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Love In Translation
If each person has their private language, then love is about learning each other’s languages
Last summer, my partner and I went on an 80-mile bicycle trip around the southern shore of mountain lake Issyk-Kul in Kyrgyzstan. Gasping for air after cresting a murderously steep hill — the third one in a row — I asked him why on earth did he call the route “more or less flat.” “Well, that’s why I said “more or less,” he explained. It was by far not the first time I realized that asking “What do you mean?” was quintessential for building a peaceful and happy relationship.
It all started with the word “interesting.” As we began dating, I quickly discovered we didn’t mean the same thing when using that word. For me, calling something “interesting” was the best compliment in the world, while my partner did it whenever he didn’t like something but wanted to remain polite. I chalked up the misunderstanding to a funny personal quirk. Yet it turned out to be only the tip of the iceberg. When it came to details, we understood the most basic words differently, such as “warm,” “cold,” “smart,” and “kind.” Even “five minutes” were ambiguous, not to mention the vague concept of “soon.” Of course, it wasn’t long before we added “love” to the list.
The ambiguity of those three words attracted a lot of intellectual attention. A French philosopher Roland Barthes wrote a book on the linguistic mechanics of love, dedicating a fair portion of its 280 pages to what the Urban Dictionary calls “the three hardest words.” Academics still argue whether the words “I love you” are overused to the point of becoming a cliché or severely underused with their potential to curb hatred and negativity in the society. A dozen of studies explored the cross-cultural, gender, and semantic differences in the usage of the magical trio.
They found that Americans and the French say it more often than Brits and the Dutch, that it has more emotional weight when people express it in their native language, and that men tend to say it earlier than women.
They also discovered that in different contexts and for different people, the same three words could mean completely different things. During one study, held in southern Texas in 2014, linguists asked a group of 120 college…
