Love, Lost in Translation: A Multi-Cultural Perspective on Showing Love
- L&C Lab
- 3 hours ago
- 12 min read
Semra, Mia, Rachel, Oriana, Zach
Love is a near-universal human experience, critical to our well-being; yet, we all struggle to give and receive the love we need. When others crave validation, we nitpick; when we zig, our loved ones zag. How can we love each other better?
One popular theory, The Five Love Languages, offers a deceptively satisfying solution to this problem. In it, pastor Gary Chapman proposes five distinct ways people prefer to experience love: (1) Words of affirmation, (2) Quality time, (3) Physical touch, (4) Acts of service, and (5) Receiving gifts. Chapman explains that love difficulties are rooted in a misunderstanding of one another’s love languages: that we need to learn our own love language, communicate it clearly, and practice speaking our partner’s.
Although this theory highlights the importance of expressing love intentionally, it falls short as a guide to loving. There’s no evidence that people have a primary love language; that couples fare best when they speak a specific love language; nor that there are only five ways we show love. Rather, love is fluid: our love-based needs and expressions change across relationships, moments, and cultural contexts.
Cultural differences, in particular, may lead to more breakdowns in love than we realize. In this increasingly globalized world, what is a culturally grounded expression of love in one context can be mistranslated into criticism, passive aggression, and hostility in a different context. Many conflicts in love may arise not from a lack of care, but from misinterpreting culturally shaped expressions of love as something else. It’s possible that no one is loving incorrectly; we’re just speaking different languages, sometimes literally.
The five authors of this blog post come from diverse cultural backgrounds: we have roots in the United States, Bosnia, Mexico, Vietnam, Taiwan, The Phillipines, Ireland, Italy, Slovakia, and West Africa. Although none of us represents any of these cultures in their entirety, these cultures inform how we understand and express love. In this post, we share our unique, personal, culturally-informed notions of love, illustrating how easily love can be lost in translation.
Love Between Bites (Semra Alispahic)
Growing up Bosnian, I learned early on that love is not loud, but rather served. It is placed in front of you in the form of a full table. Even when you insist on not being hungry. In Bosnian culture, food is not merely nourishment: it is care and protection. A mother waking up early to make pita from scratch; a grandmother nudging you to take leftover homes; a family gathering centred entirely around a shared meal. These are not only traditions, but they are also our way of expressing emotional language.
What makes this form of love so powerful is how it's rarely verbalized, yet it is consistently understood. There is an unspoken agreement in Balkan culture that love is demonstrated through presence, effort, and repetition. Meals are not just gestures; they are daily rituals that reinforce connection. In this way, love is not something that needs to be declared. Love is consistently enacted without recognition.
From the outside, this might look like plain hospitality or even pressure. But within my culture, it is deeper. Cooking is labor-intensive; it takes time, intention, and energy. To cook for someone is to invest in them and their interests. It speaks volumes. It's our way of saying “ I want you full,” “ I want you strong,” “ I want you taken care of,” “ I am thinking about you”.
Some communication styles regarding food and bodies can seem overwhelming, especially from an outside perspective. Prime examples are “Previše si mršava, jedi viši,” which translates to“ You’re too skinny,” “Eat more.” But beneath those comments is concern and devotion. In many immigrant and post-war cultures like Bosnia, feeding someone is tied to survival and resilience. Providing food means safety and stability. It is love expressed through action rather than words.
Expanding love languages through a cultural lens reveals how limited universal categories can be. What is labeled as “acts of service” in one framework may hold entirely different emotional and historical significance in another. In Bosnian culture, food is a memory and a preservation of identity across generations. Recognizing these allows us to rethink love as something that is shaped by history and collective experience. Love from a Balkan perspective is not only how we learned to survive generations of genocide, but how we collectively choose to carry our survival forward to the next generation.
This challenges the neat categories of the five love languages. Food could fall under acts of service in a sense, but that label flattens its cultural weight. Cooking for someone is not interchangeable with helping them file taxes or move to a new apartment; it is a special, migration- and hardship-informed display of affection that we conduct slowly and intentionally.
When Love Sounds Like Criticism (Mia Castellanos)
I come from an immigrant household, raised by two strong and hardworking Mexican parents who stopped at nothing to achieve what they came to this country for. Growing up immersed in Mexican culture, it was easy to see the differences in my home life compared to those of my peers. The food I grew up eating, the clothes I regularly used, and the language we spoke at home were all aspects of my early life that completed my identity, yet differed so greatly from what I saw outside of my upbringing.
The messages of love that I received from my own family were just as unique - yes, they told me they loved me, but they also showed love in a way that sometimes felt uncomfortable. “¡Mami, te estás viendo más gorda! [Honey, you’re getting chubby].” “Ves, como ella si saco un 10, ¿porque tu no puedes? [She got an A, why could you not?].” Critique was common in our household, constantly repeated to my siblings and me. Observing our peers’ interactions with their parents, we never understood how one of us could come home with an achievement or certificate of accomplishment and instead of getting some sort of “I’m so proud of you,” it was always a “¿Porque no puedes mas? [Why did you not do more?].” My accomplishments never seemed sufficient.
