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What’s Your Self-Love Language?

In this episode of The GenTwenty Podcast, Nicole and Marina talk about their self-love languages and what those look like in real life.

Find out your self-love language here.

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This transcript has been gently edited for clarity.

Nicole Booz: Welcome back to the GenTwenty Podcast I’m Nicole…

Marina Crouse: And I’m Marina! Today, we’re talking about your self-love language. To give you a little background, there’s something called the 5 love languages developed by psychologist Dr. Gary Chapman that discusses the 5 love languages as the way we give and receive love. 

The five ways are: gifts, quality time, acts of service, words of affirmation, and physical touch.

Nicole Booz: We will leave a link in the show notes to where you can take the quiz about self-love languages. It’s on a separate website than his website because this quiz actually relates directly to your self-love language, where his original quiz relates to how you love, and give love ,and receive love with other people.

It’s a slight difference there. Marina and I took this quiz before having this conversation and it turns out that my self-love language is quality time, acts of service, and then words of affirmation.  What are your top three, Marina?

Marina Crouse: My three are acts of service, quality time, and words of affirmation, which shocked me because I’ve taken the quiz before, or at least my external love language before, probably about 5 years ago and it was words of affirmation and physical touch. I’m very curious reflect back on this… and I wonder if how we’ve spent our time communicating with people in the last two years during the pandemic and how we’ve approached ourselves as we’ve hit 30 has changed things. So why? Why is your knowing yourself love language important? Why are we talking about this at all?

Nicole Booz: Yeah, I think that it kind of ties into self-care and how we rejuvenate ourselves and lean into rest but also building up our own confidence and our own self-esteem and how we believe in ourselves and how we act outwardly. Like how we represent ourselves essentially, and I think it’s really important to know the way that you can revive yourself best. That’s how I kind of see this whole self-love language thing. What about you?

Marina Crouse: Yeah  we were talking about this a little bit in another episode on people pleasing. I think too often we put ourselves last when we really need to put ourselves first because you can’t pour from an empty cup and if you’re not putting yourself first you are most likely not acknowledging the value you have and loving yourself. So for me the self-love language is definitely about mental health and self-care and I was thinking about how do you do an active service to yourself right?

Like doing the dishes for someone else or things like that… so when I was visiting you however long ago, I was like cleaning your kitchen. It’s like a compulsion where I’m like “oh Nicole’s busy she’s got two little kids. Her husband’s working because he works late hours I’m going to clean the kitchen” like that’s because I love her I don’t enjoy washing dishes. I actually hate hand washing dishes but for Nicole it was like “I’m going to wash every single pan, I’ve got this.” I was showing you love.

Nicole Booz: And I appreciated it so much.

Marina Crouse: But for myself, I don’t know if this is a true active service but one of the act of service I give to myself is letting myself rest when I think I don’t deserve it. Which, spoiler alert, you always deserve rest. You don’t have to earn it. But my brain is working on that and just the other day I was so burn out and I needed to just take a break in the middle a day and I let myself watch Harry Potter which is a bigger topic for another time but it was great.

I love to take baths, and one of the ways I do some self-care when I’m feeling really down is I clean my room. I reorganize my closet, I deep clean my bathroom, it’s like a gift to myself showing reminding myself that I am allowed to have a beautiful comfortable space.

So I just kind of steamrolled into that part of the conversation. But Nicole what do you do to show… to service yourself. That’s not right? what?

Nicole Booz: I will talk about that another time perhaps not on the air. However, my gosh I’m looking at our list here and…

Marina Crouse: Ah, this podcast is taken a turn. We’re gonna have to update the rating.

Nicole Booz: Ours are very similar. Because my top value is quality time and that’s 30 percent for me and yours is acts of service and that’s 29 percent of yours, but my second is acts of service and your second is quality time. So I think it’s very similar that we value similar things. So for me, quality time is the way I rejuvenate myself. I need time alone to just be by myself which is harder to come by when you work at home live at home with two children, a husband you know, people.

I think it’s really important for me to take that time by myself, which I find myself doing several times a week where I’m like “just leave me alone” and I have my time to do whatever it is that I want. When you’re talking about active service as like cleaning your room because I also tend to like things to be very organized. I love to declutter things and get rid of things and reorganize things. I find that very soothing. So I wasn’t actually thinking of that as an act of service for myself, but I think it is because I enjoy doing that and I enjoy refining my routines and my life to make things more simple.

