Additional Thoughts on Love Languages

I Had Thoughts. I Still Have Thoughts

A while back, I wrote a piece picking apart love languages, and I had thoughts. Strong ones. I stand by most of them. The original five feel like a self-help scaffold built on attachment wounds, trauma responses, and a not insignificant amount of patriarchal conditioning dressed up as personality – Gary Chapman wrote the book as a Christian marriage guide in the nineties, and that’s a context worth knowing before you build your entire emotional identity around it and start leaving your partner passive aggressive sticky notes about quality time.

But here’s the thing about being a chaos goblin with opinions. Sometimes you critique the framework, and then you live long enough to accidentally develop your own. Not five tidy categories with a pastel quiz and a podcast episode and a couples’ retreat in Straddy, just a handful of very specific, very personal things I do for people I actually love. Things that are deliberate, things that cost something, things that no amount of Gary Chapman could have predicted or categorised. Probably because Gary Chapman has never made tacos at midnight for someone he’d walk through fire for. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

So consider this Part Two. Less critique. More confession. Same chaos goblin energy, different angle.

The Playlist Is a Love Letter and I Will Die on This Hill

I make playlists the way other people write letters – with intention, with care, with a cover image I’ve absolutely spent time creating in Canva, because of course I have. If I’ve made you a playlist, I need you to understand the weight of that. I’ve sat with you in my head and asked myself what this person feels, what they need to hear, what song captures the exact energy of this friendship or this version of us right now. This is not casual. I don’t just hit shuffle and slap your name on it. I am not an animal.

I’ve gone through my library with the focus of a woman doing something that genuinely matters to her, and I’ve built something that’s less a collection of songs and more a letter I didn’t know how to write out loud. The cover isn’t an accident either. I pick it. I sit with options. I land on the right one the second it feels like you, because I know you, and paying that kind of attention to someone is its own kind of intimacy.

And that’s not extra – that’s love. Love expressed through the medium of a person who grew up burning CDs and never quite emotionally recovered from the ritual of it. The playlist is me saying: I know you. I thought about you. I wanted you to feel something. If that’s not a love language, honestly, what are we even doing here.

You Haven’t Earned These Tacos (But Some of You Have)

Food is my most physical love language, and tacos are the highest expression of it. I don’t cook for everyone – I am not out here slow cooking for people who haven’t earned it, and I absolutely don’t throw something in the airfryer, call it effort, and accept the applause. That’s not cooking. That’s reheating with confidence. When I cook for you, I’m in the kitchen for hours, careful and deliberate, each component getting the attention it deserves because you deserve the attention it deserves.

The seasoning. The slow cooked meat. The fresh pico de gallo made from scratch while Lulu sits on the bench watching me with the energy of a demon who has opinions about my knife skills. If I’m making you tacos specifically, you’ve reached a tier of my affection that most people don’t access. That’s not me being dramatic. That’s just the honest taco hierarchy of my heart, and it is a real and sacred thing.

It’s me saying I want to keep you in my life. I want to feed you. I want to watch you eat something I made and feel that particular satisfaction of knowing I contributed to your joy in a way that’s tangible and real and absolutely covered in lime juice. Bestie or boyfie, the calculus is the same. Tacos are a declaration. Act accordingly.

The 11pm Reel Is Not an Accident

Memes are the ongoing, chaotic, beautiful conversation of my love language – if playlists are the novel and tacos are the grand gesture, memes are the daily dispatches that say I saw this and thought of you immediately and had to stop what I was doing to send it. Hi. Still here. Still thinking about you. Still completely unhinged about it. You’re welcome, and also I’m sorry, and also no I’m not.

But here’s what makes my meme language actually a language and not just a bad internet habit. Every single person in my life has their own specific flavour, because I pay attention and I contain multitudes and also I have been online for a very long time. The chaos goblin astrology content goes to the people who get it. The work humour goes to the ones who’ve sat in the same fluorescent lighting and survived alongside me. The extremely unhinged lizard content goes to exactly one person, and they know who they are, and they know exactly why, and I will not be elaborating further.

The specificity is entirely the point – I’m not sending you something because the algorithm delivered it and I had a spare thirty seconds. Babe, I thought of you. I stopped. I sent it. That’s attention. That’s care. That’s me filing away exactly who you are and returning to it every time the internet delivers something that has your name written all over it. If I send you a reel at 11pm on a Tuesday with zero context, I love you. That’s it. That’s the whole message.

