Love Languages for the Intense Adult and Gifted Child

“Your preferred love language is what you missed the most in childhood.”

The other day, I stumbled across a quote on social media that caught my attention: “Your preferred love language is what you missed most in childhood.” I think that is quite true. Indeed, psychoanalysts and couples’ counselors have long observed that many of us unconsciously attempt to fill the gaps of our past in our adult lives—whether through our intimate relationships, friendships, or even at work.

I started wondering if this differs slightly for a gifted person. How does being intense and sensitive change one’s love language, or does it? What happens when a child with exceptional emotional depth, intellectual curiosity, and heightened sensitivity grows up in an environment laden with misunderstanding or even emotional abuse? How does intellectual or emotional deprivation affect the ways they express and seek connection in their adult relationships?

“You might be poor, your shoes might be broken, but your mind is a palace.”
― Frank McCourt

Love Language for the Intense and Gifted Child

Since its conceptualization, the idea of “love languages” has become a widely popular framework for understanding how we, as humans, give and receive love. Originally developed by Gary Chapman, this framework identifies five primary ways people express and want to receive affection: Words of Affirmation, Acts of Service, Receiving Gifts, Quality Time, and Physical Touch. Chapman suggests that we instinctively express love in the ways we most wish to receive it and that relationships can flourish when partners understand and respond to each other’s preferred “love languages.”

What many of us do not realize, however, is that our preferred love language often reflects an unconscious attempt to compensate for what we missed in childhood. Our adult relationships often become the stage upon which we project and act out these unresolved needs. We might find ourselves overcompensating for our past by compulsively giving the kind of love we longed for but did not receive, or we might seek out partners who express love in those specific ways. For example, someone who grew up in an environment lacking verbal affirmation might crave constant words of validation from a partner or shower others with praise in an attempt to recreate what they never had. Similarly, someone raised in an emotionally distant home might cling to physical closeness in adulthood or, inversely, avoid vulnerability altogether to shield themselves from further pain.

For a child who experiences the world with heightened intensity—whose mind races ahead, connecting complex ideas and feelings in ways beyond the scope of a neurotypical child—there may be a need for more nuanced love languages. Intense children might crave “more” in certain areas, such as intellectual stimulation and emotional depth, while needing “less” in others, like detailed instructions or practical guidance. Their love language might also include feeling deeply understood, having their intellectual curiosity nurtured, or being met with emotional resonance rather than dismissed as “too sensitive” or “too much.”

It is a painful truth, but sometimes parents, despite their best intentions and deepest love, are not equipped to meet the needs of a highly sensitive, intellectually gifted, and existentially questioning child. This is not a deficit of love on their part, but rather a limitation in their ability to fully grasp and respond to their child’s unique way of experiencing the world. This is especially heightened when the parents are neurotypical, or when concrete-minded, practically-oriented parents find themselves raising a child who naturally gravitates toward abstract thinking and theoretical possibilities. Despite their blood relation, they are wired too differently.  Even with the best of intentions, these parents may resort to pathologizing what they do not understand, or simply turn a blind eye to their child’s unique needs and pretend they are just “normal.”

Here are some ways “love languages” can look different for an intense child, in ways that set them apart:

The Hunger for Intellectual Stimulations

If you are an intense person, you might recognize yourself in this: your mind has always moved swiftly, racing from concept to concept, driven by an insatiable need to understand everything beyond the surface. Whether it is the winding workings of systems, the beauty of mathematical patterns, or the human stories behind art and music, your brain craves intellectual stimulation as humans crave air. You come alive in moments when someone engages with your ideas, matches the pace of your conversations, and dives deep into concepts with genuine curiosity. You long for the feeling of elation when you find someone who can keep up with your racing thoughts when they do not give you a blank stare and join you in your quest for knowledge. For you, intellectual stimulation may not be a preference; it is a big part of the love language you crave and need.

But growing up, you likely faced many moments of disconnection, even with those closest to you. Whenever you got enthusiastic about an idea, you began noticing subtle shifts in others’ expressions: their barely concealed overwhelm, their signs of boredom.  You remember those moments of awkward silence, the confused looks, or the well-meaning but surface-level responses that left you feeling tragically alone on the inside.

You learned early on that your natural way of thinking and processing the world was “too much” for others to handle. To adapt and to fit in, you might have developed the habit of speaking only half your thoughts,  measuring out your ideas in small doses, or diluting your insights to make them more palatable. Over time, self-censoring became second nature. Every day, you find yourself holding back in conversations; and while you hide, you feel something in you slowly dying.

The sad truth is, the trajectory that led you to hide is a tragedy—not just a personal one, but a collective one. Every time you swallow a brilliant observation, every time you talk yourself out of sharing a unique perspective, the world loses something irreplaceable. There is only one you, thus, only you can bring into the world an idea in that one unique way. Thus, every time you hold back an idea that only you can share, something valuable is lost forever. The world needs your voice. You needed it when you were a young person and still need it now.

