“When my heart was broken and I was fifteen, I listened to Lou Reed’s Berlin over and over and walked around a lot in the rain, while my friends followed me looking worried and imploring me not to do anything stupid. Well, stupider than walking in the rain, anyway.”
- Neil Gaiman

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“The boy I loved didn’t know I existed. Then again, he was obsessed with Camus, so he didn’t know if any of us existed.”
-David Levithan

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“When Patti Fox broke up with me, I typed her name over a thousand times on my manual Olivetti until the entire page was beaten into a stiff sheet of black ink.”
-Jack Gantos

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“The first boy I fell in love with didn’t know I loved him, but he managed to break my heart anyway.”
-Holly Black

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“Of course I had my heart broken as a teen. I was desperately in love with myself. Then I found out that I was completely shallow. I haven’t spoken to myself since.”
-M.T. Anderson

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“I was heartbroken when my boyfriend announced he was moving to Chicago without me. But, oh yeah, I could keep his guitar amp. Thanks.”
-Sarah Shepard

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“My heart was broken the spring of my senior year in high school. We broke up in a park outside of town, and as I drove him home, he read me what he’d written in my yearbook. The line that really made me sob? ‘You will always be my Princess Bride.’ Sniff.”
-Carolyn Mackler

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“We broke up because I was not a boy.”
-Lisa Brown

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“I thought dating her was just fine. Pleasant. You know what I mean? When she said she didn’t want to go out with me anymore my friends gathered around me. They shook their heads and frowned. They patted my back. ‘To bad,’ they said and ‘you’ll be okay.’ I wasn’t sure how they wanted me to act so I tried stomping around and punching walls. I tried to feel bad. I really did. But it didn’t really make any sense to keep up the act. Then I found the meaning of relationships when you’re a teen. It’s a wonderful country music tune called: I Don’t Know Whether To Kill Myself Or Go Bowling.”
-Kevin O’Malley

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“After my first lesbian break up, my ex left a series of ‘I hate you’ parting gifts on my porch. Including a cassette tape of the Radiohead song ‘Creep.’ Looped. Back to back. Side A and B. Best. Mix tape. Ever.”
-Mariko Tamaki

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“We broke up because I kept forgetting that I had a fake British accent.”
-Adele Griffin

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“I got dumped on my nineteenth birthday. The next day a car hit me. The impact threw me ten feet. My jeans were shredded so badly that my college roommate hung them on our dorm room wall as a conversation piece. I spent the next week recovering in bed, listening to The Smiths and feeling sorry for myself. It took about a decade, but eventually I understood that young love is always a comedy.”
-Matthew Quick

(compiled by Pamela Haag at BigThink)