This One’s For Me, Actually

This one is different from the others, because this one isn’t about you at all. This one is entirely, unapologetically for me – and if that makes you uncomfortable, I’d gently encourage you to examine that. I get pedicures. I get reflexology. I wear the pretty shoes, the ones I bought because they made me feel something the second I tried them on, not because they were practical or sensible or wouldn’t make my feet stage a small revolt by hour two. Joy is a legitimate reason to acquire something. Full stop. No further justification required from me or anyone.

This is my self love language, and I refuse to feel one single complicated feeling about it. Taking care of myself deliberately and tenderly, with excellent foot care and zero guilt, is how I say to my own body: I see you. I appreciate you. You carry me everywhere and you deserve something beautiful. Self love is still love. It counts. It belongs on this list just as much as anything I do for anyone else, possibly more.

And look, there’s one more thing, and pay attention because this matters. If I wear the cute shoes when I’m with you, take note. The cute shoes come out for people and occasions that actually matter – and if I’ve shown up in the pretty heels with a fresh pedi looking like I made an entire effort, it’s because you’re worth the entire effort. You have my attention, my enthusiasm, and approximately forty percent of my wardrobe rotation. And yes. You will absolutely be getting a lot of memes. You’re welcome.

Stop Squeezing Yourself Into Five Options, Babe

Here’s what I want you to take from this. Not my list. Yours. Because maybe your love language is turning up with the exact snack someone mentioned once in passing three weeks ago, or sending a voice note at seven in the morning because a song wrecked you and you couldn’t sit with that alone. Maybe it’s remembering how someone takes their tea without being asked twice, or fixing things quietly before anyone notices they were broken, or showing up with no agenda and staying anyway. None of that fits in a quiz. None of that gets a chapter in a bestselling book with a pastel cover and a couples’ workbook and a QR code to a guided meditation.

And yet…

It’s love. It’s specific, deliberate, alive love that only you would think to give in exactly that way – and it deserves to be expressed rather than flattened into a framework that was never really built for people like us. People who are too specific, too chaotic, too genuinely invested in the particular weirdness of the people they love to tick a box and call it done.

So stop trying to squeeze yourself into five options, because honey, you contain so much more than that. Your love is weirder than that. More wonderful than that. More interesting than that. The right people – the ones who deserve your playlists and your tacos and your 11pm reels and your cute shoes – they’ll know. They’ll feel it. Express it anyway, in all the strange and specific and completely you ways it wants to come out. That’s the whole thing. That has always been the whole thing.

You Are Not Entitled to an Answer – Chaos, Crumbs and Clarity

In this episode of Chaos, Crumbs and Clarity, we're unpacking why you are not entitled to an answer. Specifically, we're talking about the strange little corner of modern dating where a few days of app chat somehow becomes an emotional contract, and suddenly a man you've never met believes your silence requires a formal explanation, a debrief, and possibly a follow-up meeting with management.I have two stories for you. One man who talked almost exclusively about himself, ignored the fact that I was sick, and then followed up a week later asking whether I'd reconsidered his "request for clarification". And another who became offended because I didn't respond to his selfie within two hours while I was lying in a dark room with a migraine. Sir. Please be serious.Because here's the thing. Before you've met someone, you do not owe them unlimited access to your time, attention, reassurance, or emotional labour. You don't have to justify why the vibes changed. You don't need a reason they'll consider reasonable. You are allowed to disengage because something felt off, because you changed your mind, because you met someone else, or because you're in your luteal phase and frankly the entire world can wait.Today we're talking about the difference between ghosting and simply disengaging, why demanding closure can become a boundary violation, the exhausting expectation that women should manage men's feelings for them, and why you do not need to JADE, justify, argue, defend, or explain, when you've already decided you're done. Let's get into it.Key Takeaways:A few days of chatting does not create a debt. Matching on an app, exchanging messages, or talking on the phone does not give someone a claim on your attention. Until you've actually built a connection, you are allowed to walk away without submitting supporting documentation.Closure is not something another person can demand from you. Asking once is one thing. Continuing to push after someone has clearly disengaged is not persistence or emotional maturity. It's refusing to accept the answer you've already been given.You do not need to JADE. You don't have to justify, argue, defend, or explain why you're no longer interested. The reason doesn't have to be good enough for him. It just has to be yours.Pre-date silence and post-date silence are not the same thing. If you've never met, disengaging is part of app dating. Once you've shared an actual date or developed a genuine connection, a simple goodbye becomes basic courtesy. Nobody needs a dissertation, but acknowledging another human being matters.Sometimes they don't miss you. They miss the audience. Someone can seem interested while actually being interested in having your attention. Real connection requires curiosity about you. If the only time they become deeply engaged is when you're leaving, pay attention to that.For more visit ⁠BryJaimea.com⁠ or follow over on IG ⁠@BryJaimea

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