It took a while, over the holidays, to work out how to stop my exhausted, frail mother-in-law jumping up constantly to fetch more food without ever eating herself, but my husband eventually cracked it. “None of us will eat unless you’re sitting with us,” he told her. We downed cutlery the minute she stood up, refusing to touch anything on the table until, thwarted, she was forced to sit, even occasionally nibbling from her plate. It didn’t last, of course – she was soon back ferreting in the fridge because that’s her love language: muscular feeding, spiced with exhortations against waste and occasional emotional blackmail.
The American Baptist pastor Gary Chapman’s book The Five Love Languages, published in 1992, has a slightly hokey, patriarchal quality, but there is a grain of something universally resonant there: we give, receive and expect love in ways others might not understand (or indeed want). Chapman is confident his five “languages” – words of affirmation, quality time, gifts, acts of service and physical touch – cover the bases. “I think most of the ways of expressing love fit into one of these,” he told the New York Times in 2022. Most, maybe, but he certainly couldn’t capture all our intimate vernaculars.
Spending time with family in recent weeks, many of us will have been viscerally reminded of the, erm, eccentric ways they express love. Barking that your tyres are bald, sliding unwanted plates of fruit on to your lap, swaddling you tighter than a medieval baby in blankets as you protest that you are sweltering, laundering everything you aren’t actually wearing, stuffing the cupboard with mint Viscount biscuits because you liked them when you were six. If we had all had enough therapy, perhaps we would show our love more healthily, but instead, we find unique and baffling ways to show our feelings. Here are a few more esoteric love dialects I’ve seen – and spoken – recently.
Worrying
Surely one of the most universal alternative love languages is audibly or visibly modelling and predicting, with the processing power of a quantum supercomputer, all the terrible things that might conceivably happen to your beloveds in any and every scenario? That’s how you keep them safe, duh!
Acts of Google
I recently woke to find my husband brandishing his phone, a manic glint in his over-caffeinated eye. “What you need,” he said confidently, “is a single female goose.” Since my hens fell prey to a fox last year, causing me deep, lasting grief, he has been trying to find ways for me to have free-ranging chooks again. Other suggestions have included a pony-sized livestock dog, an emu (really) and AI-enabled fox recognition cameras that set off a sprinkler and radio. I recognise this unhinged research for the act of love it is.
Words of non-affirmation
“I love you”– pffff. How about: “You’re looking tired” or “Your cousin just bought a Porsche” or (habitually from a sibling when we’re trialling a new look) “What the hell is that on your head? You look like a poodle.” We express love with ridicule, judgment, haranguing and pointed comparisons. Is it healthy? No. Inevitable? Probably.
Pebbling
Long before we borrowed the term pebbling from penguins, we were familiar with the lo-fi version: weird cuttings from the local paper, updates on squirrels’ antics and formulaic retellings of historical “amusing” incidents. The pebble-giver’s love is obvious, but pebble recipients love patiently, wearily, too.
Repetitive questioning
How did you sleep/what do you want for dinner/do you have any washing/are you drinking enough water? I’m so bored with hearing myself bleat these dreary (and in the case of the water one, hypocritical) questions at my beloveds, but am powerless to stop my ritual interrogation.
Compassionate ignoring
I’m an irascible mutterer, a grumbler, a sulker and slammer of cupboard doors. It passes fast and there’s no real heat to it, so one of the greatest acts of love my family regularly offer is to choose, lovingly, to ignore me. They simply let me get it out of my system, and that’s beautiful. Actually, I think ignoring, accepting, breathing deeply and letting go as our loved ones fumble to express their feelings in weird and exasperating ways is a love language in which we’re all pretty fluent.