Leaving for college gave me the opportunity to broaden my view of the wildly different backgrounds and upbringings that existed. The vast change of environment brought me to a realization one day that I suddenly did not have my families’ criticisms at my disposal. It took me moving away from home to understand that these criticisms were all rooted in care and concern that had everything to do with how love expressed itself through them and nothing to do with the person that I was. I was shocked to feel a sense of longing for their comments that I had become acclimated to. I finally understood that they all stemmed from love.
Shaped by their own upbringings and experiences as underprivileged
minorities living in the US, the negative comments I once so deeply despised, were their expressions of love towards us. They were my families’ love letters to us, preparing us for the real world that I was eventually going to face on my own. I am now able to value these messages and transform them into meaningful representations that make up my cultural identity and inspire me to accomplish what they came to this country for.
A Third-Culture Kid's Language of Love (Oriana Roth-Vinson)
I was born in Vietnam, adopted by American parents, and became the older sister to my African-American brother, who is adopted from Ethiopia. I lived my most influential and defining years as a third-culture kid in Taiwan before finishing high school in the Philippines. Although each place carved its share of myself, all of them fail to define me solely.
I grew up at a prestigious American School in Kaoshsiung, Taiwan, where parents poured everything into their children’s futures; it was common for parents to push their children to be the best, often paving paths by mapping out their entire futures for them, from what university they were going to attend to what profession they would work. I think this effort often gets confused for control, but in reality it's devotion.
In third grade, I had my first science fair project on explaining the electron shells of atoms and what creates bonds. By just age eight, I was spending my weekends preparing my poster and studying for the big day. As overachieving as this was, when the day came and I presented, the feedback I had received did not seem to reflect pride or gratification.
“You didn’t explain your conclusion well, Oriana,” my friend’s parents commented.
“Next time, you need to be louder! You need to explain why the electrons behave this way, not just that they do. And you treated ionic and covalent bonds the same, they aren’t. 加油!”
That night, I went home and cried to my parents, discouraged about my presentation. They told me they were proud of me and that it was okay, and I needed that. But what echoed in my mind was the comments about my presentation from my friend’s parents - people I loved and admired, and who I knew wanted the best for me. They expected that I could do better, pushed me to do better. The next year, I gave a better presentation. 加油: Add oil.
As I grew older, I began to appreciate the complex relationship between history and love in Taiwan. Living under an authoritarian martial law meant that every Taiwanese person had to be sharp, hard-working, and selfless to keep their culture and country alive. It meant that adults sacrificed immense time and resources for the children in their lives; and, in exchange, they expected those children to honor that sacrifice by working hard. Because of this history, love from adults didn't always sound like “I believe in you” or “you’re perfect how you are.” It often sounded like 加油 jiayou. Add oil. Two syllables that ask nothing of sentiment and everything of will.
I think that in Western, more individualistic cultures, sacrifice indicates martyrdom, people-pleasing, or disdaining oneself. Instead, in Taiwan, sacrifice is devotion to showing gratitude to ones you love, demonstrating that you are showing up. I still tell myself 加油, in quiet moments, in my own voice when I'm tired and almost ready to stop. 加油. Add oil. Keep the flame.
Don’t Worry About a Thing - We’ll Do it For You (Rachel Montoya)
I grew up in Orange County, California to an Irish-Italian mother and a Mexican father. Both of my parents were born and raised in the United States, as were their parents. In fact, I grew up down the street from where my father grew up, and about a 15 minute drive from where my mother grew up. My grandparents, particularly on my father’s side, made a very conscious effort to put as much distance between their culture and their children as possible. My father was never taught how to speak Spanish, and he was taught at every turn to claim that he was white. My grandparents, themselves being the children of immigrants, had a very difficult time adjusting to life in the United States and faced a lot of discrimination at the hands of the community I too grew up in. Separating from their culture, they thought, was a method of protection for themselves, their children, and their grandchildren.
By the time I was 10 years old, all of my grandparents had passed away, and so I was disconnected both from my own culture and from the people who had kept it from me, supposedly to protect me. Still, though, this way of loving – one of worry, of protection, of concern – carried on.
I knew from a very young age that my mom spends a good majority of her day-to-day life worrying about me. And when I was younger, I was quite offended by that. “Does she think I can’t take care of myself? Does she think I can’t handle it?” As a teenager, we got into arguments about me getting home late after spending all day with my friends, about her checking my location. “Your mom worries, it’s how she loves,” my dad always used to tell me. “It doesn’t always feel like that,” I told him.
