(Es handelt sich im Folgenden um die ausführlichen Überlegungen zum Thema, die in verkürzter Form dem vorhergehenden Post zugrundeliegen.)

Dear K.!
A friend of mine had described the end of a relationship by saying: “our love languages were different.” You know the idea that people express love through different channels: words, time together, gestures, touch, gifts, and so on. If the channels are different, this might become a problem of non-matching expectations: For one person, love might appear and be felt primarily as time spent together, for another, it might appear and expected as practical support, physical affection, or intellectual companionship.

My friend said „I have known from the start that we were different in that regard. But I had thought we could be aware of that, be careful with each other and I also thought that we’re able to adjust our behavior so that no one feels frustrated or neglected concerning their needs. But we weren’t. And so in the end it didn’t work.“

I think it’s a good explanation but it’s not sufficient.

My idea is that when we get to know another person—especially someone we are attracted to—we start to build something like a mental map of them.

At first the map consists of scattered data points: places where they lived, things they studied, people who shaped them, habits, gestures, beliefs, aesthetic preferences, ways of reacting to situations.
Take you and me: I saw your profile on bumble. First data. I learned a tiny bit about your taste in music, design, movies. Next data.
Then, we met. I saw you in real. We talked, walked. Laughed. I learned a bit about your love. Paris for sure 😂 and there or somewhere else, a man. And P. who reacted so strongly when she met you.
Data again. And again and so on. Data points. Not connected.
But here is the thing. Over time these points began to relate to each other. Certain traits cluster together, others stand in tension, some appear as gaps or contradictions.
That’s the crucial thing: The connections between these points are not simple lines. They are more like resonances, tensions, overlays, gravitational centers—structures that make the person intelligible to us without ever fully explaining them.
Everything is connected but not linear like in a biography.
The life of the other person begins to shape before our eyes, it becomes topographical, a landscape.
The reason why I don’t like cv‘s is that life there seems to be a straight (or curved) line from events to decisions to achievements and back. Cause and effect, with a direction.

I think it’s not that simple. That’s why I don’t imagine lines between the data points. The idea that life is more of a map with a topography explains better the complicated and often inobvious connections or influences between the events, decisions attitudes, behaviors etc.

Now when another person begins to resonate with certain places of that landscape, a constellation emerges where there is an is exchange of impulses and signals. Sending and receiving. And also adjusting signals and antennas. The better this works, the closer two people can get. Both can read each others „map“, and possibly the map legends are the same or at least very similar.

When my friend said their “love languages were different,” I realized that in my little model it would be explained slightly different. It would mean that on their respective maps, the markers that indicate love were located in different places.

Both partners may actually express love—but the signals fall in places on the other person’s map where they are not recognized as such. They are looking for love in different coordinates of the landscape.
The legend of the map is different.

I’d be very curious what you think about this idea (which is still quite unstructured and incomplete – for example the map vs. territory part is missing – , so everything might be hard to read, sorry for that). Curious because from your perspective as someone who observes work, style and people for a living you might have much better and deeper thoughts about the matter. Does this in any kind resonate with your experience of how people read each other—or misread each other?