Whether the English language needs to invent some new words
For me, a big component of love is to be happy making someone else happy. Or being content with them being happy, even when it’s not of your doing. Doing things that you wouldn’t enjoy — things you might abhor, even, but the company of someone special makes it all worth it. When they light up and are so giddy with happiness that you can’t help but join in and share in their delight.
I revel in love. I love Love. It seems like such a noble pursuit to be in love — even the most selfish of us will have a little leeway for the one person we adore. And dang it, we could use a lot more tolerance in the world. What other force is there that makes us want to express something that is so pure and positive and inject that into the world?
Americans seems to be prickly about love — how you know whether you’re ‘in’ love or whether you just ‘like’ each other, whether you should be the first to say it, whether you love each other or you’re in love with each other. Europeans are much more open about this — love is just love, and love encapsulates so much. There can be so many levels of love, and they understand that. They don’t treat it as some fragile thing reserved only for those standing in the upper echelons of relationships in the throes of their emotions get the privilege to use.
There needs to be an update as to how we describe love. So many other languages have so many words to describe love in so much more detail — brotherly love, familial love, platonic love, lust, intellectual love between minds, attraction, romantic love, and so on. We just have like, and love. And if love can represent so much, it almost makes sense why we are hesistant to take that leap and express it. When a word can represent such an immense range of emotions, we have no idea how someone will react when faced with the word. We have no idea where on the grand scale they’ll interpret love.
Even the English, for all their mild-manners and reservedness, have somewhat of a middle ground: “I fancy you.” That’s a step in the right direction — we’re between like and love, with fancy. Things are a bit more clear. We should adopt that as soon as possible.