Warmth and Affection

Given your intellectual capacity and maturity beyond your years, it is easy for others to overlook that, like any other child, you need warmth, care, and emotional nurturance. While all children need love and care to thrive, as a sensitive child, you may have a higher-than-average need for connection. Given how much you desire depth and meaning, surface-level affection or material gifts were not enough to meet your emotional needs.

Since you were highly attuned to the energy around you and cannot help but be affected by others’ emotions, any coldness or neglect from your parents would have left a bigger impact on you than it might on neurotypical children. If you struggled to fit in with your peers, it became even more important for you to feel seen and accepted at home—not for your actions or achievements, but for the raw, unfiltered truth of who you were. In other words, you needed a caregiver who could provide a consistent, stabilizing presence—someone who could hold space for your big feelings without judgment, dismissal, or attempts to “fix” you.

If your parents had grown up in emotionally distant or authoritarian households, they may have repeated the pattern of emotional coldness with you. Perhaps you were raised in an environment where your parents, though accomplished in their own fields, struggled to provide the emotional support you needed. They may have been high-achieving professionals, so immersed in demanding careers that they had little time or energy for attentive parenting. Or they were intellectuals, academics, or scientists who, despite their intelligence, tended to intellectualize emotions—their own and yours. Instead of acknowledging or validating your feelings, they tended to offer logical explanations or dismiss your feelings. While likely well-intentioned, this approach could leave you unheard and lonely.

Your emotional needs as a child should never have been judged based on your achievements or intellectual abilities. No matter how competent or “put together” you seemed, you still needed, and deserved, expressions of love. You needed to hear, “I love you,” to be praised for your efforts rather than just your outcomes, to receive hugs, to be greeted with smiles and warmth when you entered a space. You needed to know you were welcomed in the world to internalize a sense of self-esteem. These were not luxuries; they were essential all the way into your adolescence and adulthood. What you needed then—and perhaps still need now—is the recognition that your intellectual gifts, while remarkable and worthy of celebration, were never a substitute for the emotional care and connection you deserved.

“but he doesn’t want you to admire him; he wants you to see him as he is.” – Hanya Yanagihara

 

Emotional Guidance — a Much-Needed Compass

As an intense person, you might recognize yourself in the description of “emotional overexcitability,” a term Dabrowski used to describe what your heart experiences all your life, and what sets you apart from your neurotypical peers. While having heightened sensitivity brought you great compassion and insight, it also presented unique challenges that others around you might not have understood.

Emotional overexcitability is not just about feeling more—it is about experiencing emotions so intensely that theyoverwhelm you. You might remember how, even as a child, loud noises, crowded spaces, or conflict-charged situations bombarded your system. Your empathy may have felt so vast and uncontrollable that you absorbed the pain of others as though they were your own. You may have found yourself repeatedly falling into infatuations or limerence, swept away by feelings you could not contain. In your day-to-day life, you likely spend hours reflecting on the complexities of relationships, trying to work out the intricate details of what is happening, all while longing for more honest and meaningful connections that are hard to find in the modern world.

Emotional regulation is a skill that is rarely innate and must be taught to children by adults around them. As an intense child, from a young age, the emotions you felt were so big and overwhelming that, more than most, you needed someone to teach you the vocabulary to identify and articulate your feelings, to show you how to process and express them in healthy ways. But many parents, even those with the best intentions, simply are not equipped for this. They may not have developed emotional maturity themselves, or they may feel overwhelmed by the sheer force of your emotional expressions. Without guidance, you may have been left to navigate your emotional storms alone, feeling like you were drowning in a sea of feelings you did not know how to understand or manage.

When a sensitive and intense child grows up without adequate boundaries or emotional regulation, it can have lasting effects. For example, you may now find it difficult to separate your emotions from those of others and sometimes feel the compulsion to rescue others or carry the world’s problems on your shoulders. In relationships, you might oscillate between opening up too quickly and oversharing; and withdrawing as you realise you made yourself too exposed and vulnerable. Without a clear sense of how to set limits, you may overextend yourself for others, only to feel exhausted and resentful at the end. Your emotional responses may feel awkward when compared to others: for instance, small setbacks of constructive feedback may set you off, but you become exceptionally calm when disasters strike. In other words, it can feel as though everyone else has a manual for life that you never received, leaving you perpetually off-balance.

These struggles are not a reflection of any flaw fundamental to you. They are the natural outcome of not having your needs for structure, guidance, and emotional support met as a child. You were a child who did not have the tools to manage emotions this big, and the adults around you—no matter how loving or well-meaning—were not equipped to give you the guidance you needed. Sensitive children do not only need the freedom to feel—they need the safety of clear boundaries, the reassurance that their emotions are valid but manageable, and the tools to process their complex feelings in a healthy way. Without these, emotional intensity itself is just too overwhelming and even isolating for a young soul to bear.

