This reflection continues from a previous piece:
The Wrong Person in the Room
A reflection on dialects, familiarity, and the patterns we mistake for connection
Love Has a Language
We’re often told that love has a language.
but we’re rarely told
that it also has dialects.
Accents.
Rhythms.
Slang that only makes sense
in the places it was first learned.
And most of us
never question the dialect we were given.
We just assumed
everyone spoke the same way.
What I Thought I Was Learning
I thought I was learning something shared.
Something consistent.
Something I could slowly begin to understand —
a grammar I could grow into.
But what I found
was an ecosystem.
Words that shifted depending on the room.
Warmth that arrived — then didn’t.
Silence that meant safety in one moment
and danger in the next.
Close enough to recognise.
Different enough to misunderstand.
And yet —
it felt familiar.
deeply familiar.
In a way I didn’t yet have language for.
Love Is Spoken Like This
Because love is learned like a language.
Not as something clear and universal —
but as something shaped
by where we first heard it spoken.
In households.
In silences.
In tension.
In what was freely given
and in what was permanently withheld.
We don’t just learn how to love,
we learn what love sounds like.
what it feels like
when it enters the room.
And for many of us —
it sounded like uncertainty,
it felt like something
you had to earn.
“We don’t recognise love because it is always right — sometimes we recognise it because it sounds like home.”
The Feeling Before the Understanding
And then someone arrives.
Not loudly,
not with any kind of announcement.
Just — a pull.
A familiarity.
A sense of this matters
before we could ever explain why.
We don’t stop to call it a pattern.
We call it connection.
We call it chemistry.
We call it something real.
And it is real.
Just not always in the way we think.
What’s Happening Beneath It
Beneath that feeling, something quieter is at work.
Not chosen.
Not planned.
But shaped —
by everything that came before.
Parts of us, unseen and unspoken,
recognising something in the other person.
Not always who they are,
but what they carry.
It can feel like being understood
for the first time.
But sometimes —
it is being mirrored.
Not clearly, like still water,
but through movement.
Distortion.
Something that was already unsettled in us
finding its reflection.
“We feel the pull first — and only much later begin to understand the pattern.”
The Ecosystem of It
Love is not just something we feel.
It is something we were taught —
in accents,
in silences,
in what was present
and in what left a space where presence should have been.
And when two people meet —
it is not just them.
It is everything that taught them how to love
meeting in the same room.
Sometimes what forms between them
is not built on clarity,
but on correspondence.
One pattern
recognising another.
One dialect
answering a familiar tone.
And something holds itself in place —
even when neither person
fully understands why.
A Gentle Truth
No one is wrong
for the language they were taught.
We learned what we learned
in rooms we didn’t choose,
from people who were themselves
still learning.
But not all languages of love
know how to meet each other
without distortion.
And not everything that feels like home
is safe to stay inside.
“Familiarity can feel like recognition — until we learn the difference between the two“
The Question Underneath
Maybe the question isn’t only:
”Why did this feel so real?”
but —
”What in me already knew this feeling?”
”What part of me had been waiting
for exactly this dialect?”
Because sometimes what we call connection
is the echo of something much older —
still speaking
through us,
through them,
through the space between.
And slowly —
gently —
without force —
we begin to wonder
whether we might learn
to listen differently.
In Tenderness,
A J Ashé | Being Human
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