1. Mamihlapinatapei (Yagan, an indigenous language of Tierra del Fuego): The wordless yet meaningful look shared by two people who desire to initiate something, but are both reluctant to start. 
   Oh yes, this is an exquisite word, compressing a thrilling and scary relationship moment. It’s that delicious, cusp-y moment of imminent seduction. Neither of you has mustered the courage to make a move, yet. Hands haven’t been placed on knees; you’ve not kissed. But you’ve both conveyed enough to know that it will happen soon… very soon.
2. Yuanfen(Chinese): A relationship by fate or destiny. This is a complex concept. It draws on principles of predetermination in Chinese culture, which dictate relationships, encounters and affinities, mostly among lovers and friends.From what I glean, in common usage yuanfen means the “binding force” that links two people together in any relationship. 
   But interestingly, “fate” isn’t the same thing as “destiny.” Even if lovers are fated to find each other they may not end up together. The proverb, “have fate without destiny,” describes couples who meet, but who don’t stay together, for whatever reason. It’s interesting, to distinguish in love between the fated and the destined. Romantic comedies, of course, confound the two.
3. Cafuné (Brazilian Portuguese): The act of tenderly running your fingers through someone’s hair.
4. Retrouvailles (French):  The happiness of meeting again after a long time. This is such a basic concept, and so familiar to the growing ranks of commuter relationships, or to a relationship of lovers, who see each other only periodically for intense bursts of pleasure. I’m surprised we don’t have any equivalent word for this subset of relationship bliss. It’s a handy one for modern life.
5. Ilunga (Bantu): A person who is willing to forgive abuse the first time; tolerate it the second time, but never a third time.
   Apparently, in 2004, this word won the award as the world’s most difficult to translate. Although at first, I thought it did have a clear phrase equivalent in English: It’s the “three strikes and you’re out” policy. But ilunga conveys a subtler concept, because the feelings are different with each “strike.” The word elegantly conveys the progression toward intolerance, and the different shades of emotion that we feel at each stop along the way.
   Ilunga captures what I’ve described as the shade of gray complexity in marriages—Not abusive marriages, but marriages that involve infidelity, for example.  We’ve got tolerance, within reason, and we’ve got gradations of tolerance, and for different reasons. And then, we have our limit. The English language to describe this state of limits and tolerance flattens out the complexity into black and white, or binary code. You put up with it, or you don’t.  You “stick it out,” or not.
   Ilunga restores the gray scale, where many of us at least occasionally find ourselves in relationships, trying to love imperfect people who’ve failed us and whom we ourselves have failed.
6. La Douleur Exquise (French): The heart-wrenching pain of wanting someone you can’t have.
   When I came across this word I thought of “unrequited” love. It’s not quite the same, though. “Unrequited love” describes a relationship state, but not a state of mind. Unrequited love encompasses the lover who isn’t reciprocating, as well as the lover who desires. La douleur exquise gets at the emotional heartache, specifically, of being the one whose love is unreciprocated.
7. Koi No Yokan (Japanese): The sense upon first meeting a person that the two of you are going to fall into love. 
   This is different than “love at first sight,” since it implies that you might have a sense of imminent love, somewhere down the road, without yet feeling it. The term captures the intimation of inevitable love in the future, rather than the instant attraction implied by love at first sight.
8. Ya’aburnee(Arabic): “You bury me.” It’s a declaration of one’s hope that they’ll die before another person, because of how difficult it would be to live without them.
   The online dictionary that lists this word calls it “morbid and beautiful.” It’s the “How Could I Live Without You?” slickly insincere cliché of dating, polished into a more earnest, poetic term. 
9. Forelsket: (Norwegian):  The euphoria you experience when you’re first falling in love.
   This is a wonderful term for that blissful state, when all your senses are acute for the beloved, the pins and needles thrill of the novelty. There’s a phrase in English for this, but it’s clunky. It’s “New Relationship Energy,” or NRE.
10. Saudade (Portuguese): The feeling of longing for someone that you love and is lost. Another linguist describes it as a “vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist.”
    It’s interesting that saudade accommodates in one word the haunting desire for a lost love, or for an imaginary, impossible, never-to-be-experienced love. Whether the object has been lost or will never exist, it feels the same to the seeker, and leaves her in the same place:  She has a desire with no future. Saudade doesn’t distinguish between a ghost, and a fantasy. Nor do our broken hearts, much of the time.

My favorites are Ya’aburnee, Mamihlapinatapei, and La Douleur Exquise. :p

fishingboatproceeds:

The cover of The Fault in Our Stars, designed by Rodrigo Corral.

“Anyone who falls in love is searching for the missing pieces of themselves. So anyone who’s in love gets sad when they think of their lover. It’s like stepping back inside a room you have fond memories of, one you haven’t seen in a long time. It’s only a natural feeling.”
-Kafka on the Shore (Haruki Murakami)

The Realm of Possibility (David Levithan)

Saba and Jack from Blood Red Road 

“Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn’t it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses. You build up a whole armor, for years, so nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life… You give them a piece of you. They didn’t ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn’t your own anymore.

Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like ‘maybe we should be just friends’ or ‘how very perceptive’ turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It’s a soul-hurt, a body-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. Nothing should be able to do that. Especially not love. I hate love.”

-Rose Walker (The Sandman #65: The Kindly Ones by Neil Gaiman)

PUNCTUATION (from The Lover’s Dictionary by David Levithan)

LOVE. From David Levithan’s The Lover’s Dictionary. Because even if we think we know what it is already and even if we combine all the words in the dictionary, we can never be able to really give the definition of love. :)

George Orwell: 1984