![]() ![]() “To love well,” bell hooks wrote, “is the task in all meaningful relationships, not just romantic bonds.” I’ve practiced a nonhierarchical approach to my relationships-both romantic and platonic-for years. The words fall so short, it’s embarrassing. My partner’s family showed their love through brasato, polenta, games of scopa, and family legends recounted on summer evenings how could ti voglio bene convey all that? Love spoken can feel so direct it’s almost suspect. In practice, though, it was more often expressed in subtext than spoken outright. ![]() With friends and family, one says ti voglio bene, literally I want good for you. Once I began spending longer periods in Italy, meeting friends and family, I learned the linguistic distinctions between romantic and platonic love. In Italian, I love you translates to ti amo, at least in a romantic sense, and this is what my partner taught me. I stammered my early way through Italian hoping to find equivalents for the elegant Arabic bihabbak/ik بحبّك, I love you, or ta’burni تقبرني / ta’brini تقبريني, may you bury me -to love someone so much you’d rather die than mourn them. I listened to him speak Italian for months, straining to catch what I could from the Spanish I’d grown up with in New York and the Latin I’d taught myself in high school. I wanted to be able to conjure the associations he had with the word, with the phrase-to tug on those shoots whose roots went deeper than English. I love you in italian how to#Meeting my partner, though, changed everything.Īs our relationship turned serious, I love you was one of the first phrases I asked him how to say. Singing these ingenues deadened me with dysphoria, but so long as I was closeted or onstage-two modes more similar than different-I accepted that my throat was made to convey other people’s loves, not my own. ![]() In Italian opera, there were hundreds of ways to declare one’s love: crowns of roses, tears shed on silver rings. My dad had spoken it on the phone to friends in Rome, where he’d lived for the better part of a decade, and I’d sung scores of Italian arias during my vocal training in my teens and twenties. I didn’t yet speak Italian, though I’d been exposed to the language since childhood. When I first met my Italian partner, we conversed in English. ![]()
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