This week I am taking a closer look at the five love languages and how they may differ slightly for a person with a neurodivergent brain. So far we have discussed physical touch and gifts, and today I would like to take a closer look at acts of service.

For some reason, people sometimes seem confused about this one. What exactly is an act of service? When I asked my son, he thought it meant doing something you don’t want to do, and had a hard time understanding why it would even show up on a list of potential love languages. While it may be true that an act of service may be something that you don’t want to do (dishes for example) that’s not really the point. This is my husband’s primary love language, so I have learned to speak it fluently for his sake, but once upon a time, I was on the same page as my son.

Yes, while washing dishes or cleaning toilets is an act of service, it doesn’t include only things that no one really wants to do. The simplest way to put it is that someone with this as their primary love language will do things for you or on your behalf, regardless of how they feel about it. At its core, it can be defined as “finding a way to make someone else’s life easier.” And my husband is much more likely to willingly do something he does enjoy as an act of service for our family than he is to ever do something that he doesn’t.

For example, despite this being his primary love language, he will drag his feet at the idea of washing dishes or folding laundry, but he will gladly cook a meal, go grocery shopping, or figure out why my laptop isn’t functioning as it should. Because these are things he actually likes doing that he knows I either don’t like doing or can’t do on my own. And likewise, to show him that I care about him, I make an attempt at keeping the dishes washed and the laundry folded.

And some things fall into the acts of service category that you might never even think of. For example, a back massage (wait, isn’t that physical touch?) or letting them choose the movie this time even though you probably won’t like it (but that could also be considered quality time. There are just so many gray areas!)

For neurodivergent people, it’s really not terribly different. The neurodivergent form of acts of service is something called support swapping. Because the thing you have to understand about neurodivergence is that it sometimes makes it difficult to care for oneself in a conventional way. We may rely on others to help us with self-care. For some reason, it is a lot easier for us to care for other people than it is to care for ourselves, so we have found a way to turn that into an advantage. This may come as a text reminder to take daily medication, or it could be in the form of a phone call just to check up on someone you haven’t heard from in a while. You may actually enjoy washing dishes but hate laundry, while your friend is the opposite. So you do their dishes, they fold your laundry and it all works out. Regardless, it is a sort of symbiotic relationship to make sure that everything that needs to get done to help us be our best selves actually gets done.

Acts of service for a neurodivergent person may also include anticipating a need and fulfilling it without asking the person in question if it is something that they need help with or scheduling a time to come over. Proceed with caution here, though, as it will depend (much like with physical touch) on what kind of relationship the recipient has with you. I, myself, sometimes have a need for this particular variety of acts of service, but the people I would accept unsolicited help from are not even necessarily the same people I would be okay with hugging me. And the reverse is also true. So the best thing to do to determine this is to establish what kind of relationship you and the person in question have, otherwise your presumed act of service may feel a lot more akin to an intrusion on privacy.

In this way, neurodivergent love languages may be kind of like a puzzle, and we’re all just trying to figure out how the pieces fit.