And then I got to college. I was on my own for the first time in a new city. I knew nobody, I had no idea what the city was like or what I was doing in it. I felt really alone my first night here. And then my mom texted me to ask if I was warm enough in my dorm, if she should send me warmer clothes. “Have you eaten lately? I’ll send some groceries to you.” “Don’t walk back to your dorm at night by yourself.” And suddenly, I got it. Her worry, her concern was never a criticism or a commentary on my abilities. It was her way of saying, “I see you, I’m thinking about you, I love you”.
Now, a semester from graduation, I think back to my mom’s “be careful” and “get home safe” texts. I think about the articles she sends me about San Francisco, followed by “have you heard about this?!”. I think about when I fly back to San
Francisco after a weekend at home and she says “text me when you get to the airport…and when you get through security…and when you get to the gate…and when you board…and when you land”. I think about when I broke my foot on the Lone Mountain stairs and I had to actively convince her not to fly up to take care of me. I take great comfort realizing there is someone who is always thinking about me; that, even when it feels like I’m all alone in the world, my mom shows me that I’m not. Her worry is her way of loving me, and it’s something that I hold a special place in my heart for. Now when she texts me, “be careful!!,” I smile and text back, “I always am”.
Big Love versus Quiet Consistency (Zachary Reese)
I am biracial: My mother is White with roots in Eastern Europe, and my father is Black with Roots in West Africa. Their families have been in the U.S. for many generations, in southwestern Pennsylvania and Washington, D.C., respectively. Despite their different origins, both sides of my family are remarkably similar in the ways they love: bigly. In my family, love is meant to be seen and felt, loudly. Both sides are verbal, physical, dramatic, and emphatic with their love. For instance, here’s a video of my sister cheering at the top of her lungs at my high school graduation. And here’s a picture of my mom and me dancing at my wedding (100% her decision, but I ended up enjoying it).
Big love – not to be confused with “Big Love” – can be a gift to receive. You know you’re loved when you get a big, warm, multi-minute hug from an auntie, or when your sister screeches with joy when picking you up at the airport.
But, I’m a Zillenial (born in 1994) who split his formative years between a nearly-all-White school and the Internet. People of my culture hid behind a veil of irony and unobjectionable, uninspired preferences like Millenial grey. As we grew older and our therapists told us to embrace our identities as Disney adults, we were swiftly mocked as “cringe” by folks just a few years younger than us (no shade to my co-authors), forcing a retreat into blandness.
I think it’s because I grew up in this cultural context that I struggle immensely with authenticity, and in particular with big love. It can feel performative and unnatural for me to share big love, and this makes me worry that I’m not meeting the moment; that I’m failing to show the same love I’m so visibly and audibly receiving from my family. “Am I hugging hard enough?” “Did I let go too soon?” “Did they believe me when I said ‘I love you’?” In the face of big love, my fears run rampant.
Such fears came to a head several weeks before my wedding in a therapy session:
Zach: What does it mean if I don’t cry during the exchange of vows?
Therapist: What do you think it means?
Zach: I’m worried people will think I don’t love my partner. Or that I’m incapable of love.
Therapist: Do you love your partner?
Zach: I do.
Therapist: It sounds like you’re capable of love.
What I came to realize through these exchanges with my therapist is that I was never worried about loving others; I was worried about whether my love would be misread by people who express it more ostentatiously.
The reality is that my Zillenial, multi-racial, suburban, child of the Internet love is one of quiet consistency. I don’t scream with exhilaration when I meet a family member at the airport, but I am often the first person to volunteer to pick them up. I will not cheer loudest at a college graduation, but I take great pains just to attend the ceremony. And regardless of whether I cried at the wedding (I did!), I spent a year of my life organizing that wedding – which, itself, was an expensive, spiritual, high-minded ode to love.
I hope my family sees my quiet consistency. I hope they recognize my insistence on spending holidays together, celebrating each other’s milestones, and exchanging “happy Friday!” texts not as a lesser form of love, but as a different one – one that can be easily lost in translation when love is expected to be loud.
Maybe We’re Not Loving Wrong
Across the different narratives presented here, love emerges as a culturally embedded practice. Our five ‘love languages’ – preparing food, offering criticism, sacrificing, expressing concern, and showing up consistently – carry distinct emotional meanings within their respective cultural contexts. While some of these expressions of love incorporate negative emotions, they can take on different interpretations depending on the cultural lens through which we view them.
To be sure, we should all strive to make others feel loved. We have a responsibility to negotiate the languages of our cultures and help our loved ones bridge the gaps. But as recipients of love, much of what we can control lies in our interpretation of the love we receive. Sometimes, just thinking differently about the same expression of love can fundamentally change our experience of it.
We invite you to think about the forms of love you have received. Although they may feel unfamiliar or uncomfortable, we hope you can take some solace in considering their cultural roots.
We love you. However that may come across.
-The L&C Lab