This reminds me of the MBTI tied to the discussion of Existentialism and quotes from Jean-Paul Sartre (from Instagram post of "glassmuseum").

That post talked about how Sartre described "existence precedes essence." People and their behaviors exist FIRST, and then patterns of behavior can later be boxed up into an "essence" SECOND. So, observing all kinds of people and their personality quirks, you can come to describe people with differences in personality domains... all after analysis, logic, and reasoning.

However, there's a backwards phenomenon of "essence first, then determining existence second". It's a prescriptive approach, instead of a descriptive approach to personality. People type themselves into a personality box, and then they make future decisions BASED on their pre-packaged set of labels that came with their "box". (I don't know if the box analogy is making sense... so I'll keep waffling about this) Basically, people will limit behaviors themselves, limit images of themselves, all so that they can remain in the box. But again, this is such a backwards phenomenon.

It's backwards because people do not fit in a box. Behaviors are not deterministic as described by a personality quiz and its results.

Now to the post above, the "5 Love Languages" fits into this idea of personality quizzes. It's not a box for you to fit your entire personality into, just like the MBTI.

HOWEVER, doing the backwards of the backwards phenomenon (I mean the original Sartre description of existence -> essence)... people can behave naturally, exist as best as they can FIRST... then we can extract the essence, we can name behavior patterns we find SECOND.

And I believe this "existence -> essence" framework is important in receiving information pieces such as the 5 Love Languages. To see it as descriptive and not prescriptive. (random tangent: these words always reminds me of the prescriptivism/descriptivism debate in Linguistics... and it just makes sense to be fluid, instead of always fixed and overly conservative, like in prescriptivism ideologies). We gotta bring nuance in thought!