Original post: http://bearlamp.com.au/against-the-five-love-languages/

You are in a relationship, someone made some objection about communication, you don't seem to understand what's going on. Many years later you find yourself looking back at the relationship and reflecting with friends. That's when someone brings up The Five Love Languages. Oh deep and great and meaningful secrets encoded into a book.

The 5 languages are:

Gifts
Quality time
Words of affirmation
Acts of service (devotion)
Physical touch (intimacy)

Oooooh if only you had spent more energy trying to get quality time, and less effort on gifts that relationship could have been saved. Or the other way - the relationship was doomed because you wanted quality time and they wanted gifts as a show of love.

You start seeing the world in 5 languages, your coworker offering to get you a coffee is a gift. Your boss praising your good work is words of affirmation. You start thinking like a Man with a hammer. Strictly speaking I enjoy man with a hammer syndrome. I like to use a model to death, and then pick a new model and do it all again.

What I want you to do now is imagine you didn't do that. Imagine we cloned the universe. In one universe we gave you the love-languages book and locked you in a room to read it. In the second universe we offered to run you through a new relationship-training exercise. "It's no guide book on how to communicate with your partner, but it's a pretty good process", we lock you in a room with a chair, a desk, some paper, pens (few distractions) and order you to derive some theory and idea about how to communicate with your partner.

Which one do you predict will yield the best result?

When I ask my system 2, it is fairly happy with the idea that using someone else's model is a shortcut to finding the answers. After all they pre-derived the model. No need to spend hours working on it myself when it's all in a book.

When I ask my system 1, it thinks that the self-derived system is about a billion times better than the one I found in a book. It's going to be personally suited, it's going to be sharp and accurate, and bend to my needs.

Meta-strategy

Which is going to yield the best result for the pr...