The Five Love Languages

The premise is well understood by me. Different people express and accept love and value using different languages from one another. To paraphrase, these five are: words, time, gifts, acts, touch. Me? I'm big on 1 and 4; Words and acts. Challengingly, my hierarchy of love languages corresponds exactly to the inverse of my partners!

This morning is a typical case of that challenge not being met. I feel hurt and rejected. I feel that my plans and values are being devoured from within like one of those unlucky caterpillars with parasitical wasp larvae on the inside. And there's no caterpillar Sigourney Weaver to save me.

This week I had two goals. One was a month old and it was to, finally, take the cardboard recycling out to the street for collection. It's a personal failure to me that it didn't happen until now. And the fact that nobody else bothered to or even cared or remembered hurts me caterpillar-style.

Was is Aristotelianism or Epicureanism or something 1000 years on that talked about friendship the way it is for me? I forget the reference but always loved hearing this once. That, one definition of a friend is someone who will take on your works and go on with them after your death. Not just revenge on what snuffed you either but things like your hypotheses and scrolls you may have been writing or taking out your paper recycling to the side of the road. My family doesn't even do that for me.

How I love the idea of ancient Greek and Renaissance philosophers in their togas and their gowns feeding my cat while I'm away or returning my library books if a deadly James Cameron plot befalls me. My friends speak my love language and remember my life plans even if I were away.

This week I had two goals. The second was paying the bill for broadband though we lack the budget. So I got an extra job and worked hard and made extra money. Paid for it. But then Mrs Just As Now shifted the money about. She said we needed this, had to buy that. Speaks of fruit and of new school bags and shoes for the kids. Something was gnawing at my little green caterpillar insides.

My act of working extra to expand our budget was an "act of service" nobody cared for. Another Taja Mahal for the living which my Greek and Renaissance imaginary friends are loving me for but my internet-hungry family takes for snack food. My chrysalis is never going to come.

It's love to me to help someone else's dreams come true. To take their goals seriously and help them where you can. The least best thing you can do, in my love language, is to listen and remember what another person cares about even if you don't. But I told Mrs J.A.N. (Oh hell, Freud alert. That's my Mum's name!) anew of this goal, that I'd gone to extra effort to pay an extra bill, and she didn't remember. Did not listen. That, in Love Language #1 and Love Language #4 is large font Caps Lock-on DON'T LOVE YOU.

This happens far too often to she and I. The Five Love Languages book is more of a blessing than a curse. The curse is that she's read it and knows what message I am interpreting and that doesn't stop her blasting away anyhow. The blessing is that as my fuzzy wuzzy caterpillar organs are shredded, chrysalis future sold up the river, pain and grief receptors salted and UV irradiated I know that she didn't mean it like that. It was a typo, it was a misprint. It was an English as a Second Language student's unproofed first draft.