So you’ve bought your wife 100 bunches of roses over the years to demonstrate your love, and yet still she’s declaring you don’t love her — and filing for divorce.

According to Pastor Gary Chapman, author of ‘The Five Love Languages — How to Express Heartfelt Commitment to Your Mate’ you can buy all the flowers you want, but if your spouse doesn’t speak the ‘gift’ love language, it won’t make a bit of difference.

The idea behind ‘The Five Love Languages’ is that people accept and express their love primarily in one of five different ways: affirming words, quality time, receiving gifts, acts of service and physical touch. When you express love in the way that your spouse truly appreciates you fill up their “love tank”.

Pastor Chapman told the Bookworm Beat in a telephone interview that it is easy enough to figure out your spouse’s love language if you listen and pay attention.

“First, observe how they typically express love to other people,” said Pastor Chapman. “If they are always giving people hugs or pats you can assume physical touch is their language. If they are always giving people affirming words and encouraging people you can assume that is what they want to hear.

“You also listen to their complaints. The complaints reveal their heart. If your spouse says ‘we don’t spend time together; we are like two ships passing in the night’ then they are telling you that quality time is their love language. If you go on a business trip and they say, ‘didn’t you bring me anything’, then gifts is their primary love language. We get irritated when our spouse complains, but the complaints reveal the heart.”

He said speaking your spouse’s love language can make all the difference in a marriage.

Pastor Chapman became interested in couples counselling three decades ago, after he and his own wife Karolyn went through a bad patch.

“I didn’t know any of this when I got married,” he said. “My wife and I had a lot of struggles in our early years. Like many couples we were very different. From the very beginning we started having struggles. We are very empathetic, because we know what it is to be miserable, and what it is to be happy again.”

He and his wife have now been married for over 40 years.

However, he said it was only 15 years ago that he started developing his love language relationship theories.

“I realised I was hearing the same stories over and over,” he said. “I went back over my notes and noticed that couples were complaining about the same things repeatedly. Their complaints fell into different categories.”

Out of these categories came the five love languages. At first he wasn’t dogmatic about there being only five love languages. He was open to there being more, but so far hasn’t uncovered any different ones.

He said a lot of marriages break up when couples come down from the emotional high of love, usually after two years.

“If they haven’t learned how to express love in different ways, they miss each other,” he said. “Most couples are in-sync in the early days of the marriage, but often they are missing each other, so the love tank gets empty and their differences get bigger. They end up arguing about the differences. Then, a few years down the road, they are wondering why they got married. This book teaches people how to have a good marriage where both people feel loved and supported. I think that is why the book has been so successful.”

And it has been very successful indeed. After 15 years in publication it is number five on the New York Times bestseller list in the self-help category having sold three-million copies in 34 languages including Arabic and Hindi.

Although the book is from a Christian perspective, it is not aggressively so, and does not lay gender blame, which is perhaps why it has been equally popular in non-Christian countries.

Pastor Chapman is a long-time senior associate pastor at Calvary Baptist Church in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He is a graduate of Moody Bible Institute, but also holds bachelors and masters degrees in anthropology from Wheaton College and Wake Forest University, respectively.

He has also found that the love languages carry across different cultures, although the type of service, gift or affirmative word appreciated might vary from culture to culture.

“I haven’t had a whole lot of feedback from the Arabic version,” he said. “I did get a lot of feedback from the Turkey edition. The book has been a bestseller in Turkey, which is primarily a Muslim country. I went to Turkey and gave some lectures.”

He said that a background in anthropology made him leery, at first, about publishing in other languages.

“I wasn’t sure if it would work,” he said. “The Spanish edition came out first, and it was a bestseller. After that we started letting other countries publish it. Its cultural transcendence has been surprising.”

And these different methods of expressing love can carry over, beyond a marriage to other kinds of relationships, such as parent or child, or even friend or colleague. Pastor Chapman has written 14 other books tackling these topics.

“It applies in all human relationships,” Pastor Chapman said. “Most parents sincerely love their children, but there are a lot of children who don’t feel loved. Much of the misbehaviour in children grows out of an empty love tank. Their behaviour is an effort to get attention from a parent.”

He said one way to improve a child’s behaviour is to give them heavy doses of their primary love languages.

“The ideal thing for a child is that they will learn how to give love and receive love in all five languages,” he said. “When they get to adulthood it will be much easier for them. Most of us have only been taught one or two ways to express love.”

Pastor Chapman said he has often been asked whether our primary love language is genetic or is learned.

“I don’t have a good answer,” he said. “It is like a lot of personal traits. I do know that by the time the child is three years old, you can easily discern their love language, if you observe how they love others. My son’s love language is physical touch. When he was three I would come home from work and he would grab my legs. I would put him on my lap and he would mess up my hair. My daughter was not like that. Her love language was quality time. She would say ‘daddy come into my room I want to show you something’. She wanted the two of us to be together. Whether it is innate or learned it is developed early.”

In addition to writing, Pastor Chapman runs marriage seminars on a regular basis all over the United States and sometimes in other countries. For more information about Pastor Chapman or his books, go to http://www.garychapman.org or http://www.fivelovelanguages.com