#15: Love is what exists between its languages.
The glow of gifted objects, shortcuts to meaningful connection, and why there are no epiphanies waiting for you in an internet quiz.
💗 This week’s playlist: you’re in love, but say nothing.
K: Heyyyy. Long time no see. We missed you guys! Our going AWOL was, by all accounts, my fault. Truthfully, I’ve had a difficult month and needed some time away from writing. You and I will catch up properly in next week’s 888, but for now, know that I’m feeling much better and I’m happy to be back.
E: This week, we’re discussing love languages—words of affirmation, quality time, physical touch, acts of service, and gift giving—as we’ve experienced giving, receiving, and reflecting on them.
K: Love is a pair of yellow shoelaces.
I retake the love languages quiz each time the topic comes up among friends and invariably end up with the same results: I score highest in “gift-giving” by a wide margin, the lowest in “physical touch,” and about the same in the other three languages, which are “acts of service,” “quality time,” and “words of affirmation.”
It’s in the nature of internet quizzes to simplify things for the sake of speedy digestion and circulation, and though I don’t see anything wrong with that, the construct of these five “love languages” flattens out an otherwise (obviously) complicated emotion. On a macro level, love is a social, psychological, and physiological engine of human survival. But the more you zoom in on it, organize it, or attempt to pick it apart, the further away you get from gaining any deeper understanding or discovering any actual truth of love.
I’m reminded of those optical illusions that refuse to reveal themselves to you in isolated parts, or what John Berger said about forests: “A forest is what exists between its trees, between its dense undergrowth and its clearings, between all its life cycles and their different timescales. […] A forest is also a meeting place between those who enter it and something unnameable and attendant, waiting behind a tree or in the undergrowth. Something intangible and within touching distance. Neither silent nor audible.”
There is a fundamental immateriality to love that I struggle with. Love is what exists between its languages. You cannot assign any one quality to it, you cannot engage with it on terms of your own choosing, and there is no hope of ever establishing an equal relationship with it, because where we are earthly creatures of flesh and blood, love is as discarnate as God. I think that’s why I often write to an end of preservation, or why so many of us collect memorabilia as we move through life. I believe we keep anniversary cards from our exes and send multimillion-dollar time capsules out into space for the same reason: a devotion to physical landmarks tethering us to otherwise intangible treasures. Memory, legacy, and love all eventually concede to the mercurial forces of time.
A tasteful piece of jewelry will never not make me smile, but the deeper appeal of the gift-giving love language is the way it assuages, even falsely, some core fear of loss and abandonment that we all share. You can’t hold people forever—eventually, they run through your hands like water—but you can hold a necklace chain, a love note, a pair of yellow shoelaces, an annotated paperback, an empty Marlboro pack. I so often hold these things up to the light and take solace in the fact that at one point, somebody loved me, or believed they would come to love me, because herein lies the proof: this necklace, this love note.
There’s a solidness to objects that you’ll never find in people. A gift remains unchanging and steadfast, even when the person who gave it to you doesn’t. In that way, gifts possess a sort of magical bittersweet quality. They glow from the inside out, harnessing energy from beautiful places we, the owners, are exiled from: the irrecoverable past, the unrealizable future. Even as a gift fades with time, gathering dust in the closet or sitting sun-bleached by the windowsill of a childhood bedroom, it remains faithful to whatever hopes were first ascribed to it. I don’t believe the glow ever goes away.
So, does all this mean gift-giving is the expression of love that is “most meaningful” to me, as suggested by my quiz results? Do I feel most loved and appreciated when presented with diamonds and peonies? I don’t think so. It’s likely that this particular love language just sits on my most prominent fault line of pain.
I struggle a lot with the idea of people leaving. I’m not one to cling, but when I do, I cling very hard—even when I know it makes no real difference. For though I continue to stand in doorways of love with one hand outstretched, the other is held protectively over my head. I am forever bracing, it seems, for that dreaded moment of change, when someone’s eyes stop meeting yours, and some part of what you once shared is sealed away forever. When I ask for cadavers of affection, I am really saying, Leave me something to remember “you” by. Not the “you” whose heart will close like a fist come the end of things, whose eyes will shutter me out. “You,” here and now. The stars. The smoke. The crack of light running down the middle of this midnight encounter.
