Lost Love Languages
February 2024
The other day my partner casually uttered something that sent a charge through my being like emotional smelling salts. More so than the phrase itself, it was how it was given. A four-word sentence, delivered with a cadence, intonation, and muddled, made-up accent so specific that it hit me with equal parts recognition, confusion, and shock. Because that simple phrase, presented in such an elaborately original way, was one of Kara’s.
Given where we were and what we were doing, she wasn’t looking my way and no response was required. Which provided a much-needed moment to process. And it didn’t take long before I realized that she had acquired the phrase from me. The delivery was so precise it was apparent that I had been mimicking the line to her without knowing it.
We all have unique or nuanced ways of communicating with our different friends or family members, and often an especially secret verbal love language shared with our partners. Being the characters we are, Kara and I had developed an entire culture’s worth of phrases, voices, proclamations, and isms.
Some were shared with other friends or the general public, as they weren’t exclusively for her and me. But some were, and the sentence that just emitted from my partner was one of them. How did that happen? Or, I guess a better question is, how have I been repeatedly saying it without recognizing it? And why was I saying it at all?
Is it a subconscious thing that I’m letting out as a way of keeping Kara’s memory alive? Or maybe it’s because my new partner is, well, my partner now. And some blurry-eyed part of my heart is just associating that phrase with the object of my love and devotion. I don’t know how I’d feel about that.
In a way, it might be like music. We all have songs we associate with certain memories or people. “They’re playing our song!” But over time, we often associate or share some of them with more than one person or event. Or they morph to take on more expansive, different, or new meanings entirely.
But in this case, not only was that particular phrase one of Kara’s and my “songs,” she wrote it, and my new partner just played it for me. On top of that, it turns out that I was the one who taught her the chords. Those things combined to spin me out a bit.
I probably just need to relax and understand that not everything needs to make sense or have finite meaning or causation. Or I could try to put a life-affirming bend on it. Like, our love languages are never truly lost if they still live within us, and in the love we continue to share with the world. Yeah, I’m more than happy to just go with that.