The language of love is a funny thing. It starts out, often
enough, all sonnets and poetry, or at least sweet, wooing words. It softens
over time to a comforting sense of the known. It ebbs and flows and, if you are
lucky, settles into a shared secret code. A dialect of memories and sayings and moments in time that
separate you from the outside world.
Will and I, after almost fifteen years of marriage and a
handful more from our before-we-were-married days, talk to one another in a
jumble of movie quotes, often altered to fit the current situation or
misremembered, although we tend to misremember them the same, so they seem like
the real thing to us. It doesn’t sound romantic, I suppose, but it is, in fact,
the language of love between us. The compilation of eighteen odd years of
growing up together, growing toward one another, and as time has passed, the
beginnings of growing old together.
They aren’t great words of love. We’re not spouting off
Casablanca or Gone with the Wind. In fact, more often that not, they come from
crappy, cheesy movies that we have watched time and again, so awful that they are
wonderful. And it has become so prevalent that we catch our children quoting
lines from movies they have never even heard of, much
less seen. But even to them, at eight and twelve, they have become a secret
code between us. A language of family. A language of love.
I only hope we don’t become so unintelligible to the outside
world by the time another 18 years has passed that we have only each other to
speak to. But then again, that wouldn’t be so bad. We’re MFEO, after all.
-Gillian