The Language of Love

During 2020's lockdown period, I bought Gary Chapman's, "The Five Love Languages," on my Kindle to better understand how I myself feel most loved. Up until that point in my life, I never had a solid understanding of what it meant to truly feel or express "love."

As a teenager, I had closed myself off to most others except for a very small circle of teachers, friends, and one or two family members, because I quickly learned that most of the people with whom I interacted feigned interest out of pure obligation (certain family members) or so that they could weaponize a person's interests against them (bullies).

For example, I distinctly remember gushing to my mother when I was younger about a story I was writing. It was my first serious piece of writing, and I felt so clever in this reality of happy endings to have a plan for killing off my main character near the end. The retaliation was immediate, with her clicking her tongue and sighing in a near scoff, saying, "Why do you want to kill off the main character? You should write a happy ending."

Well, I can happily say that bittersweet tragedies are still among my favorite tropes in fiction, and yes, the comments continued up through university, given that my senior composition recital was, in fact, a tragedy of sorts.

When your primary love language out of the 5 is "Quality Time" and, more specifically, "Quality Conversation," such comments and questions are like going to the dentist's office for a cavity fill or wisdom teeth extraction. There's a sharp sting of pain as the needle punctures through the gum, and then afterward you don't feel a thing.

Yet even Quality Time and Quality Conversation doesn't always fit the bill for how I experience love. I enjoy eating food, but I don't care to dissect the flavors like my partner does, for example, though I try where I can when the topic arises. Hanging out in the same room but working on our own separate hobby doesn't feel like Quality Time to me. Gabbing away my own thoughts without feedback aside from occasional affirmations registers as disinterest even if it's not, the reverse of which I myself need to practice more, too. Oh, and my favorite, questions aimed at extracting details even for topics of interest feels less like Quality Conversation and more like an interrogation.

No, there's a category even more niche nesting within Quality Conversation, and I only put together a handful of weeks ago what that category could encapsulate. Although it doesn't have an official name, at least as far as I'm aware, as I reflect upon my life, it feels embarrassingly obvious in its blatancy, like walking headlong into a glass door. While I love picking apart the movie we just watched or the game we're playing or the books we're reading, nothing loosens that protective valve like Quality Sharing.

Growing up I shared my favorite games with my older sister: "Spyro," "Tomb Raider," "Final Fantasy," "Chrono Cross," "Mass Effect," etc. She would sit with me for hours watching me play through these games, sometimes playing them together, and as I grew older and could articulate the kinds of ideas they brought forth, we would discuss them. In a way, it was Quality Time/Conversation, but she didn't watch me play them because she necessarily had an interest in the game itself (she actually hated "Spyro"). Sometimes she watched simply because she knew the game and, more importantly, the story potential I myself conceived mattered to me. I wanted to share my ideas, and to share my ideas, she had to know the context from which I'd drawn them. That's where Quality Time divides further into Quality Sharing.

During my early teen years, when I first met my bestie from high school, I learned that she had played a few video games but not of the JRPG variety. I shared (foisted upon her, really) my collection of JRPGs, and we became inseparable.

On Christmas a few years ago, I brought home some drawings inspired from the Skies Over Aefala campaign my partner and I and our group had been creating, and I can still visualize to this day which members of my family expressed genuine interest and which ones were too preoccupied elsewise to provide anything more than a fleeting glance and a comment boiled down to, "Good job."

Yeah, no wonder expressing vulnerability is so difficult, which I say as that revelation dawns on me literally in this moment of writing.

Why share anything if you anticipate nothing but criticism or backhanded compliments or lukewarm responses?

Well, you don't. You just quietly shut that core part of yourself away until portions of you wither and die. It takes the right kind of people to revitalize those atrophied emotions, and sometimes the risk feels greater than the payout.

Of course, I can only speak for myself here, but the topic has been on my mind thanks to a recent point of tension.

Over the last few years, whenever my partner and I would complete a session for our Skies Over Aefala campaign, we would talk about it throughout the week. However, something I always struggled with was that, true or not, it felt as though I was the one always initiating through comments or questions, like it was a one-way street. Sometimes I would wonder why I bothered, which created a fair amount of friction between us, because neither my partner nor I were really sure how to remedy it, and trying to discuss sessions with our other players throughout the week was impossible for various reasons. Thankfully, over time and the course of several discussions, the pain point ebbed.

Except there's only so much you can dissect from a single session, and yet my mind kept wanting to sink deeper. The few times I tried playing TTRPGs in Japan, it was the same phenomenon, like I couldn't shut the faucet of my thoughts off, wondering what would happen next, what threads would we follow, how a certain character's storyline would play out.

