The Five Languages We Don’t Speak

Seven years is long enough to learn a new language, run a marathon, or build a life. Liam and I built a life. We have a house filled with half-unpacked boxes in a town where the street names are still unfamiliar, and we have Rosie, our daughter, who is the one perfect, shining thing we’ve created. But a shared life isn’t the same as a shared connection. And lately, I’ve realized Liam and I have become fluent in only one thing: silence.

It’s a heavy, weighted silence that settles in the evenings after Rosie is asleep. We sit in the living room, bathed in the blue light of our separate phones, inhabiting the same space but existing in different worlds. This isn’t the comfortable quiet of two people who know each other inside and out. It’s the silence of strangers.

Everyone talks about the five love languages by Gary Chapman, as if it’s a simple Rosetta Stone for your relationship. Find your partner’s language, speak it, and unlock a new level of marital bliss. But what they don’t tell you about is the other five languages. The ones you learn by accident. The ones you don’t speak, but that scream through your house anyway.

The first, and most obvious one for me, is the Language of Unspoken Praise. I am starving for it. When Rosie was six months old, I was a ghost in my own skin, and I realized with a sudden, gut-wrenching clarity that Liam hadn’t called me pretty since our wedding. When I finally found the courage to tell him, crying over the kitchen sink, he just looked confused. “I married you,” he said, as if that was a compliment with a lifetime warranty. He promised he’d work on it. But he never did. The silence where a compliment should be is now a language he speaks perfectly. It says: You are not worth the effort of words.

Then there’s the Language of Perfunctory Gestures. Liam is a master of Acts of Service, or so the books would say. He changes the oil in my car. He fixes the leaky faucet. He takes out the trash. But these are just tasks. Maintenance. They feel like items being checked off a to-do list for our shared corporation, not acts of love. My birthday gift last month was a new filter for the vacuum cleaner. “The old one was shot,” he’d said, pleased with his practicality. It was a useful gift, but it was a language that communicated one thing: I see the house and its needs, but I do not see you.

We also don’t speak the Language of Lingering Touch. A hug at the door is a quick, hard pat on the back. When our hands brush reaching for the salt shaker, there’s no spark, just the polite retraction you’d give a stranger. We sleep in the same bed, two bodies separated by an invisible, uncrossable border. The absence of casual, gentle touch has become its own dialect, one that speaks of duty, not desire.

The fourth is the Language of Parallel Existence, which has replaced Quality Time. Last Friday, I suggested we watch a movie. He agreed. We sat on the same couch, and for ninety minutes, I watched the screen while he scrolled through videos on his phone, the tinny sound of someone else’s laughter leaking from his earbuds. We weren’t sharing an experience. We were just… occupying the same furniture. It’s a language of profound loneliness.

Finally, there’s the Language of Forgotten History. We don’t talk about how we met anymore. We don’t laugh about that disastrous first apartment with the mice. The good memories, the things that are supposed to be the bedrock of a relationship, are like artifacts in a museum we never visit. By not speaking of them, we’ve let them lose their power. The silence has erased our origin story.

I said yes so fast all those years ago. I was eighteen, desperate to have my life start, to feel chosen. I saw Liam’s quiet nature as strength, his practicality as stability. I didn’t know that I was choosing a lifetime of translation, trying to find love in the subtext of a fixed faucet or a paid bill. I didn’t realize I was signing up for a life where I would have to learn to interpret silence, and mostly fail.

My breaking point was the vacuum filter. I stood in the hallway that night, looking at this gray, pleated cylinder that was meant to signify my husband’s affection, and something inside me just… shattered. The dimness we lived in felt absolute.

The next day, I didn’t say a word about it. I was done asking. I was done explaining. I decided to try one last thing. I was going to speak a language. Not his, not even mine. Just… a language. Any language other than silence.

Liam has an old, beat-up guitar in the corner of the office that he never plays anymore. He says he doesn’t have time. While he was at work, I took it to a music shop and had it restrung and polished. It cost nearly all of my personal spending money for the month. I didn’t leave a note. I just put it back on its stand. An Act of Service that wasn’t about maintenance. It was about remembering who he used to be.

He noticed it that night. He ran his hand over the new strings, his back to me. He didn’t say thank you. But he didn’t turn on his phone, either.

A few days later, while Rosie was napping, I sat down beside him on the couch. He was reading the news on his tablet. My heart was pounding. I was about to attempt to speak my own native tongue, even though it felt foreign in my mouth.

“You know,” I began, my voice shaky, “I was watching you with Rosie this morning. You were so patient with her when she kept spilling her cereal. You’re a really good father, Liam.”

He froze. He slowly lowered the tablet. He looked at me, really looked at me, for the first time in what felt like years. There was a flicker of something in his eyes—surprise, confusion, maybe something else. He opened his mouth, then closed it. He didn’t say anything back.

But later that night, as I was drifting off to sleep, I felt his hand find mine in the space between us. He just held it. It wasn’t a prelude to anything else. It was just a connection. A single, quiet word spoken in the dark. It wasn’t a compliment. It wasn’t a promise. But it wasn’t silence. And for the first time, it felt like we were finally learning how to speak.