There is something particularly unsettling about feeling useless in a situation. Call it hypercompetence or whatever other word you want, but as someone who likes to think of herself as relatively capable of fixing most things for the people in her life, I despise feeling unable to fix something for someone. This became particularly apparent the other day, when I spent nearly 16 hours at A&E with a friend, playing a unique and frustrating version of NHS waiting-room musical chairs – the only name I can think of for the absolutely absurd number of waiting rooms, seating orientations, and hospital furniture types we were acquainted with overnight.
In all of my considerations and calculations, I foolishly thought that we would be there for a few hours max, because I’ve worked in my fair share of emergency rooms (or ERs, as we call them in the US), and I’ve seen how these departments tend to function. But those few hours turned into us camping out overnight in the waiting room(s), where my friend was very adamant that I did not need to stay and that I should go home and “get some sleep”. This was, however, impossible, since even if I had gone home, it wouldn’t have been to sleep, but to bombard her with anything I could find (medical articles, possible treatments, reassuring texts) to make myself feel useful enough to alleviate her discomfort. Instead, I took occasional jaunts to the nurses’ station, conducted semi-regular enquiries, and became a professional water-bottle-filler.
My friend, an incredibly hypercompetent and hyperindependent person, could have handled whatever she needed to handle. But just because she could do it alone didn’t mean she had to – even if my help was probably minimal, maybe nothing more than a warm body in the seat next to her.
In the days that have passed since the A&E adventure, I haven’t thought much about the night we were there, or why I stayed. The passage of time, though arduous and frustrating (even downright ridiculous when we hit 4am with as many answers as we had questions), was still time spent with a friend. So, from my perspective, my staying was quite simple. Two plus two equals four. The sky is blue. You’re stuck in A&E overnight? So am I.
I suppose you could call it quality time. Or an act of service. Or perhaps whichever love language it is that encompasses aggressively refilling someone’s water bottle from a suspicious pitcher while silently cursing NHS waiting times. But maybe that’s the point. We have become extraordinarily good at naming how we love, and considerably less interested in what loving someone actually looks like.
Ask someone their love language, and they’ll probably have an answer. They might even pull out online test results. I indulge the conversation every time, and even find how a person interprets the languages quite telling. But ask someone when they last felt truly seen, and they might need a moment.
Interestingly enough, while the love languages have been a part of my (and many others’) vernacular for many years, they were first introduced in 1992 by Gary Chapman, a Baptist minister, who found that people give and receive love in different ways. Using his anecdotal experiences from counselling couples, he created the five languages of love: acts of service, physical touch, words of affirmation, quality time, and gift-giving. His book sold over 20 million copies and has influenced clinical practice, such as how these love languages can teach us things about value-based care, therapeutic practices, and even drive public health messaging, such as the Alzheimer’s Association’s 2025 Love Language Campaign and ZERO Prostate Cancer’s Caregiver Love Language Initiative.
And yet his work has been debated for years. One 2022 study found higher relationship satisfaction, sexual satisfaction, and empathy between couples with greater intra-couple love language matches. But recent research likewise finds Chapman’s model to be overly narrow, saying that it does not offer a sufficient vocabulary for all that is encompassed in love. What do we do to ourselves by trying to find the vocabulary for loving behaviour? Does love, and the ways in which we show it, need categories?
I’ve been thinking about the spaces between these categories, whether they are those of Chapman’s traditional five, or from a different model entirely. I think about the friend that remembers the date of an important meeting; the tenderness of a “text me when you get home” before you part ways; someone coming over to help you clean or organise when it’s all been a little overwhelming.
These gestures aren’t particularly extraordinary. And perhaps they do fall into the neat categories that Chapman gives us to talk about love. But there are also the words that touch and make you feel seen in a way that can sometimes feel exposing. There’s the way you give yourself to someone when you show them physical affection, be it platonic or romantic, because there is always a moment of sheer vulnerability when waiting to see how it will be received. Time, though intangible, is something we act upon, that we fill with actions and moments that have meanings we choose to give them. Love is remembering and being and doing and everything in between. Our language for it ought to be as expansive as it is.
Perhaps that’s what those sixteen hours in A&E were, in truth. They weren’t particularly productive, certainly not comfortable, and hardly the sort of quality time anyone would willingly schedule. A circumstance of making that has far too many confounding variables. But it was time, nonetheless. Time spent together, even when there was nothing to do. Time that, in the grand archive of a friendship, might become just another small story we laugh about and retell: “Hey, remember that ridiculous night we spent in A&E?”
So, I won’t stop you from talking love languages with me. I suppose that shows me something too. But it’s not everything I would hope to know, and I delight in the discoveries yet to occur.
