Decla­ring love

The dif­fi­cul­ty of a decla­ra­ti­on of love opens up qua­si-phi­lo­so­phi­cal con­cerns about lan­guage. (…) The words were the most ambi­guous in the lan­guage, becau­se the things they refer­red to so sor­ely lacked sta­ble mea­ning. Cer­tain­ly tra­ve­lers had retur­ned from the heart and tried to repre­sent what they had seen, but love was in the end like a spe­ci­es of rare colo­red but­ter­fly, often sigh­ted, but never con­clu­si­ve­ly identified.

The thought was a lonely one: of the error one may find over a sin­gle word, an argu­ment not for lin­gu­i­stic pedants but of despe­ra­te importance to lovers who need to make them­sel­ves unders­tood. Chloe and I could both speak of being in love, and yet this love might mean signi­fi­cant­ly dif­fe­rent things within each of us. We had often read the same books at night in the same bed, and later rea­li­zed that they had touch­ed us in dif­fe­rent places: that they had been dif­fe­rent books for each of us. Might the same diver­gence not occur over a sin­gle love-line?

She real­ly was ado­rable (thought the lover, a most unre­lia­ble wit­ness in such mat­ters). But how could I tell her so in a way that would sug­gest the distinc­ti­ve natu­re of my attrac­tion? Words like „love“ or „devo­ti­on“ or „infa­tua­ti­on“ were exhaus­ted by the weight of suc­ces­si­ve love sto­ries, by the lay­ers impo­sed on them through the uses of others. At the moment when I most wan­ted lan­guage to be ori­gi­nal, per­so­nal, and com­ple­te­ly pri­va­te, I came up against the irre­vo­ca­bly public natu­re of emo­tio­nal language.

The­re see­med to be no way to trans­port „love“ in the word L‑O-V‑E, wit­hout at the same time thro­wing the most banal asso­cia­ti­ons into the bas­ket. The word was too rich in for­eign histo­ry: ever­y­thing from the Trou­ba­dours to Casa­blan­ca had cas­hed in on the let­ters. Was it not my duty to be the aut­hor of my feelings?

Then I noti­ced a small pla­te of com­pli­men­ta­ry marsh­mal­lows near Chloe’s elbow and it sud­den­ly see­med clear that I did­n’t love Chloe so much as marsh­mal­low her. (…) Even more inex­pli­ca­bly, when I took Chloe’s hand and told her that I had some­thing very important to tell her, that I marsh­mal­lo­wed her, she see­med to under­stand per­fect­ly, ans­we­ring that it was the swee­test thing anyo­ne had ever told her.
(Alain de Bot­ton – On Love)