The radio plays out from someone’s iPhone on a bench outside, a top-40 love song: “Girl, you’re the one I want to want me.” The lyrics pester me slightly, and I wonder why it’s so hard to avoid talk of love and romance in a stretch of a couple hours.
But for many who find themselves interested in the prospect of romance, media like these love songs deeply influences our identity narratives. The linguistics major in me begs the question: can the life of a relationship be mapped empirically from start to finish regarding the speech acts that shape it?
As a gay man, growing up in heteronormative spaces meant that I had to learn how to sound like what was normal for a person of my gender. I had to be “one of the guys” – asking girls to homecoming, constantly using words like “dude” and “bro,” refraining from crying even when I needed to desperately. Narratives I absorbed about my identity included narratives that shamed me and taught me to strive to be something other than myself. Looking at everyone else, I wondered why people were so happy to be in “something” with someone. Relationships didn’t seem like a happy place to me, and I defined love outside of romantic contexts until after high school graduation.
And I still hold on to the definitions of love that I’ve held dear throughout life in many ways. Love was laying down one’s life for one’s friends. Love was my mother tucking me into bed at night and waking me up in the morning with her lilting voice. Love was a fleeting moment of pure silliness with my sister while we danced to the Spice Girls. Could love, too, exist in romance?
Years into my Duke career, after coming out and overcoming an ensuing identity crisis of sorts, a mysterious app called Tinder came out. Not long ago, I remember online dating spaces being stigmatized, but I figured, along with many others in the millennial generation, that since we’ve already ceded away details of our private lives to the government (thanks, Obama), it couldn’t hurt to create my own profile. And for a member of the LGBTQ+ community, Tinder proved to be an effective space for finding people who might be interested in me rather than having to awkwardly navigate people’s orientations in the harsh world of physicality.
Swiping through pixelated faces of all types of guys within a close radius, I found him. It looked like his smile was the kind to light up a room. His soft brown eyes complimented his short clean haircut and bright fashion choices, and his photos lay above a T-Swift quote. I thought about this moment, about the ways in which I was perceiving this person. Was this too good to be true in real life? Was this still Duke? Was this the possibility of love?
I swiped right. A glowing pair of photos – his and mine – flashed across my iPhone screen. “It’s a match!” it exclaimed.
My heart started to beat faster. I waited a few minutes and then began what would become the first speech act of a relationship. “Hi there!” I sent him. We linguists call speech acts like these as having a dominant phatic function, or one that opens the channel of communication. At one point there existed nothing between us. But with one typed-out utterance, a bridge formed between the two of us.
“Hey :),” he sent back. The bridge that I created was crossed from the other side.
We met on a dinner date, suggested by a speech act with a dominant conative function (one that focuses the speaker’s intention toward the addressee). And in the most mundane of ways, eating at one of Duke’s five eateries, we began to lay the brickwork for our relationship. Through questions and stories, we learned about each other’s lives: where we came from, our families and friends, what drives us forward, where we want to go in life.
The linguistic part of me had always made me hyperconscious of the wordiness of words – their physical form. My eyes smiled when I heard him call me cute names. I got a bit weirded out when he called me “dude” one time, a term I had always associated with straight masculinity.
On top of it all, our relationship was not just about the speech acts between him and me. It was also about the speech acts made by the friends we introduced each other to, the movies we watched, the music we listened to together. We lived our lives in this language-shaped sequence, and our relationship’s foundation had turned into more of a shoulder-height wall.
I remember that one day in linguistics class, we were studying philosopher J.L. Austin’s concept of performative utterances, which are speech acts where the speaker uses language not just to present informative about the world but to actively change the world. “I hereby pronounce you a married couple,” or “I name this ship the U.S.S. Harry Potter” could certainly qualify. But when I heard my significant other one night say the words “I think I wanna break up,” I knew that the power of these performative utterances were immense. We had constructed, over the course of months, a beautiful wall of trust and comfort, but in one moment, a speech act knocked it all to the ground. And I was left feeling broken.
But I was happy to learn through this experience that this love stuff, which I used to think had permeated my culture to an almost gross extent, may have been possible for me. The sequence of romantic speech acts destroyed the fallacies that I had taken in growing up, and I knew that while first and foremost I am one single person who needs self-love and self-care, love was possible for me. And what bridged this chasm of experience was a simple speech act: “Hi there!”
Drew Korschun is a Trinity senior. His columns run on alternate Tuesdays.
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