How to Talk about Love in English

How to Talk about Love in English

Love is in the air! And no, that doesn’t mean it’s a bug you can catch (although it is contagious, so beware). ‘Love is in the air’ is an expression used in English, especially in February when lovebirds everywhere celebrate Valentine’s Day and, by extension (especially when you forgot to buy a gift on the 14th), Valentine’s Month. And no, ‘lovebirds’ aren’t birds in this context, although there is actually a species of parrot by that name (which conjures up an image of two such colourful creatures enjoying a tete-a-tete over fine wine at a romantic café).

In this post, we’ll delve into some common lovey-dovey English vocabulary in celebration of the month of lurve. Since love can encompass many types, from platonic ties with friends, to familial love and of course furry love, we’ve thrown in a non-romantic expression too.

Fall in love

Perhaps for some clumsy couples with a knack for tripping over their own feet, this is the literal meaning, but generally speaking, this expression, like all English idioms, has a metaphorical interpretation and means to develop romantic feelings towards someone. (The effect may be just as dizzying as actual falling, which is possibly where the phrase comes from). It is also possible to say that two people fell ‘out’ of love, not to be confused with having a ‘falling out’ with someone, meaning to have an argument, although if you fall out with your partner you may well fall out of love with them, too.

A similar expression is to ‘fall head over heels’ for someone. Clearly, love has a lot of associations with incurring bodily harm – and with madness, as the expression, ‘to be madly in love’, would suggest.

The dating game

The ways that people meet romantic partners may have changed, but a lot of the language is still the same (barring new slang used by Generation Z, which no one aside from Gen Z seems to understand). For instance, when people start dating we can say that they are ‘seeing’ each other. By the way, this is a great example of how we use stative verbs in English. Time for a short grammar lesson…

Stative verbs are ‘non-action’ verbs like see, know, think, and understand. We should use them without ‘-ing’ when they’re in their non-action states, but some stative verbs should be used as gerunds (ie with an -ing ending) when referring to an action. That’s why we say, “I saw my friend at the shops,” because we’re referring to a non-action/one of our five senses. However, we should say, “Anna and Hugo are seeing each other,” due to the fact that ‘seeing’ in this context refers to an action and can be replaced by the action verb, ‘dating’.

Yes, this could lead to all sorts of confusion when you say, “I am seeing so-and-so,” instead of, “I am meeting so-and-so.”

Love at first sight

Experts say that it takes just one-tenth of a second to form an impression of someone you’ve just met. So, it isn’t implausible to imagine that people could fall in love as soon as they’ve laid eyes on each other, hence the expression, ‘Love at first sight’, as opposed to, ‘Love at first smell’. So how is it possible that we can say it was love at first sight when someone met their partner on a ‘blind date’? I’ll leave you to chew on that.

The apple of (someone’s) eye

Keeping with the previous metaphor, we say someone is ‘the apple of my eye’ when they are the person who we “love most” and are “very proud of”, according to the Cambridge Dictionary. It’s used to refer to familial love rather than romantic love, for example, “Her son was the apple of her eye,” to which compliment the son possibly replied: “Do you have an apple in your eye mommy? Is it very sore? How did it get there”

One of the earliest uses of this idiom was in Shakespeare’s play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, when the fairy king, Oberon, tells his mischievous aide, Puck, to put a love potion in a human’s eye, which then triggers a series of comical events. Back then, the pupil of the eye was known as the ‘apple’ since it resembled this fruit.

‘Flower of this purple dye,
Hit with Cupid’s archery, 
Sink in apple of his eye’.

So whether your definition of love includes magic, falling headlong into a stranger’s arms (because you decided to take ‘falling in love’ literally), or the purr of your cat, we hope you have fun using these common phrases about that famous four-letter-word (and no I don’t mean the other one).

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