For this campaign, too, I've had such thoughts, bountiful enough to discourage sleep the same night as a session just completed. How might this impending conversation unfold? What kind of consequences will this action invite upon the characters? How long will it take for this person to recover?

I realized this past Saturday that I gravitate toward discussing the what-ifs even more-so to the what-was's. Yet when your partner is the GM, well, that creates an immediate, insurmountable wall. I'd want to have a discussion surrounding the immediate fallout of events from the session, but my partner would feel unable to share what he was thinking, which would shut down that particular avenue. So, the conversation would loop on how characters felt during the previous session or what they were thinking or dissecting scenes into mincemeat.

Saturday blew that dam open, and I realized how vital reciprocated Quality Sharing is to me personally. Quality Sharing feeds into Quality Conversation, which feeds into Quality Time, but the sharing needs to happen first as the initial point of contact.

The discussion arose because every week on session day, I develop a headache by the time we finish. My guess is that, even though I enjoy the game, I accrue tension in the way I hold my jaw, my posture, my eyebrows until, before I know it, I feel that familiar ache pulsing in the center of my forehead. This past Saturday, I mentioned feeling particularly anxious for Sunday's game for reasons I couldn't quite explain.

As my partner and I spoke to one another about it, we decided to try something new, and he shared what he was planning for Session 134. Although not as easy a conversation as I make it out to have been, we followed different "what-if" threads, all dependent upon how certain beats landed, not married to any single idea but following the web of possibility.

"Ohhh, if Cael gets knocked out in this fight, then the planar gate would close, trapping Knit and Kosris in the Shadow Plane until Cael is able to cast it again. That'd be interesting, considering all of Maryn's forces are converging upon them. Oh, but if Cael doesn't fall unconscious, then when Thane tries to escape, they might have a means of interrupting the attempt, assuming they see it. Ohh, and if they do remain conscious, then that could lead to a potentially interesting confrontation with their mother, who they haven't seen in over five years. How would that go?"

With all of these interesting possibilities and more out in the open, it lowered my expectations of what "could be," and allowed me to follow multiple branches, each toward a satisfactory conclusion. When I postulate what could happen on my own, I haven't any context of what my partner has planned, so I can only imagine a few paths, which somehow raises my expectations for how I want events to go.

Discussing the myriad of ideas in this way felt like two storytellers using the game system as a medium instead of using the system to tell the story, and for once I felt like a collaborator instead of a player. Of course, this only works because it's just my partner and I now, and perhaps it's antithetical to how role-playing games are meant to be played, but I'm happy to say that on Sunday, I did not develop the usual headache, and holding onto these different possibilities loosely still allowed for surprises to take place. Like I didn't know that Lynn was going to use reflective, multi-colored paint on her scales as war paint, which was one of my favorite scenes from the session, or that Cael would be able to hear the assassins that ambushed them, fellow Kayal, screaming through their shadows.

The discussions didn't change anything about how the narrative unfolded. I still succeeded at some rolls and failed others. I still followed what my characters would do in each situation. And honestly, it was far more exciting that way.

I wonder, how many subcategories actually exist under the overarching umbrellas of the Chapman's 5 love languages, and are there really only 5?

Summary of Notable Accomplishments:

• So much transcribing I actually had to take a 3-day break to allow my left wrist to recover, because I could tell that it was feeling weaker the longer I continued typing.

  • I still have ~24 hours to go for Cael's session 0 scenes....just from the pre-Efiál portion. No idea what their post-Efiál portion will be like.

• Grip strain from working out contributed to the above

• Made some small adjustments to Cael's character sheet and made Lynn's and Knit's

• Found appropriate music for Session 134's confrontation with Thane:

• More transcribing

  • Since I knew I wasn't going to sleep well Sunday after the session, I stayed up until 3:30 AM transcribing all of it. That was fun.

• No really, the past two weeks, I transcribed ~24.4 hours'-worth of audio.

• Read more "Ultralearning" the first day I took off from transcribing

Real Talk:

• If you've read Chapman's book, what are your thoughts surrounding the notion of 5 love languages? Do you feel like having only 5 categories tries to shoehorn too many people into too few boxes, or does the number feel adequate?

• Of the 5 listed below, how would you describe yourself, and would you break any of the categories into further subcategories?

  • Physical Touch

  • Receiving Gifts

  • Quality Time

  • Acts of Service

  • Words of Affirmation

This Week's Obligatory Cat Pic: Yes