There are relationships where the problem doesn’t start with betrayal, a devastating fight, or an obvious absence. It starts with something harder to explain: the feeling of not being loved in the way one needs. This nuance matters because it completely changes the interpretation of the conflict. It’s not always about a lack of love. Sometimes it’s about a more subtle, and therefore more painful, difference: the other person loves, but their way of expressing it doesn’t match the way the other party can recognize it.
In this conversation, sexologist and couple’s therapist Lyzzeth Alvarado suggests thinking of the languages of love not as a fixed label, but as a tool to understand how we learn to connect. When discussing the topic, she explains that it is “the way we express and how we feel love is expressed to us.” And she adds something that is key to understanding why so many couples feel disconnected even when affection exists: each person learns to love “from the perspective of how they were raised” and according to “how we learned love is.”
That means no one comes into a relationship from scratch. Before falling in love, we already bring a history. An idea of care. An expectation about closeness. A way of interpreting gestures, silences, details, and absences. Much of this begins to form in childhood, in the bond with those who first care for us. Lyzzeth Alvarado connects it with the concept of attachment and the way we learn to bond “with the immediate beings around us from the beginning of our formation.” If those first figures are sensitive and consistent, the person can grow up with a greater sense of security. If they are intermittent, distant, or unpredictable, that insecurity can also leave a mark and reappear in subsequent relationships.
The idea is important because it helps remove the conversation about love from the terrain of automatic blame. Not every couple’s misunderstanding arises from bad intention. Sometimes it arises from two different emotional histories trying to coexist. That’s where one of the most precise observations from Ursula Pfeiffer, co-founder of Yuriyana Club, appears, when she says: “What causes us the most distress is that the way we want to be loved is not recognized. That is what generates many of the conflicts in a couple.“
That sentence names something many women immediately recognize. The pain is not always in the total absence of love, but in the experience of not feeling seen in the particular way they need to be loved. Ursula develops this further when she points out: “No, he doesn’t love me. I mean, we say he doesn’t love me, but it’s a he doesn’t love me. Not exactly that he doesn’t love me, but that he doesn’t love me the way I want to be loved.“
That shift changes the focus of the problem. It forces us to move from general accusation to a much more demanding question: Do I know how I want to be loved? Can I recognize it clearly? Have I learned to express it? Because, as Lyzzeth Alvarado warns, many times the conflict is not only in the difference between two people, but in the difficulty of communicating what one needs. “Sometimes I don’t communicate how I want to be loved. I expect the other person to interpret or guess it.“
That expectation of being guessed doesn’t appear by chance. It relates to deeply rooted ideas about romantic love, but also to a lack of awareness about one’s own needs. Sometimes one doesn’t communicate because true love is expected to intuit it. Other times one doesn’t communicate because one hasn’t even clearly identified what is needed. In Alvarado’s words, it can happen that “we are not even aware of what our expectations and needs are.”
Added to all this are gender mandates. In the dialogue, Ursula points out that this clash is frequently observed in heterosexual relationships, where the male is often socialized under a different emotional logic. She puts it this way: “And there is a clash because the male didn’t learn that. The male learned to provide.“
The observation doesn’t function as an excuse, but as a cultural diagnosis. Many women grew up expecting words, emotional validation, or more explicit demonstrations of affection. Many men grew up understanding that loving was supporting, providing, resolving. So the couple can enter a frustrating dynamic: one person feels they are giving love, the other feels they are not receiving it. And both can be telling the truth from their respective codes.
The cultural context further amplifies this problem. Lyzzeth Alvarado recalls how certain ideas about love are normalized through jokes, songs, or popular phrases. Jealousy interpreted as a sign of intensity. Aggressiveness romanticized. Insecurity confused with interest. Ursula also questions this normalization when she observes “that inability to recognize that violence should not have a place within our interpersonal relationships.”
That’s why talking about love languages is not a superficial game of compatibilities. It’s a way to review the emotional learning that each person brings to the relationship. And that work, Alvarado insists, starts with oneself. Her initial proposal is concrete: to make a list “of the things that make us feel loved.” The idea seems simple, but it has depth. It forces one to identify in daily experience what gestures make one feel cared for, valued, supported, or recognized. Not from theory, but from lived experience.
Ursula provides a particularly useful image for thinking about this process when she compares this learning to a “manual” and a “dictionary” of what to expect and how to interpret love. The metaphor helps us understand that we not only learn to feel; we also learn to translate. To read certain gestures as affection, others as distance, and others, even, as normal, even though they actually hurt us.
But identifying one’s own affective language is only part of the work. Then comes something more difficult: communicating it appropriately and listening to what the other person needs without turning the conversation into a list of reproaches. Alvarado insists on the importance of “finding a balance” between two people who don’t have to love the same way. It’s not about transforming completely or expecting a perfect coincidence. It’s about recognizing that the relationship involves negotiation, adjustment, and mutual learning.
She also makes an important warning: this process cannot always be done without help. There are relationships where communication already arrives too filtered by wounds, frustration, or accumulated interpretations. In those cases, the intervention of a third party may be necessary. Ursula herself puts words to that experience when she says: “we don’t necessarily listen to what the other person is telling us, how they are telling us.”
This point is crucial. Because talking is one thing, and feeling understood is quite another. When a relationship remains trapped for too long in affective languages that don’t connect, a persistent feeling of anguish, disconnection, and deficiency can set in. Alvarado warns that, if one doesn’t clarify “how I love, how I want to be loved, and if I am capable of loving how the other person wants to be loved,” deep breaks in the bond and even damaging dynamics can arise.
Perhaps that’s why the most important closing of the conversation doesn’t first point to the couple, but to the bond with oneself. Lyzzeth Alvarado summarizes that foundation with a phrase that functions almost as an ethical starting point: “learn to love ourselves to be able to love the rest.”
There is something profoundly liberating in that idea. Because it shifts love from the realm of guesswork to the realm of consciousness. Loving better does not consist of expecting the other person to understand everything without words. It consists, first, of knowing oneself. In identifying one’s own needs. In reviewing what one learned to call love. And, from there, building bonds where affection doesn’t have to feel like a permanent absence, but like a clearer, more conscious, and more reciprocal experience. This perspective naturally dialogues with the mission of Yuriyana Club to accompany women toward a fuller emotional, physical, and sexual life, through knowledge and enriching connections.
You can find the complementary video to this article here: https://youtu.be/7uNqLvK5k6k
