February 13, 2015

Love Language

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The language of love is a funny thing. It starts out, often enough, all sonnets and poetry, or at least sweet, wooing words. It softens over time to a comforting sense of the known. It ebbs and flows and, if you are lucky, settles into a shared secret code. A dialect of memories and sayings and moments in time that separate you from the outside world.

Will and I, after almost fifteen years of marriage and a handful more from our before-we-were-married days, talk to one another in a jumble of movie quotes, often altered to fit the current situation or misremembered, although we tend to misremember them the same, so they seem like the real thing to us. It doesn’t sound romantic, I suppose, but it is, in fact, the language of love between us. The compilation of eighteen odd years of growing up together, growing toward one another, and as time has passed, the beginnings of growing old together.

They aren’t great words of love. We’re not spouting off Casablanca or Gone with the Wind. In fact, more often that not, they come from crappy, cheesy movies that we have watched time and again, so awful that they are wonderful. And it has become so prevalent that we catch our children quoting lines from movies they have never even heard of, much less seen. But even to them, at eight and twelve, they have become a secret code between us. A language of family. A language of love.

I only hope we don’t become so unintelligible to the outside world by the time another 18 years has passed that we have only each other to speak to. But then again, that wouldn’t be so bad. We’re MFEO, after all.

                                                                                                                -Gillian