POSTED: SEPT 1, 2025
I am quite intrigued by language, and as I am really only proficient in English that is where I spend most of my adventures in exploring words and wordcraft. One that is a perennial favourite for me is the word LOVE.
Now I know that many other languages tackle the broad notions that the English word Love covers by breaking it down into other words or variations on a word, so that would be a more sophisticated way to go. But English – no way, we use it as a positive emotional catch-all. It relies on the context to put things in perspective. So you might love your grandpa and love a cheeseburger but it is the context that we have to apply to know that you don’t love them in the same way or on the same scale.
It is also interesting how putting a word before or after it gives it a new set of meanings – making love, for example is not necessarily really about making or love.
As a result of this broadness of application, the significance of the word is often diluted as it is so overused, whether in the sale of consumer products or as a general term for affection of some kind.
But that same broadness of application and dilution in some contexts makes it more special in some contexts. In the dating world (yes, I am dating myself for using such a term) the word is not used lightly as it has profound implications. So all of the throwaway references to loving the new soap you are washing your clothes in or loving the new improved garbage bags, may be liberally used in all contexts other than the person who you might actually be in a relationship with, but not want to add that layer of seriousness or commitment to. So, the word gets tucked away for such purposes only to come out when triggered.
And why am I riffing off on such a subject today? Well, an old friend I ran into on the internet and we got to chatting. Some backstory might help to understand her relationship with the word love. I knew her as we were both working in the kitchens of cruise ships fifty years ago. Yeah, fifty years – a while back. And in the mid 1970’s relationships were quite fluid, where the level of commitment was a very wide spectrum. But within that love the one you’re with world, people still would find themselves in committed wonderful deep relationships. So my friend, on a few occasions in her life had encountered men who chose to share with her that they loved her. And on each occasion once her partners opened that can of worms they could not handle her response. As soon that as soon as one of those lads would reference that he loved her she would be out of the relationship. She would also be in a mess, in that she had valued the person and saw a future with them but the word had a real stigma for her. I never knew why and one of the guys who was a fallout of this phobia I knew quite well and he was so messed up by the rejection, left the cruise ships and joined a cult. Yes, another strange characteristic of the times.
I was never really close to her and have not kept in touch very well over the decades so it was strange for her to relate to me why she had a problem with someone expressing their love for her. I had made up in my imagination that it might relate to a bad experience with a stepfather or weird uncle and learned that yes, it was in fact a family relationship not the kind my imagination had conjured up. No, her problem stemmed from being a real monster as a kid, much like myself, and hearing from her mother throughout her life that she was loved. From an early age she realized the statement had an unsaid back-half of the sentence like “I love you, …..despite being a mean-spirited little bitch that has caused nothing but pain and hardship for your father and I and your siblings”. When she dropped rocks off an overpass onto the windshields of the cars below at twelve and trashed a corner store at fourteen and stole a car and then crashed it in her later teens, was all before she really ramped up the bad behaviour further in her late teens, each time her mother would start the conversation at the Principals office, Police station, or hospital with I love you or You are loved.
But I realized that after all this time, her sharing this with me, a person who she had not chatted with in about a decade, was an indication that she was moving forward, understanding her emotions better and putting it all in context. We are all just trying to figure ourselves out, and some issues take longer than others. She was also happy to chat to find out if I had an email for that mutual friend from decades ago. It was not to reconnect in some romantic way but to explain to him why she had treated him the way she did and to apologize. Good for her. I did not have an email but sent her the contact for someone who I expected would have it.
Django