Friday Open Thread (with love languages)

Dear friends,

It’s Valentine’s Day, and I am alone at home. My husband’s been abroad for several weeks, and circumstances have led to him staying abroad longer than expected.

I feel like Valentine’s Day in this age of accelerating internet has become a time for people to publicly and sometimes painfully hash out their feelings about it — whether it is a net good or bad, whether it sufficiently recognizes non-sexual or non-romantic loves, whether its historical roots are of enough interest to redeem the toxic capitalism around it.

So I’d like to side-step that a bit and just ask — what are your love languages*? How do you find yourself expressing affection, and how do you best like to receive it?

*I had no idea this concept came from a 1992 book by Gary Chapman until I googled just now — I encountered it as a generalized thing in the days of LiveJournal, probably as the result of a quiz, & filed it in the same sort of systemized personality formation as Harry Potter House sorting and astrology. Weirdly the seeming-anonymity of the ideas lent them more power, & while I will probably never read this book, I deeply value the idea of loving as language we need to teach each other, within which we stumble over syntax, vocabulary, idiom in our efforts to grow closer, to be understood.