Cats, Love Languages, Love Amplitudes
For some time, I didn’t understand Sam, the cat. My fiancee wanted us to be friends, but he didn’t seem too interested. He looked at the carpet a lot. I regarded his behavior as one of the many forms of indifference I encountered in Prague—the blank-faced customer service style at the mall in Smichov, the twilit stillness of the too-orderly beauty of the riverfront. He was part of the mysterious Czech anti-happiness committee, who met in secret, devising subtle ways to enforce a laid-back variety of weltschmerz.
But I was wrong. I hadn’t lived with cats before, so I had no way of measuring his behavior against the cat standard. He was actually being pretty nice. Cats are solitary obligate carnivores. In general, they dislike other presences, thinking them likely meat thieves.
Just by remaining in the room I was in, when I was around, he was extending an invitation. Implicitly he was trusting me. It was my job to make good on that trust, by rewarding him with the touch of my hand, with the taste of fish products from the dismal local Tesco. Initially, I didn’t do this because I didn’t believe it. Wasn’t his indifference evidence that he didn’t like me? Why should I force myself on such a chilly audience?
But, eventually, Victoria convinced me to start making an effort. It was a slow process, especially because, as her new partner, my presence was uniquely suspect.
Now, a couple of years in, we cuddle all the time, and he’s super fucking needy. If I don’t say hi to him at least a half-dozen times a day, he yells at me in a particular trilling style reminiscent of a main character in La Traviata. He’s only appeased when I pick him up and sing him a song I’ve composed to please his sensibilities.
However, sometimes he expresses his love in the old way—he just hangs out on the other side of the room. The fact that he’s there means that he’s my friend. That’s his love language: quiet sitting, a lack of active hatred.
And then, one day, as I was looking at him just sitting there like an onion in a basket, it occurred to me that some humans are like this, too. There’s a large number of people who express their affection simply by not fleeing from your atmospheric field. They don’t hate you, and they hate a lot of people.
This was not intuitive to me for a long time, because it is not my Way. I’m annoyingly effusive, chatty with everyone, pretty much ready to launch into a collaborative dissertation with the guy who sells popcorn on the Santa Monica pier. If someone isn’t at least somewhat open to this behavior, I’m confused.
But Sam taught me an important lesson: that, along with love languages, there are also love volumes. This must be taken into account if we’re to lead happy social lives. If you only hear love that’s at a certain level of amplitude, you’re going to miss out on a lot of the nicety available to you.