I am saying, Tear something out of this moment for me to cling to later, when it’s morning and you’re withdrawing your shoulder from my shuddering cheek.
E: Love is the good part of a sleepover.
It’s past bedtime, and the two of you are still awake. The conversation starts to flow into the deep end like water - terrifying and groundless. Truth or dare, you say while you choose truth every time. Exchanging secrets, thoughts you’ve never said out loud before, questions neither of you know the answer to. That’s what quality time feels like, and why I score the highest on it every time I take the quiz.
As a kid, I cherished these once-a-year instances. They solidified a childhood friendship, especially if you had strict parents who didn’t let you see your friends that often. I know now that what I really craved was to feel close to someone. I experienced more of it in college, where sleepovers turned into letting the TV play in the background while you guys talk on the couch for hours. Though the dread of being the first one to say Wow it’s getting late still sticks with you.
But quality time isn’t reserved to only ‘deep’ conversations. It’s as common as let’s grab coffee, I’ll walk you home, can you drive me to the grocery store?, I’ll wait for you, and as special as taking people to your favorite spots. If I took you to the fountain above South Lawn, the French restaurant in West Village, Lucky Lab, or that hidden corner in SoCo… you know how much I love you. Even the simple act of reading together, cooking pasta, talking in a parked car, forgetting to look at your phone is enough. They’re all saying, I don’t want to be anywhere else, with anyone else, but here. With you.
Nowadays, you can find shortcuts to meaningful connection in card games, the NYT, and YouTube channels that pair people in intimate situations. But can you really play your way to love? After running through these with a fair share of people, I’m not sure if the feeling of being close can be replicable. You have to know the difference between spending time with someone and spending quality time with someone. It actually has nothing to do with what you guys do together and everything to do with a mutual recognition of the other’s value. There’s this quote from a book — “His eyes lit up. I mean, the guy was ready to listen to every word I said.” Mary Oliver called attention the “beginning of devotion,” and I think it’s brave to look into someone’s eyes and not look away a second later. It’s brave to ask questions and feel like you’re wading into the deep end of a pool. If this was all easy, it wouldn’t be so rare.
The card games and guided questions are still valuable, of course. The internet is so desensitized to real human connection, resorting instead to instant gratification, shiny romantic reels, and 7-second attention spans, that I’m clinging onto anything that helps me slow down. There’s no “winning” here. No elaborate proposal, no big epiphany. You just keep asking.
Quality time, more than anything else, convinces me that love is a choice. It’s the most vulnerable, tethered to nothing but being with them a little longer and knowing them a little better, which is as unquantifiable as this feeling we’re searching for. I don’t know how many hours lead to love, or what it all means, but I know that the choice to spend time with someone over and over again makes room for it, and for all the other love languages to enter, especially the ones that aren’t mine. Gift-giving and acts of service, like picking up flowers on your way home or house-sitting their plants, become meaningful because it’s grounded in something bigger than the act itself, a certainty that only comes with understanding how they prefer to love. Physical touch becomes complementary, and I’m thinking here of when Taylor Jenkins Reid said, “Intimacy is not sex—it’s truth.” Words of affirmation gets easier, even though I think it must be earned for them to land in any real way. Why did it take Chuck and Blair two seasons to say I love you? Three words, eight letters, say it and I’m yours. But spend some time with me first.
Our brilliant friend
K: This one goes out to Carolynn and Meely. Thank you for being my cult of silence, KH dinner dates, college football crash course instructors, steadfast co-editors-in-crime, and two of the most unwaveringly compassionate friends a girl could ask for. Love love love you both.
truly loved this one, i always look forward to these newsletters but the way love was talked about here was so beautiful
This one is very good.