Marina and I were talking about this earlier but my husband and I have recently introduced a laundry schedule to our home. Today’s day one so whenever this comes out please check in with me on Instagram or email or wherever I am currently most active…

Marina Crouse: Yeah, Nicole is taking an Instagram break. So  just email her or Instagram me and I’ll email her.

Nicole Booz: Yeah, just email me to see how this is working out but we introduced a laundry schedule where each one of us has a day of the week to do laundry because it’s taking too much of my time to put everyone’s laundry from one basket back into all their rooms and I really hate that. So we’re trying to refine our schedule and I hadn’t actually thought of that as as an act of service but that’s kind of like an act of service to myself.

Marina Crouse: Yeah, you’re recognizing a pain point and you’re finding a solution for it. So with cleaning my room I don’t like clutter, I don’t do well when I have lots of stuff everywhere. It’s a claustrophobic feeling and so right now I have probably want to say fifty…but that’s an exaggeration… I have like ten post-it notes, a bunch of pens, some other stuff that I’m meaning to do all on my desk which is where I’m supposed to work. So after we record this episode I’m going to tidy my desk before I can sit down and do the other things I need to do because I know I’ll feel calmer I’ll feel more focused. Do I want to tidy to my desk? Not really because I just want to get all this other stuff done. But I know that this will help me feel better.

Nicole Booz: Yeah, for sure and also looking at this I think it’s interesting that for both of us receiving gifts is last as a self-love language because both of us have a tendency to order beautiful things we see online, cute things from small business.

Marina Crouse: I give a lot of gifts. 

Nicole Booz:  It’s like your self love language. I guess I buy a lot of things for my children but a day that I don’t get a package to me is kind of like a sad day I’m like “oh it’s not coming till tomorrow that’s sad.” #jokes

Marina Crouse: You know I love receiving mail. I mean who doesn’t love a good package? But I love receiving cards. That’s my favorite thing about my birthday is all of the cards I receive. It makes makes me feel so loved. I look back at them and that’s where I think words of affirmation come in because I love all those words. 

One thing I’m actually working on is saying more affirmations to myself… content warning for a curse word, but there’s tiktok audio that’s going around that I sing to myself all the time that’s goes “bitch you doing a good job, bitch you doing a good job” and I sing that to myself when I’m working on something that I find hard because it makes me laugh and it reminds me that I’m doing okay, I’m doing good.

So it is just funny how how these things present themselves and I try to be really careful with money because I’m on a limited budget, so I won’t buy myself things. But if I see something that reminds me of Nicole I’m like “oh she needs this, I’m going to buy it.” So I yeah I think the way you show love can often be different than the way you love yourself.

It’s just a fascinating concept. It all comes down to to communication and presenting ourselves truthfully and honestly which I think is hard to do sometimes. What are some other ways that people can honor their needs? Why is it important to take care of yourself? I know we’ve touched upon it but we really want to hammer this home.

Nicole Booz: Yeah, I think that it’s really all about resting and showing yourself that you matter and you are valuable and I think that honing in on your self-love language can really help you lean into that. More because maybe something that you are doing  show love to other people is what you’re trying to do for yourself, and maybe it’s just really not aligned and it’s not working. So we hope that you will take the quiz and you’ll kind of really evaluate what it all means to you and how you can best show your self-love.

And how you can really incorporate that into your routine and practice more self-care. Marina and I have joked about this a little bit but in the office Kelly Kapoor’s says “fashion show, fashion show at lunch!” and I joke and I say “affirmations, affirmations at lunch!” I think that’s a way that you can  work on your self-love language. We hope this was an interesting episode.

Marina Crouse: Yeah’ve, let us know what you think! Tell us your affirmations, tell us your love languages and your self-love languages. We want to keep this conversation going. DM us or email us if we’re on Instagram breaks for our own self-love journey.

Nicole Booz: Yeah, we would love if you would leave us a rating and review. DM us like we said, we’d love to hear from you and we’ll chat with you again soon! Bye.

About the Author

Nicole Booz

Nicole Booz is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of GenTwenty, GenThirty, and The Capsule Collab. She has a Bachelor of Science in Psychology and is the author of The Kidult Handbook (Simon & Schuster May 2018). She currently lives in Pennsylvania with her husband and two sons. When she’s not reading or writing, she’s probably hiking, eating brunch, or planning her next great adventure.

Website: genthirty.com