I meant to write this post for Valentine’s Day. But life, like love, is unpredictable. So on the last day of February, I tell myself it is still Valentine’s Month and therefore this post is still highly topical, suitably timely and massively interesting. My blog, my rules, my denial. Especially as it’s now the 1st of March.

Psychologist Robert Johnson thinks we don’t have enough words to describe our feelings of love. He wrote about the lack of ‘awareness and emphasis that we give to the realm of feeling’, and says the English language is partly to blame. His analysis is intriguing – “Sanskrit has ninety-six words for love; ancient Persian has eighty, Greek three and English only one.”

Johnson draws a clever comparison between our “poverty-stricken vocabulary” and the fact that Eskimos have 30 words for snow because it is so important to them. Each ‘snow’ word has a different nuance, a precision of description. I researched (Googled) this fact and it seems there are actually over 50 words for snow in the various Eskimo languages (including Inuit and Yupik dialects). They have different words for the snow that is safe to walk across, the snow that is like powder, wet snow, softly falling snow, the snow that is good for driving a sled over.

This is important because snow is all around them, is intrinsically linked to everything they do, and is fundamental to their existence. And we have only one word for love.

We use the same word (love) in all situations: for family, a lover, a hobby, a coffee. I love you. I love that idea! I love dancing. I’d love a coffee. Yet, we have so many different words for coffee: cappuccino, latte, flat white, piccolo, espresso. So many words for getting drunk: wasted, bladdered, sozzled, plastered, sloshed, legless. So many words for being angry: pissed off, livid, mad, raging, fuming. But just one word for love.

So. What is love? I suppose it depends on who you ask. Since the internet was somewhat disappointing, I asked a few young and innocent (and non-jaded) children what they thought about love. Here’s what they told me:

How can you tell that two people are married?
♥ “You could see their ring if you were close-up. They would probably be talking about their kids.” (C, aged 7)
♥ “If you’ve been to their wedding.” (N, aged 10)

How would you choose a boyfriend or girlfriend?
♥ “I would write down some cateristiks that I want and then see if they have those cateristiks. If they don’t then I would move on to the next person.” (C, aged 7)
♥ “Someone who is smart and doesn’t eat that much candy.” (R, aged 6)
♥ “I’d want him to be honest and not act differently to me than he normally would. I’d want him to be like daddy.” (M, aged 10)
♥ “I already have one. She tells me funny jokes.” (D, aged 5, I repeat, aged 5)

How would you show love?
♥ “By going to a movie with them even if you’ve already seen it.” (M, aged 10)
♥ “Don’t take anything out of her lunchbox. And definitely don’t wrestle her.” (D, aged 5)
♥ “When my brother is scared at night, I tell him there are no monsters, even if I’m a bit scared too.” (J, aged 8)
♥ “Not go to a football match on their birthday.” (J, aged 8)
♥ “Make sacrifices to show the other person they are more important than what you really, really want.” (N, aged 10)

And just when I thought I would finish on that deep and profound note, I received a message from my sister that couldn’t not be included in a post about Love:

©2019 Seetha Nambiar Dodd