While we cannot go back in time and rewrite your childhood, you have the power now to create the nurturing, understanding, and support you have always deserved. You can find this through trusted relationships, through therapy or resources that resonate, or even through your own self-compassion and self-discovery. What once felt overwhelming can become your greatest strength when paired with the tools and boundaries to help you thrive. Healing is possible, and you are worthy of it.

The Permission to Deviate from The Conventional

As a uniquely wired child, another easily missed need of yours was the need for someone to see beyond the surface and accept you for who you are. It was already hard enough for you to navigate a world where you struggled to feel at home or fit in with your peers. The last thing you needed was for someone to try to fix you, to mold you according to neurotypical standards. What you needed instead was someone to honor your intensity and allow you to exist as you are—someone who would not dismiss you as “too much” or “too sensitive,” but who would celebrate your depth and help you find your way in a world that often felt shallow and indifferent to your complexity.

Raising a gifted or neurodivergent child means parents must learn to step away from the conventional paradigm of doing what feels obvious; it requires a paradigm shift that your parents might not have been prepared to make.   Even when others around them do not understand you, they must learn to comprehend your unique way of being, rather than trying to pathologize your natural traits, or worse, gaslight you and make you the scapegoat and blame you for all family problems.

It was likely that your parents’ life experiences and societal conditioning have limited them: Perhaps they had up in poverty, were themselves weighed down by family responsibilities, or sacrificed their own dreams for practical survival. They might have been immigrants who put aside their authentic yearnings in favor of stability, or they may have been neurotypical themselves, thus fully comfortable following more traditional paths, and do not understand why you could not do the same. Cultural factors, too, may have played a role, especially in societies where collectivism and homogeneity are valued.  Out of their best intention to protect you, perhaps they were worried about “Tall Poppy Syndrome,” where standing out too much would lead you to be ostracised. Out of their fears, they may have encouraged you to downplay your abilities, to conform, or to pursue paths that felt safe and secure rather than those that set your soul free.

Giftedness was never about having a high IQ or excelling academically, but a different way of perceiving and interacting with the world. As a developing child, you need your parents to see and respect your passions, interests, and innate modes of self-expression. If they were observant, they would see how much you lit up when you were free to pursue your passions; Whether it was devoting yourself to specialized areas of study, or expressing your— talents, appearance, andgender—  in ways that were unusual. To push you into a conventional mold; whether through a rigid academic path, a traditional career trajectory, or suppressing your exuberance to “fit in” would have been stifling.  You might have memories of this happening, where you remember the pain of feeling trapped, plagued with frustration, boredom, and a sense that your innocence and exuberance were distinguished.

“Of all individuals, the hated, the shunned, and the peculiar are arguably most themselves. They wear no masks whatsoever in order to be accepted and liked; they do seem most guarded, but only by their own hands: as compared to the populace, they are naked.”
― Criss Jami

The Permission to be a Child

As a gifted child, your advanced cognitive and emotional maturity made you particularly vulnerable to parentification: a role-reversal dynamic where a child is expected to fulfill emotional or practical roles beyond their developmental capacity, effectively taking on the responsibilities of a parent or peer. Your heightened empathy, ability to grasp complex emotions, and keen insights likely made it feel natural for those around you to rely on you in ways that exceeded what should have been asked of a child. While your perceptiveness and emotional intelligence were remarkable, they did not erase your fundamental need to simply be a child.

Your parents, without realizing it, may have leaned on you due to their own struggles—financial strain, marital discord, mental health challenges, or the overwhelming weight of daily life. Your loyalty, empathy, and maturity have made you an easy choice to turn to; whether it is to provide counseling, mediate conflicts, or take care of your younger and even older siblings. You might find yourself stepping into a family caregiving role, trying to ease your parents’ burdens and become the hypervigilant peace-maker of the family. It was likely that your parents saw you as wise beyond your years or felt comforted by how much you seemed to understand their struggles. But no matter how capable or responsible you appeared, you were still a child.

Regardless of how bright and competent you are, you still deserve to have the full right to a childhood. As a child, you deserved the freedom to not have all the answers, to struggle and fall, and to express strong emotions without fear of being punished. You should be allowed to cry uncontrollably, to feel angry, to make mistakes, and to grow at your own pace. You should not have been expected to look “put together” and calm all the time. The adults in your life should have resisted the temptation to lean on you for emotional support or involve you in adult conflicts, whether it was smoothing over family tensions, role reversal in any way with one or more of your immature parents, or taking on too many practical tasks. They should have established clear boundaries that protected your time to explore, play, and develop at your own pace. While contributing to family life can be a meaningful and positive experience for any child, your efforts should have come from a place of choice and genuine willingness—not a sense of obligation or the need to act as a stabilizing force for your family. If you are left feeling guilty now whenever you have to say no to them, you might want to reflect on the extent to which you have been parentified as a child.

