Why tell someone ‘I love you’ when you could overfeed, ridicule or ignore them?

The holidays have reminded me of the many languages of love – most of them barely comprehensible

It took a while, over the holidays, to work out how to stop my exhausted, frail mother-in-law jumping up constantly to fetch more food without ever eating herself, but my husband eventually cracked it. “None of us will eat unless you’re sitting with us,” he told her. We downed cutlery the minute she stood up, refusing to touch anything on the table until, thwarted, she was forced to sit, even occasionally nibbling from her plate. It didn’t last, of course – she was soon back ferreting in the fridge because that’s her love language: muscular feeding, spiced with exhortations against waste and occasional emotional blackmail.

The American Baptist pastor Gary Chapman’s book The Five Love Languages, published in 1992, has a slightly hokey, patriarchal quality, but there is a grain of something universally resonant there: we give, receive and expect love in ways others might not understand (or indeed want). Chapman is confident his five “languages” – words of affirmation, quality time, gifts, acts of service and physical touch – cover the bases. “I think most of the ways of expressing love fit into one of these,” he told the New York Times in 2022. Most, maybe, but he certainly couldn’t capture all our intimate vernaculars.

Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist

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