Do you ever wonder what the language of love sounds like? Or, indeed, WHICH LANGUAGE is the language of love?
Every person with even a single blood cell of Italian origin now probably shouted in their head: Italian! Yes, we all watched movies with hunky guys in striped shirts, large biceps, and artsy stubble, rowing gondolas in Venice and belting “amore mio!” or singing songs about amore. It all looks so romantic, especially if you are Italian. But ask a person of French origin, and they’ll explain to you that Italian is too loud, their romance requires too many words, and they wave their hands and arms too much to emphasize the meaning. To a French person, the ultimate language of “l’amour” is, of course, French. Haven’t they, after all, invented the “French kiss”?
But wait, my Russian friend disagrees: isn’t the whole world in awe of Russian capacity to love and suffer? Who hasn’t heard of, or read Pushkin or Yesenin, Tolstoy, Chekhov; who hasn’t been moved by the music of Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev...it’s the ultimate life’s soundtrack for love, passion, and, yes, tragedy. Because, to Russians (and most of us non-Russians), love and tragedy go hand-in-hand.
Probably, if you ask someone of different origin, they’ll tell you that their language is the language of love. Doesn’t it mean that the elusive language of love is exactly the language lovers speak? Every person is most comfortable describing and explaining their emotions in their mother tongue.
Except...
What happens when Cupid’s arrows hit two people without a common language? I guess I’m somewhat qualified to talk about it. See, my wife is Asian Canadian. Her mother tongue is Cantonese and her second language is English. Mine are Croatian and English. So, yes—we still have English as a common language, but even so there are things that get lost in translation or misinterpreted. We overcome that by talking, explaining our feelings to each other the best we could and, in the process, attributing new, uniquely ours meaning to certain words and sometimes inventing whole new words which have meaning only to us.
So, if I may draw the conclusion to the question about the language of love—it’s the language the people in love speak to each other. It’s not a particular language. Sometimes, it’s not a spoken language at all. It’s the smile, the frown, the posture, slump in shoulders or straightening in the spine. It’s the bounce in steps, the tremble in fingers. It’s the touch.
Or, as Cher explains in “The Shoop Shoop Song”—“If you want to know if he loves you so, it’s in his kiss”.
And the best part of it all? One never masters the language of love, no matter how much they practice. So, my friends, learn, practice and enjoy the language lessons of love!
I leave you with arguably one of the most famous love songs of modern times: