively to reduce emotional turmoil. By expressing care and love in ways that feel most meaningful to your partner, you can remain connected even under pressure.

Foster Emotional Safety and Security 

Engaging in your partner’s love language fosters emotional safety and security by genuinely reinforcing the beliefs that “I matter to you,” “You see and understand me,” and “I am safe to be myself with you.” When couples feel emotionally secure, they are more likely to engage in being vulnerable, express their needs, and work through conflict effectively. This ability to foster safety strengthens trust, deepens, and supports long-term relationship satisfaction and resilience. 

What do love languages look like during wedding planning? 

Physical Touch 

If your love language is physical touch, you feel love through observable contact. Physical touch may look like offering a reassuring touch in moments of distress or physically embracing one another. When you’re planning your wedding, this might look like holding hands while touring venues or when you’re at appointments for food tastings. It can also look like taking a dance class together, sharing a kiss when you meet up for wedding errands, and holding each other’s gaze during happy moments to maintain connectivity. 

Acts of Service

If you are most fluent in acts of service, love is felt through helpful actions. This may look like one partner taking on vendor emails or managing the budget to reduce the other’s stress, noticing when their partner is overwhelmed and proactively stepping in or completing tasks without being asked. It can also look like following up with guests who are past their RSVP deadline and speaking to family members about expectations for the wedding day. These acts communicate, “I see how overwhelmed you are and I want to support you by taking some of it off your plate.” 

Quality Time

For those who cherish shared time, you feel love through presence and undivided attention. In spending quality time during the wedding planning, this could include viewing venues together, being present for meetings with vendors, and even engaging in premarital counseling! While the wedding is a major focus, we don’t want to forget our relationship needs. This can mean intentionally scheduling non-wedding related time together to reconnect emotionally, creating space to talk about one another’s feelings and experiences (not just the wedding to-do list), and engaging in activities that may have been set aside during planning. 

Words of Affirmation

For someone who values words, love is felt through verbal appreciation, recognition, and reassurance. This can include expressing validation toward your partner’s decisions or the effort they put into a task, whether it is thanking them, celebrating a good idea, or expressing pride after overcoming a challenge. You can let your partner know, “I really appreciate how much thought and care you put into this,” “I’m glad we’re doing this together,” or “I’m proud of you for getting through that anxious situation.” 

Pro Tip: Try to get as specific as possible with your appreciation– “Thanks for everything today” is nice, but “I am so grateful I had you there when I was nervous to talk to my dad” is even better.

Gift Giving

For our gift lovers, love is felt through thoughtful, symbolic, and meaningful gestures. During wedding planning, treating yourselves to a fun date or purchasing something for your new home can mean celebrating achievements or completed tasks. Another way to show love is by sending a gift to your partner at their bachelor(ette) party to let them know you are thinking of them while away, such as their favorite bottle of spirits or fun party favors. On the day of your wedding, this could look like preparing a gift for your fiance to open, while leaving a note before you head down the aisle. These gestures communicate emotional anchoring, reminders that a partner is seen, valued, and held in mind even during moments of overwhelm or time apart.

A note to leave with

Love languages are not set in stone! They can shift over time, across different life stages, or in response to stress and transition. You don’t have to fit neatly into just one category, many people experience a mix of two or more, and the way you receive love doesn’t always align with how you express it. Love languages are simply a tool, not a rulebook, and communication still matters the most. 

Want to learn more about yourself and your partner’s love languages? AisleTalk offers therapy and coaching for your relationship’s biggest moments — from breakups and new beginnings to wedding stress, premarital conversations, and the everyday work of balancing family, life, love, and loss. If this resonates, we invite you to book a free intro call with our team to learn more about working together.