I apologize if you were waiting for this final installment of my discussion about neurodivergent love languages. I was hoping I would be able to run through all of them on consecutive days. I did not count on being too sick to function, but anyway, here it finally is. The fifth and final love language (and my own personal primary love language): Quality Time.

Obviously, quality time means time spent together, but the focus here is on the quality rather than the time. Spending lots of time together doesn’t necessitate that it is, in fact, quality time. My husband and I watch tv together after the kids go to bed, and while I agree that it is time, I would not go so far as to say it is quality. At least not every time. It often depends on what we’re watching.

For most people, quality time involves being intentional about the time that you spend together, often doing something together that you both enjoy, but can also include doing something that you don’t really enjoy which the other person loves as a means to get to know more about the person you are spending time with.

For most people, quality time is often highly interactive. For neurodivergent people, the highly interactive nature of quality time may get overwhelming. For this reason, many neurodivergent people take a more introverted approach to quality time called “body doubling.” You may observe this in very young children when they first learn that other children not only exist but also enjoy playtime. In child development, it is called “parallel play,” but it really amounts to more or less the same thing. You do your own thing, they do their own thing and you just enjoy each other’s company being alone, but in the same room, checking in every once in a while.

This can be a really helpful tool for neurodivergent people who need more alone time but also need another person around to hold them accountable for tasks that need to get done throughout the day. Simply having another person around, even though that person may just be sitting at your kitchen table, reading a book, and not actually interacting with you in any way, can keep many neurodivergent people grounded enough to actually get through those tasks.

Neurodivergent people may also prefer online time spent together over time spent actually in the same room. Technology has made this very accessible with Zoom, FaceTime, and online video gameplay. It has become easy to accommodate someone who prefers to spend time together, apart.

For me, personally, I do appreciate the more extroverted version of quality time and enjoy interacting with people quite a bit when I spend time with them, however, I also find that I may need more time for recuperation when the event is actually over. But I am an extrovert that functions as an introvert due to my neurodivergence. None of us are a monolith, and neurodivergence can look like so many things, it’s important to have these conversations with the neurodivergent people in your life. Even if you are neurodivergent yourself, as the nuances of someone’s love language can differ quite a bit from your own, even if the two of you share the same primary love language.

Which is why I suggest that no matter what your love language is, communication about the ways you recognize that someone cares for you and the ways you are more inclined to show others that you care about them should be your first step. Because nothing that I’ve said this week matters as much as making sure that the people you spend time with and that spend time with you understand what makes you feel uncomfortable in a relationship and what makes you feel secure.