I feel like a lot of my posts have been on the more melancholy side. For this post, I’m going to talk about a thing that is a more positive emotion: love.
First of all, what is love? Haddaway doesn’t give much of an answer, but the song does bring up the emotional vulnerability that goes hand in hand with love. Over my life, I’ve seen the word “love” be used to show all these varying degrees of how much someone enjoys something or someone-- even though it’s just one word. There is no scale and love is different for everyone. That’s what makes it so challenging to express really intimate emotions like that in the English language-- we all use this one word to express our fondness for senses, objects, ideas, friends, family, significant others-- and we expect everyone else to know exactly how strong the emotion is with only that one word at any given time. Of course, we could use context clues, but what if what if there are none? What if someone says, “I love this shoe” but means “this is an amazing shoe and its style is beautiful but I’d probably trade it for something that fits me more comfortably” and a friend thinks they meant “I want every single shoe I own to be this shoe and I will wear them 24/7.” That’s definitely not the best example, or the best explained, but I hope that shows the disparity that using the word love can create between how we perceive each other’s ideas. Also “I love green” and “I love this pizza” uses two different types of love: sight love and taste love. And, once we get into the territory of loving people, that’s where everything gets so extremely confusing.
