Languages of Love: Smiling and the Sense of Sight

Before looking at the "smile" as a love language, it is important to keep something in mind - something that applies to all the love languages to a certain extent.  Love languages are more fittingly called gestures, and gestures are distinct from words.  Gestures without words can communicate love very profoundly, but a profoundly loving relationship cannot be founded on gestures alone.  For example, Jesus says, "No greater love has a man than to lay down his life for his friends."  These are his words.  Then he dies on the cross to "prove" this love - which is his gesture.  If the only thing we knew about Jesus is that he died on a cross - if he never said anything - we would not see his death as a gesture at all.  We are able to see it as a gesture because he said, "No one takes my life from me, I lay it down freely."  A gesture's capacity to communicate love depends heavily on the explicit verbal communication of intentions and choices.

Some people are shy when it comes to expressing love. Someone who is shy will have a tendency to avoid words, but will engage more exclusively in gestures in order to communicate love.  Gestures are open to interpretation, so if their author provides none, the true meaning of the gesture might be lost or go unnoticed.  Jack likes Jill, but is too shy to tell her.  He uses the language of service to try to communicate his love to her, but she pays no atention to why Jack does things for her.  She just thinks Jack is, "Nice."  We could take away from this example the need to pay more attention to the gestures of someone who is shy, and then try to encourage them to express their intentions.  Someone who is shy will want to know that their gesture is received positively before they will be able to express their intention.

So even a smile, which can clearly communicate openness and pleasure at seeing someone, can only communicate that when confirmed at some point by words.  To put it differently, a smile is much more meaningful when it is our friend who smiles, but when a stranger smiles it is either a sign of openness to conversation, or just simple politeness.  Sometimes strangers smile at us in an "intrusive" way.  Perhaps you have had the experience of being smiled at by someone you don't know only to discover that they thought you were someone else.  Or perhaps you have smiled at someone whom you thought to be someone you know, only to find out that they weren't.  This experience is usually accompanied by feelings of embarrassment or awkwardness that reveal the inherent inappropriateness of certain kinds of looks, smiles, or gazes.  The affective knowledge we have of a person can be the source of a loving gesture such as a gaze or a smile, but if we misjudge the reality itself, the gesture becomes ridiculous - like a child who takes the hand of a stranger in a crowd, thinking them to be his mother.

There are several levels, once again, of sensible love and spiritual love.  So if we are going to consider the ethics of visual gestures, it will be helpful to notice that certain gestures are fitting for certain types of relationships.  These gestures are founded on respect, as we have already seen, and they develop according to the level of intimacy appropriate to the relationship.

The fundamental visual gesture of respect is paying attention to someone when they require it.  This is an attitude that involves both the body and the eyes.  The positive visual gesture of respect making eye-contact during conversation when appropriate.  The visual gesture of respect that involves a certain negation is avoiding staring.  The visual gesture of respect involving the body is attention, or a position of listening.  One of the fundamental visual gestures of respect, therefore, is "showing" someone you are listening or paying attention.  And that is something you show by not performing another activity when that someone requires attention.  At the same time, when someone attracts attention to themselves without having intended to, basic respect would indicate not paying attention to them.  Some cultures use a bow to indicate respect or even veneration.

Beyond visual gestures of basic respect, there are visual gestures open to friendship.  The most universal visual gestures that communicates an openness to friendship is the smile.  Visual gestures that make use of the hands vary from culture to culture, but it would seem that every culture makes use of hand gestures to communicate - some more than others - and that there are specific visual gestures that use the hands to indicate an openness to friendship.  For example, there is a visual gesture that initiates a handshake, or the gesture of "waving" at someone.

Visual gestures of friendship differ not so much in kind as they do in intensity.  The eyes are more or less expressive according to the interior disposition.  The eyes are like the window of the soul, that is why we have a hard time trusting someone whose eye-contact is strange, exaggerated, or too fleeting.  The better we know someone, the more we understand from their gaze too.  It is important to realize that our gaze communicates something that words cannot, and that some people are more sensitive to a gaze or a smile than others.