Loving in their language

Most of us love people the way we wish to be loved — and then wonder why it does not land. This post is about learning the language the person you love actually speaks, and on why curiosity may be one of the most underrated forms of love.

If you have been told, all your life, to love more — and you have loved more, and the loving has not landed the way you hoped — this post is for you.

We have spent more years than we wanted to inside relationships where love did not land. Not because the love wasn’t there. Because the love we were giving was not the kind of love the other person could receive. We loved the way that came naturally to us. We loved the way we wished to be loved. We loved the way we had been taught love looks. And sometimes, the person on the other side of all that loving was waiting for something we never thought to give.

We want to tell you about that. About what it has taken to learn it. About the practice of it now. And about what we have come to believe is one of the most underrated forms of love.

Others are not us

Val and I have watched our children become themselves, and now we are watching our grandchildren do the same. We have noticed a pattern.

An infant does not know where she ends and her mother begins. Her body is the whole world.

A toddler discovers, sometimes with delight and sometimes with fury, that other people will not always do what he wants. No is a small earthquake. Mine extends to whatever his hand can reach. The plate in front of him is his, and the plate in front of you is also somehow his, and the idea that you might want to eat from your own plate is genuinely puzzling.

A small child begins to wonder what other people are thinking. She asks questions, sometimes the same one many times, trying to map the inside of a sister or a friend or a grandparent.

By adolescence, the world contains other minds, and those minds want different things, need different things, see and feel and rest and grieve differently.

We discover, eventually, that we are not them. The harder discovery is that they are not us.

Most of us only half-finish the second part. We carry into adulthood, more than we realize, a quiet assumption that the people around us are versions of us — defective if their needs do not match ours, ungrateful if they do not love us back in the language we are speaking. We marry someone whose love language is different from ours and assume that, if they really loved us, they would do it our way. We raise children and quietly expect them to receive love the way we would. We build friendships and offer comfort in the form we would have wanted in their situation, and feel hurt when it doesn’t help.

Knowing that we are not them is half the lesson. Learning that they are not us — and acting on it — is the work most of us are still doing.

What my mother showed me

Years ago, before I had learned much of what I am about to describe, my mother said something I have never forgotten.

I had recently gotten my pilot’s license. My sister was visiting our parents in Idaho from Washington, and I flew up in a small rented plane to see them. I took her two children up for a flight. I thought they had a wonderful time. I felt good about the day.

That night, I was sitting with my mother in the kitchen, and she said something kind, and then she said something direct. She said it had been good of me to come and good of me to take the kids flying. But what my sister had really wanted — what I had not done very well — was for me to just spend time with her. Spending money on them, she said, is not the same as spending time with them.

I think I tried to brush it off. I think I tried to explain why what I had done was good. But I knew, the moment she said it, that she was right. I had given the gift that was easy for me to give. The gift I was proud of. The gift that made me look good. I had not given the gift my sister actually wanted, which was costlier in a way I had been avoiding without admitting it: my unhurried, undistracted, unimpressive time.

That was the moment, I think, when I first started to understand something that has become a mantra for me: People are always more important than things.

It took years for that line to become real in my life. It is still becoming real. But the moment my mother said it, a small door opened that I have not been able to close again.

I am so grateful that my mom loved me enough to say this. And that she had loved me well enough, all the years before, that I could receive it from her.

What Africa taught me

Some of the most important things I have learned about loving people, I learned from working with my teams in Africa.

For years, my work took me throughout the African continent, where I had the privilege of leading teams of remarkable people. I went in with the assumption — never quite spoken, but operating underneath everything — that I knew how to do this work. I had led teams before. The principles were the principles. Clear direction. Collaboration. Trust. Care.

The principles, it turned out, were the principles. But the way the principles needed to be lived out, if they were going to mean anything, was almost entirely different from what came naturally to me.

My team members in Africa did want clear direction. But they tended to respect direction from a leader more than my teams at home had, and they were quicker to defer when I asked for their input. The thing I valued most — the back-and-forth of genuine collaboration — was not something I could simply invite and receive. It had to be earned. They were waiting, quietly, to see whether my interest in their voice was real. Until they trusted that it was, they would defer. Loving them, in this setting, looked like patience. It looked like asking questions and then asking them again, in different ways. It looked like listening for the things that were almost said. It looked like stopping the assumption that silence meant agreement, or that quick assent meant ownership. The work of really hearing them took longer than I was used to.

When the trust did finally come, what came with it was a depth of partnership and friendship I had rarely known. They engaged with a commitment and loyalty I had not seen before, because they had decided I could be trusted with what they actually thought. That trust was love, given to me, in their language. And the only way to earn it had been to learn the language first.

Collaboration, for them, was also different. My teams at home thrived on autonomy. My teams in Africa appreciated the support and the closeness of working as a team, and they wanted me more involved in the details of what they were doing than I would have been at home. At first this felt to me like overreach. Over time, I came to see it as the form of presence they needed. Presence, in their language, was love. Distance, no matter how respectful, would have read as indifference.

There was one harder piece of this. In many African contexts, small bribes and informal payments are a normal part of how things get done. We had a strict policy against paying bribes. This was hard for some of my team members to understand at first, not because they were dishonest people — they were not — but because the framework around honesty and reciprocity had developed differently than mine had.

One of my team members told me a story once. He told it to me, I came to understand, because he wanted me to be able to love his people well. He knew his community was misunderstood, and he was trying to give me what I needed in order to see them clearly.

