Redefining the Language of Love

I have just returned from a beautiful part of the world, a place I love deeply and that means a great deal to me. This musing came to me on the flight home. When we truly allow ourselves to reflect, it feels less like a penny dropping and more like rising into the vastness of the universe.

Many years ago, I was introduced to the five love languages, a ‘universal’ definition of the ways in which we express love: receiving gifts, acts of service, quality time, physical touch, and words of affirmation. What struck me most was that people can pour every effort into showing their loved ones how much they care, and yet that love may not be received, simply because the other person understands love differently.

I remember thinking about this in the context of my work at the time. What if every teacher knew each child's love language? What if parents did too? Imagine how a whole community might change, and the beautiful ripple effect that awareness could create.

On this trip, I had many revelations, but the one I want to share is about experience, a topic I recently explored in a review for Al Waha Tribune's Summer Solstice edition.

Sometimes, the most moving way to show someone you love them is to share what you love: a place, the beauty you see in it, the way it makes you feel. Even if it means driving to a spot two hours away just to have lunch with my mother in a place that holds so much joy for her. Seeing the happiness and delight on her face was priceless, and my heart was full.

In a separate moment, I received a note from someone that read: "Thank you for making life feel like poetry." Just like my mother, I too found myself unknowingly creating meaningful experiences for those I cared about.

Love, shared as an experience, is something so moving you never forget. It lives in the senses, in the thought behind it, in the excitement on the giver's face. A single experience can hold almost all the love languages at once, from the time given to the effort made, from the gift of a place to the words that follow. The feeling is forever etched in me.

Thank you to my mother, for sharing her special places with me, so that I could learn to share them too.

24 September 2026