A video has gone viral for showing “girlhood” at its best: roommates dropping their responsibilities to support their friend’s dating life.
Posted on TikTok by Alice, @aalicehall, the video shows her and her friend desperately cleaning their pal’s room before she arrives home from a night out, with date in tow. The video has received over one million views.
“When you get the ‘date is going well’ text,” Alice wrote over the video.
In the ten-second clip, Alice and her roommate manage to pile all of their friend’s clothes into a big suitcase, clear dirty dishes from her desk and make her bed.
Viewers in the comments raved about the display of friendship, saying the act of support was a marker of something true and long-lasting, and that it will matter to their friend coming home more than it will matter to the date’s impression of her.
“Those are AMAZING friends. I mean … the guy will NOT care, but the fact that they’re willing to do this for you … the BEST of signs,” @fyremunky wrote.
“This is the girlhood I so desperately want to experience,” @arsynmob13 said.
“These are the REAL friends,” @worldwidewwebb wrote. “My best friend cleaned my apartment when I was out of town once (against my will) and it was the kindest thing anyone has ever done.”
Yana Tikhonova/Getty Images
The ‘Love Language’ of Cleaning
Alice and her roommate’s support through cleaning their friend’s room fits into a framework of love that has been highly popularized since the 1990s: The five love languages.
In his book The 5 Love Languages, Gary Chapman laid out a hypothesis that each person has a preferred love language out of five, and that couples are happier when partners learn to speak the other’s language. The theory has been extended by fans to family and friendships as well, used now to classify most relating into five “languages”: words of affirmation, quality time, receiving gifts, acts of service, and physical touch.
Alice and her roommate’s cleaning would fall into the acts of service category.
Indeed, acts of service are an important part of any relationship’s functioning. A 2016 study by Pew Research Center showed that sharing chores is crucial to a good marriage.
But more recent research has shown that despite the popularity of Chapman’s theory, it might not be effective only to focus on one dominant language per person.
Looking at the theory through a relationship science lens, researchers understood why the five love languages have so much pull: they allow people to more easily identify their needs in relationships and provide an easy metaphor to do it. However, researchers say the love languages suffer from weak empirical evidence and are based on a series of unbacked assumptions.
Instead they argue, other more balanced frameworks might be the way forward.
“We offer an alternative metaphor that we believe more accurately reflects a large body of empirical research on relationships,” the authors wrote. “Love is not akin to a language one needs to learn to speak but can be more appropriately understood as a balanced diet in which people need a full range of essential nutrients to cultivate lasting love.”
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.