After all, childhood should have been your time to grow into who you were—not a time to hold up the world for everyone else.

 

How Childhood Deprivation Shapes Adult Relationships

The idea that “your preferred love language is what you missed most in childhood” is poignant to reflect on when you were deprived of one or more essential needs while growing up as an intense child. Your longing for understanding and acceptance, heightened by the experience of navigating a world that felt out of sync with your cognitive and emotional wiring, does not simply disappear with time. Instead, it shapes your choices and interactions within adult relationships.

If you were not met with empathy, validation, or emotional attunement as a child, you may now find yourself instinctively drawn to partners who can provide what was missing. For example, you might gravitate toward people who can recognize and respond to your feelings and engage in nuanced, meaningful conversations about emotions. Yet, this yearning for emotional validation can sometimes become extreme and self-defeating. You may find yourself compulsively testing your partner’s love—seeking constant reassurance and approval, becoming demanding or clingy, or resorting to passive-aggressive behaviors when your needs are not met.  You may also crave having a partner who represents a haven of safety and acceptance where you can exist without masking your true self. While this longing is valid, it can sometimes lead to unrealistic expectations. For instance, you might assume that your partner should instinctively “get” you, without recognizing that effective communication requires clear, direct expression of your needs.

Navigating your intellectual needs in a romantic relationship can be equally challenging, especially if your childhood gap has left you with a lifelong hunger for intellectual stimulation. For instance, you might initially be drawn to partners who match your intellectual intensity, only to dismiss them later when they fall short of your idealized expectations. Alternatively, you may overemphasize intellectual capacity in a partner, undervaluing other qualities essential for a healthy and fulfilling relationship—such as emotional attunement, warmth, mutual respect, shared values, or spiritual connection. Moreover, your passion for learning and your ability to process information quickly can sometimes create imbalances in relationships. You might “over-give” intellectually—sharing your insights and knowledge generously—but feel frustrated or unseen when your partner cannot reciprocate at the same level. You may end up feeling like you are always the one “finding interesting and stimulating topics to discuss” in your conversations, or that you are somehow always educating or lecturing your partner but not getting anything back. Such experiences can evoke past wounds of those times when your intellectual excitement was met with indifference or dismissal by your parents. When this frustration recurs across multiple relationships, you may start to believe that finding a compatible partner is impossible. You might resign yourself to solitary pursuits, convinced that true intellectual companionship is out of reach.

 

“Do stuff. be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It’s all about paying attention. attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. stay eager.”
― Susan Sontag

Breaking the Cycle

Recognizing how your childhood experiences have shaped your emotional and intellectual needs allows you to approach relationships with greater productive intentionality.

Healthy relationships are built on vulnerability and the ability to communicate your needs directly. However, this is moreoften than not a challenging task as it requires you to confront your own shadows. Self-development work or self-reflection might lead you to face things that you do not like in yourself; for example, you may have the tendency to avoid expressing your needs explicitly, instead hoping your partner will mind-read them, and then get resentful or passive-aggressive when they do not. Or, you might find yourself overgiving in relationships, expecting unspoken reciprocation without discerning whether the other person is capable of meeting your needs in the same way.

Perhaps the goal is to seek partners who not only have the qualities you value, such as intellectual curiosity or creative passion, but also find those who are capable of meeting your needs in a way that feels nurturing, validating, and safe. Maybe what matters more is a partner’s willingness to engage with your inner world, to see you in your entirety, and to make space for your unique emotional and relational needs. At the same time, this requires a realistic and discerning examination of your expectations and relational patterns. No partner can single-handedly fulfill every unmet need from your past, and placing that responsibility on them will inevitably lead to frustration, disillusionment, and perhaps even resentment.

While we must learn to manage our relational hunger and excessive cravings to compensate for the past, it is equally important to honor our unique needs unapologetically. Your psychological makeup and personal history are yours alone, and no one—not a therapist, a partner, or even the ideas presented in this article—has the authority to dictate what you are”allowed” to want or need. What feels authentic to you is sacred. Trust yourself to know what aligns with your truth, even if it defies societal norms or external expectations. Your needs are not something to justify, explain, or shrink to make others comfortable—especially not in the context of intimate relationships.

While your past may have left gaps in your emotional, intellectual, or creative fulfillment, it does not define your future relationships. When approached with clarity, patience, and self-compassion, a partnership can become a meeting ground for growth—a safe and sacred space where both you and your partner feel seen, heard, and valued for who you truly are.