[VDay Post] Why shouldn't Money be a Love Language?

 

It was Gary Chapman who pioneered the idea of the Five Love Languages. The idea is that you can have better relationships if you figure out your own love language or your partner's. The five love languages are:

• Physical Touch
• Gifts
• Acts of Service
• Quality Time
• Words of Encouragement.

After a while, self-help gurus tried to expand the model into seven love languages. Some article I read a while ago added intellectual conversation and emotional connection, but if you google the seven, you will get Communication and Expression of love and affection.

Now all this fine and good, if you are in the business of selling self-help books. Recent surveys show that for the men who read this blog, they really need to focus on other things in life to attract a mate. Dating companies conduct surveys in Singaporean women and find out that they prefer the following:

• Education Qualifications
• Salary
• Similar religion

So my question for Valentine's Day in 2023 is simply : 

Why can't money be a love language?

If you think about it, money can be used to buy gifts. It can also buy services that end up giving you more time, which pays for more quality time and enables more acts of service. It provides more economic security and in an economic regime of high inflation and rocketing real estate prices, why can't it be formally inducted as a love language?

I think if we can acknowleged Money as a Love Language, we can have a very fruitful conversation about what kind of money is your Money Dialect, to which there are several interesting examples :

• High-earned income
• Dividends / Royalties
• Investment Growth 
• Entrepreneurship
• Inheritance
• Marriage

Even if your Love Language is Money, there are many ways to make money, so you should think  about what kind of Money Dialect you speak. 

It's pretty obvious my Money Dialect is Dividends. Someone who is always hunting for expat men might see Marriage as a means to get more financial security. Someone who is always studying to join a high-paying profession will speak the Love Dialect of High-earned income. 

Reading someone's Money Dialect is a useful skill even if you are not looking for romantic entanglements. A person who has a Money Dialect of Dividends will tend to prefer to save a lot of money to grow their passive income. This person may clash with someone whose Money Dialect is Entrepreneurship. 

There is nothing more annoying for a dividends investor to keep hearing about self-aggrandizing stories of hustling and Lamborghini cars.