Falling in love can be a great thing to do, if you do it with the right person at least. It also helps if the feelings are mutual 🙂 In movies it happens all the time… people always fall in love with each other. Therefore, falling in love seems to be a natural thing to do and yet… if you look at different languages it is easy to see that somehow falling in love is different in many other languages.
Let’s start in English first. Have you ever wondered why you fall in love? Imagine that you are walking on the street and then all of a sudden you stumble. You fall and then.. you fall into something really deep and in English you call it love.
Don’t you think that first of all it seems like a kind of accident? At least you are out of balance! And then, what would you do once you have fallen? Would you stand up again or would you decide to swim a little bit longer in the oceans of love?
You can fall in love in so many different ways, all around the world!
Also in French you fall when you are in love, but… now it is a bit more complicated. First of all you have to decide whether you are a man of a woman. If you are a man you’ll say: je tombe amoureux, but if you are a woman you have to say: amoureuse. Here is another important difference. In French you do not fall into something, but when you fall it means that something inside of you has changed, or taken posession of you. Now you are amoureux, which you can’t translate exactly in English. Let’s call it in love, but literally it means something like enloved. A state of being in love.
In Spanish you can say me enamoro and now you see that it has nothing to do with falling anymore. Now it has turned into a verb, an activity and here is another important thing. You are doing it to yourself! Of course, you’ll say me enamoro de un chico / una chica, so it is clear that a hot chico or chica triggers your reaction, but if you think about it, you are doing it completely to yourself! If you think about it, it makes perfect sense. Who is creating that pink overromantic picture in your head of that boy or girl that has nothing to do with reality? You do! Therefore, you should not complain if at the end your idea of your ideal partner does not match with reality 🙂
In Dutch you can say: ik word verliefd. It is something that you can get or become, and verliefd is more or less like amoureux in French or enamorado in Spanish. It describes that state of being in love. It is though as if the feeling of love are taking over inside of you.
As long as you say: ik word verliefd, it means that the process is still going on, or that it will take place in the future. Once you are really in love, you’ll say: ik ben verliefd. A funny thing is that in Dutch you will always use op, ik ben verliefd op een man / vrouw and then if you use your fantasy it is easy to have wild thoughts. Op in Dutch could also mean on top of something or someone 🙂 For example: you can say ik zit op een stoel (I sit on a chair), so now you imagine the rest!
And… in Dutch there are more funny things to discover. In Dutch, just like in Spanish you have a special word for being in love-ness. In Spanish it would be enamoramiento and in Dutch it is verliefdheid. Imagine that somehow you notice that you have a pleasant but distorted view of reality and that you go to the doctor. The diagnose of the doctor could be like this: meneer / mevrouw, u heeft verliefdheid!
Here is another funny thing… in Dutch you can even put it in plural! Verliefdheden can lead you off track! You can have a multiple dosage of verliefdheid! It could be related to one person, but if you like, you can also fall in love with many different people at the same time! Some Dutch people notice – certainly during spring – that all of a sudden they have so many different positive feelings for so many people!
How do you fall in love in your language?
Can you see that falling in love can really be different in each and every language? How does it work in your language? Feel free to share it here!
