^^^^^ This is my latest excuse for my various messes, a.k.a. “ideas”, lying around my house.
***** Happy 25th Birthday, my blue-eyed baby! I am proud to be your fellow Sag and Yenta of the family. Mostly I am super proud to be your mama. I love you.
One time, one of my friends asked me what my love language was, as she was really into reading and understanding Gary Chapman’s famous book, The Five Love Languages. Honestly, I didn’t have an answer because I really never got into the book and the question started my internal critic reeling, wondering if I wasn’t showing my friends I care, because I didn’t know my “official” love language. According to Chapman, people show love in five major categories and most people have a predominant way that they show love. The categories are: Quality Time, Words of Affirmation, Physical Touch, Receiving Gifts, and Acts of Service. Apparently people give and show love in the ways that they would like to receive it. And so the theory is, if you want to better understand and appreciate your partner and how to love them, you notice how they show you their love.
I’m intrigued with the idea of all of this, but I don’t think love or relationships are ever this simple and easy. I’m also uneasy with the idea of “transactional” love. I do believe that love is an action and so it follows that spending quality time, affirming your people, giving and receiving hugs and kisses, etc., giving and receiving gifts and doing kind deeds for people, are all beautiful ways to express your love and affection, but the concept implies to me, an expectation, “If you do this, then I’ll do that . . . ” (transactional and performative and obligatory)
In my life’s experience, I have sadly come to better understand and appreciate my loved ones’ unique love languages when they are no longer a part of my life, for various reasons, usually death or growing apart. It’s the unique, nuanced love language of any individual that makes you realize that there really is no one else who can fill those exact same shoes. No one else can share with you that same exact love communication. It’s what “I miss” about a person that makes me realize I was understanding that person’s unique and special fit into the puzzle of my life. I was “hearing” their love language which sometimes I could only fully decipher when they were gone.
Who in your life listens to you intently with the biggest desire to understand? Who in your life rallies you to live it more fully than you ever realized you could? Who in your life shares the same sense of humor, so that you are both cry-laughing in unison until your sides ache? Who in your life makes you feel like you have hung the moon just for existing? Who in your life has pushed you to be the best version of you? Who in your life has been an example and inspiration of strength and resiliency? Who in your life lights up the minute you walk into the room? Who in your life introduced you to things and concepts and experiences that opened up whole new worlds to you? Who in your life seems to know that exact right time to reach out with just the right words? Who in your life makes you feel more “alive” just being with them? Who in your life just “gets you” and loves you for it?
What will people miss about you when you are gone? What void will be left in their lives because you are no longer in it? I don’t necessarily think it will be what you did for them. I don’t think it will be anything about your looks, or your personality, or your money or your talents. I believe that it will be the unique, interesting, vulnerable giving of yourself that beautifully and intrinsically connected to something deeper in them. And I think that when this connection is electric and happening, we don’t realize it, until we don’t have it anymore. I believe that we share a unique love language in every significant relationship in our lives, kind of like those fake, secret languages that we would make up, in our childhood, with our siblings and best friends.
Maybe one of life’s biggest ironies, is that we don’t clearly hear or understand someone’s love language, until it is no longer spoken to us. And then that beautiful language is clear as a bell. It sometimes plays in our heads, like a tune we can’t stop thinking about. It’s that one note in the symphonies of our lives that no one else could hit, but that one person. Thankfully, we shared a special language at one time, and so it lives on in us, carved like engravings in our hearts, even when it is an ancient language, no longer spoken.
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.