English doesn't have enough words for Love
Nov 21, 2024"Why has the pleasure of slowness disappeared? Ah, where have they gone, the amblers of yesteryear? Where have they gone, those loafing heroes of folk song, those vagabonds who roam from one mill to another and bed down under the stars?" ― Milan Kundera, Slowness
Sanskrit has 96 words for love. Greek has 8. English has only 1.
I've been thinking about something anthropologist Robert Levy discovered in 1973- Tahitians didn’t have a word to describe grief. When they lost someone close to them, they’d say they felt ‘sick’ or ‘strange’. But they couldn’t conceptualize grieving.
Or the Berlin-Kaye color sequence, and how the word for blue often comes very late in the development of a language, and how before it does, speakers of those languages would have only conceptualized different shades of green.
And I think about how English seems to be a language starved of descriptions of love, and how maybe this might mean our culture might be starved of love. And how there might be shades of experience and closeness inaccessible to everyone simply because we haven’t come up with names to describe their color.
I think about the words "I love you" often. There is perhaps no set of three words that are both so overloaded with meaning that also can mean so little in the English language. "I love you" can be immensely weighty. It can be the three words that mark a step change to something more in a relationship. "I love you" can be so light, words said in passing as a partner rushes out the door on a busy morning. "I love you" can be shrieked out to a pop-star in a concert, whispered tenderly to an old flame, jokingly tossed to a friend.
Which is it? To whom do we say it? When two people use those words with each other, do they even mean the same things? When Lennon sang "Love is All You Need" what was he talking about?
Look at this list of words for love in Sanskrit.
प्रेम (Prema) - Divine, unconditional love; the highest form of love that transcends the physical and emotional.
स्नेह (Sneha) - Tender affection or fondness; often used for the love between family members or close friends.
काम (Kama) - Sensual or romantic love; desire and physical attraction.
भक्ति (Bhakti) - Devotional love; specifically refers to spiritual love and devotion toward the divine.
वात्सल्य (Vatsalya) - Parental love; particularly the unconditional love of a mother for her child.
मैत्री (Maitri) - The love of friendship; benevolence and goodwill toward all beings.
अनुराग (Anurag) - Deep attachment or passionate love; ongoing devotion to someone or something.
मोह (Moha) - Infatuated love; can also mean the kind of love that leads to attachment and delusion.
Did Lennon mean Bhakti? Or Prem? Or Maitri?
It frustrates me how unsophisticated the language we use for this stuff is. "I'm really into her". Okay buddy, but what do you mean? Are you down bad? Do you feel some kind of devotion unfolding in your heart? Are you delusionally infatuated? "No like, I really really like her" okay so you're in love? "Naaah bro stfu". Okay so it's not Love with a capital L, but it's not nothing. What’s evident, however, is that you definitely don’t have the words to describe how you feel.
Maybe this is so hard because Love is so loaded as a concept. It feels too heavy. Think about the video of Rupert Grint and Emma Watson and him saying “I Love You” to her. And how there was that need to immediately qualify it with “as a friend”. (Am I going to overanalyze this? Yes.)
It’s as if those words were dangerous left hanging in the air. Cue the friendzone jokes in the comments, which drive me nuts. Could it not simply be that the cup of emotions in his heart overflows when thinking about this person he almost grew up with? And that he wants to pour that overflow of love into her cup. And the only low resolution way to communicate that is to say those dangerous words, an act that, for some reason, requires a lot of bravery. But then, like a bad joke in a marvel movie, the tension of the earnestness has to immediately be defused with a throwaway line.
“As a friend” but (and I can only guess) aren’t they so much more than that? Did they not grow up together? “Friend’ feels too flimsy of a word to describe what they have. But then Love is perhaps too loaded, maybe it comes with too many connotations, perhaps of possessiveness, and physicality, and romance. This is the issue with language being low resolution. What words can he use to describe the depth and nuance of emotions he feels? Maybe it’s Sneha, maybe it’s Anurag?
Maybe the issue is that unlabeled space feels dangerously uncertain to the brain. And with only two low resolution concepts, “I love you” and “as a friend”, both unable to capture the subtleties of his feelings, he rushes from one to the safety of the other. If we had words for all the places in the middle, there wouldn’t be this tension. But with our inability to sit with the tension, it's like we can't conceptualize love that doesn't need to declare its final form in the first act. Imagine if we had English words that captured all the subtleties we could feel? Maybe we’d be able to sit with those feelings better. Maybe with more concepts the peaks would be easier to scale too. There wouldn’t be the immense weight of going from ‘just a friend’ to someone you could say “I love you” to.
An inability to conceptualize a need doesn’t mean the need still doesn’t exist. Just as humans need a varied diet, I think we need a varied diet of different kinds of love. In our ancestral environment, evolving in tiny tribes, think about the number of bonds that we evolved to expect but don't always get today. Familial love, yes, but also a constant love from the village elders. The love between a teacher and a student. The love between an older student and a younger student. Between a class of students. Between friends, but friends with a capital F, friends who grew up together. And I don’t know if we have the best diet today.
Just like the Tahitians feeling grief who could only describe it as 'feeling strange' or feeling tired, how many people who feel depressed or unable to pay attention to things or have a general persistent sense of malaise in fact are experiencing a yearning for love towards a community, or a need for tender affection?
Is it possible to miss someone that doesn't yet exist in one's life? Can one yearn for a puzzle piece to fill a hole that they themselves do not yet recognize?
There might be two parts to a solution. Can we first identify the places in our life we’ve felt more than we were capable of communicating? And then can we have the courage to elegantly communicate it? Or if not communicate, at least sit in the feeling?
This might be overly niche and personal, but I started feeling the physical sensation of love (like I mean that warm, fuzzy feeling in the body) only after I started reflecting on the different kinds of love that I did, in fact, feel towards so many people and places and things. Before, the bodily feeling was often a reflexive wince, almost like I was overwhelmed with it. It felt like I was trying to place it in existing categories and it didn’t exactly fit in any, and so I wanted to discard it. But now, I’m trying to stop cramming feelings into existing labels too fast.
And I don’t know that I’ve cracked the ability to communicate it yet. I don’t think this requires saying it out loud, necessarily. There are forms of communication deeper and older than language. I think so much is in the sitting with it, in letting the complicated feelings live in the body, and it happens to transfer across by itself.
On one hand writing this entire thing feels overly earnest, potentially cringey, "too much". But maybe this stuff is critical. What’s the point of creating a world with magical technology if we don’t even have the language to relate to each other with nuance?
Can we learn to live more comfortably in those undefined spaces of emotion? Can we learn to conceptualize finer levels of resolution for them; name them? Can we be brave enough to stay there and hold our ground even if there's almost a need to artificially push it one way or the other? “All you need is Love”, sure, John Lennon. But maybe there’s more kinds of Love than meets the eye.