He said that when he was a child, if someone came to the door asking for his uncle because the uncle owed them money, he was always expected to say his uncle was not there — even if the uncle was standing right behind the door. He was careful to add that this was not about strangers, or about ordinary discretion. The person at the door was someone they knew, perhaps knew well. But they were not family. In his world, family was protected above all else, and the truth bent around that protection without anyone calling it a lie.

Before I could help him see what our company’s standards required, I had to understand where he was standing. Once I understood — really understood — that his frame and mine had been built on different ground, I could meet him on common ground and walk with him toward a different way of doing things. If I had led with correction, I would have lost him. By leading with understanding, I kept him, and he led himself further than correction ever could have taken him.

The people I worked with in Africa became dear friends. Some of the closest I have known. They taught me, more than I taught them, what it means to do the work of really seeing another person and learning to love in their language. I would not trade those years for anything.

A lot of people, when they think of Africa, see less of everything. Less education. Less infrastructure. Less opportunity. Less. I saw something completely different. I saw people of extraordinary dedication, insight, and capacity for love. I came to believe — and I still believe — that the work of loving people in the way they need to be loved is the same work everywhere on earth, but the language of it is different in every place, and the language has to be learned every time.

What we do now

Val and I, before we go to meet with someone, often ask each other a question: how do they need to be loved?

Not what they need from us. Not what we want from the meeting. How do they need to be loved.

Some people need to be heard for a long time without being given advice. Some people need to be helped concretely, with their hands, in the kitchen or in the yard. Some people need warmth and physical presence. Some people need a careful kind of distance. Some of our children love long, probing, late-night conversations with us. Others would rather we ask one question, listen to the answer, and move on. Loving them all looks different. Loving each of them well takes the work of remembering which is which.

Most of the time, the answer to how do they need to be loved is something we already know if we are willing to be still long enough to notice. We have lived with these people. We have seen what makes them light up and what makes them retract. The information is there. The question simply makes us look at the information we already have rather than reaching for the easier, more flattering response that comes naturally.

Curiosity becomes love when it becomes listening — real listening, the kind that does not have a response already waiting in the wings. Most of us only listen until we have what we need to reply. Loving someone in their language often means listening past that point, into the second thing they would say, and the third, and the fifth. The part of them you most needed to hear is rarely in the first sentence.

I have come to believe that curiosity is one of the most underrated forms of love. To be curious about a person — really curious, not as a strategy, not as a way to manage them — is to honor them as someone whose interior life is real and worth knowing. To stop assuming you already know what they need is itself a kind of love. To go on being curious about someone you have known for forty years is to refuse to flatten them into the version of them you have grown comfortable with.

I do not do this perfectly. I do not even do it well most of the time. But the asking helps. The asking helps me notice when I am about to give the gift that is easy for me to give and not the gift that is needed. The asking helps me catch myself before I reach for the version of love that is really about me.

When the language goes only one way

Some of you are doing this work of loving someone in their language while no one is yet doing the work of loving you in yours. We have lived it. Val lived stretches of her first marriage learning a language she was speaking mostly into silence, with no one yet able to speak it back.

What we want to say to you, gently, is this: the work going one direction does not always come back to you in the form you want it to. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it doesn’t. But the change in you is real either way. The work is meaningful either way. And the kind of person you become as you do this work is a person who is loved better, by the people who can.

A note about what we have not said

We have learned, in the writing of this site, that loving people in the way they need to be loved sometimes means not telling stories that would have illustrated the point.

There are people in our lives whose privacy is more important to us than our illustration. We hold those stories carefully. We have set some of them aside, even when they would have done good work here, because the love is the point — not the lesson.

If anything in this post has rung true for you, we will say plainly: some of the most important examples we could have given are not on this page. They are in the lives we are quietly trying to live.

What I am still learning

I am not done with this work. I am not finished learning how to love the people in my life in the way they need to be loved. I still watch myself. I still catch myself reaching for the easier gift. I still notice, sometimes hours or days later, that I gave someone the version of love that suited me rather than the version they were hoping for.

What I have come to believe is that the noticing is part of what it means. The watching is part of what it means. There is no point at which a person arrives at this work and is done. The work is a posture, not a destination.

And here is the thing I did not expect when I started.

The people who taught me the most about loving — my mother, my African teams, our children, Val — were also teaching me, at the same time and from the same source, something else. They were teaching me gratitude. They were teaching me faith.

The people on my African teams might have eaten one meal that day and not known where the next would come from. They were grateful for that meal. Truly grateful. Terrible things happened to them and to people they loved, and their response was it is okay; God is in charge, and they meant it. They lived it. They were the happiest people I have ever known.

I have thought about that for a long time, and I have come to believe that gratitude and faith and the capacity to love people in the way they need to be loved are nearer to each other than they look. Gratitude makes you able to see the actual person in front of you rather than the version of them you were hoping for. Faith makes you able to keep loving them when the loving is not visibly working. Curiosity, gratitude, faith — these are the three things I am still learning, and they keep turning out to be the same thing.

We are all going to be loved imperfectly by people who are doing the best they can with the language they have. And we are all going to love imperfectly, in return, in the language we are still learning to speak.

What love looks like, I have come to believe, is the willingness to keep learning the language.

What language has someone you love been quietly speaking?

Share a thought in the comments below.