the languages of love.

Now Playing: All This and Heaven Too by Florence + The Machine (the heart is hard to translate, it has a language of its own) 

They told me that everyone has their own language of love.

I think...I think it goes further than that. I think every relationship has its own language of love. You never treat two people the same, and nobody responds to the exact same expressions of affection. Love is like that. It's a whole new language that starts when two people meet and ends until something tiny little big huge momentous do us part.

I think this because I'm just starting to realise how many problems arise when this language doesn't work. Doesn't do what it's supposed to. Doesn't convey 'I love you' in a way that the other person understands, or they understand it but what you say doesn't really convey how you feel.

Because 'I love you'...it's so much more complex than that, isn't it? It's why people are afraid of saying it, or only say it in those kind of mushy romantic situations. Because the truth is nobody loves only one person at any given point in time. The people you love might number in the thousands and you love them all equally, yet totally differently. We don't understand that, and it confuses us - we think that love is only for one person, and we're betraying that person by loving others, and so we push the others away when we still need them, like really need them, in a way we can't explain and sometimes don't even notice until it's gone.

I think that's the problem, when you're growing up. The languages of love that you're used to as a child change - people change, people leave, people break your heart and screw you over. And for the languages of love that don't change, you really need them to change, because what you understood so innately as a child is so alien as an adolescent, as an adult. It's why we push our parents away because we can't understand the tongue of soft coos to a baby and gentle words of encouragement to a child - for me, anyway, love is something more...physical, personal, something new and exciting and reckless and dangerous and you don't get that from family. And then, of course, you're surrounded by people who don't know how to express what they're feeling - sometimes they don't even know what they're feeling. You know you don't, at all.

Put it this way. There is someone that I love dearly, and nobody else understands why. Every day they tell me that I'm in a bad friendship, that we're not doing anything for each other, blah blah blah. Or they'll say that I'm after something 'more' - I used to be, didn't I, so how do we know that that suddenly changed?

It's so...it's so hard to explain how things are. Things that I see as solid unshakeable undeniable proof that somebody cares about me, that somebody gives a damn...people don't see it, and toss it aside, which I find particularly annoying from people I don't think care about me at all. Languages of love are impossible to translate. There are just so many things that I can't say or..won't say...and...

Trauma. We all have those moments, those memories in our lives, that we can't talk about - at least not in depth, and not entirely truthfully. They're not always painful memories, just...confusing ones. The memories that have no closure. Moments of intensity that you can't explain how or what or why.

Apparently those are things people can't speak about. I'm different. I can't shut up. I told you, I'm good with everyone's secrets but my own. I talk because I still haven't found a way to explain how I felt, how things feel, what I think. Poems and blogging and writing and talking and crying and screaming and drawing and painting and fighting...none of them...I can't find my medium.

Love is different. I know my language of love - it flows thicker than blood in my veins. I know exactly what I need from people to feel loved, to feel cared for, to feel wanted. And that knowledge...that knowledge is not power because every day I feel its absence.

People think...people think I ask too much of them. Too much time, too much to take away from other people in their lives and...I don't know how to explain to them that's not it. I have never seen the appeal in being the only person in someone's life - one of the guys in atheist club is polyamorous and I can totally, totally understand that, why someone would choose to live like that, why someone would like to structure relationships like that, even if nobody else I know does. I just...I know you can treat someone right without making anyone else in your life feel any different. I know that there is enough love in anyone and enough time in every day to do what little it takes to do that. I don't ask for too much. I have just spent my whole life asking nothing of people and getting nothing in return. I can't do that anymore. It's too much. I can't...I can't let myself be bled dry anymore.

But I used this excuse, to get rid of...someone. I told him I didn't have any space in my life for anyone else but that's a lie, I would have made space and none of my other friends would have felt any less loved. I couldn't tell someone to their face that I didn't like them, and I didn't like how they were treating me. Well, that's not strictly true. I did tell them the latter part, very clearly, on no uncertain terms, and when he didn't listen I...kind of lied to get rid of him.

I feel bad about that. I know he doesn't feel bad about behaving very inappropriately towards a very naive seventeen year old but I still feel bad about lying to him. In my defence, this guy...he made me scared. Very scared. I get scared of people who don't understand the concepts of 'taking it slow' or 'personal space' or 'boundaries', especially when they're a lot taller and bigger and older than me...and let's face it, I'm 5'2", 50kg and seventeen, so a lot of people are taller and bigger and older than me. And so, when you're little and small and young, you do what you gotta do to get rid of people who scare the pants off you. Which, now that I think about it, was probably his design.

I'm not really a...a people person. I need people more than I need food or oxygen, but...I don't really understand them. I don't know what's going on in peoples' heads and it's really...it's really scary sometimes because even though everyone says that I'm irrational they're irrational and I didn't know I didn't know I don't know what's going on I...

I spend a lot of time premeditating things - thinking about things, thinking about things I will do, things I want to do. And then...I spend a lot of time thinking about things, mulling over things, trying to preserve memories and store them away, away where people can't hurt them the way they hurt me, or trying to forget, things that I don't even know what or why...

Because in the moment...I don't know what's happening. I'm confused and the words don't come and my body moves without permission. People seem random and scary and I never know what they're going to do next. I didn't know my first kiss was coming until about a second before it happened. This guy, this guy that I just got rid of, grabbed me and picked me up and spun me around and I didn't know, I didn't know it was coming, didn't know what was happening, didn't know what it meant, didn't know why he did it.

People accuse me of extending conflict after it's all been resolved but...I can't think straight, in the present, especially under pressure. I miss things people say, and I say things I don't mean. And then I think back and just a few words, or a gesture, will trigger something and I will look back and realise I'm not okay, I'm not okay with how things played out at all, and that this problem needs a little more bashing out before it is properly fixed up. I can't think in the here and now; the present is too intense and confusing. I do the intellect stuff before and after. In the moment I am really...vulnerable, and afraid, and stupid.

The present is traumatic, for me. Not traumatic in need therapy and a padded cell traumatic, not even nightmare inducing traumatic. But to me, the present is defined by silence, by a lack of words. There's too much to process and I guess my infamous repartee cracks under the pressure. For most people things are linear, things are cause and effect and consequence, but for me...the present is a story with a beginning and the end and then I go back and write the middle in retrospect and you know what, sometimes it's fucking hard to connect two ends of a story together. I should know, I'm a writer.

This is becoming very long and pointless. I'm sure you can tell that I'm frustrated, and it's not just at love and other animals. And when you have nobody to vent at, well, you create a whole community to vent at, especially when the steam you have to let off might actually kill your fellow conversationalists in the language of love.

Not that I could ever really put this steam into words, that's the major frustration. The heart is hard to translate and I...well I'm even worse.