TE AMO! IS TOO! INTIMATE!! maybe if you say it quickly and in a jokey way its ok but in a serious talk??? it feels too much!!!!!!!

“i love you” is NOTHING compared to te amo. i love you feels like a kiss on the check and te amo feels like fucking marriage. 

#I have like a whole thing on saying te amo to anyone

YEA. i had a relationship with someone and she dropped the “te amo” super quicky and i was like…………”thats ok, thank you, but im gonna be honest w you….i’m not saying te amo until i really feel it” thats how serious it is. 

te amo IS very serious, very deep, very intimate. when you want to tell someone that you love them without it being massive, the term you want is te quiero

cant believe no one had contributed this

Same for German imho?!??? Ich liebe dich is THE confession. You don’t drop it in a joking way.

It might just be me, but I wouldn’t randomly pepper Я люблю тебя into conversation either. It feels… too much.

Maybe it is the English one that is weird

I tell my close friends “I love you” all the time. I think It’s different if I were to say “I’m in love with you”.

In these non-English languages, do parents not tell their children “I love you?” Or is it only romantic?

Oh, I’m monolingual but I know a bit about this one! :D

So, in a lot of languages, there are multiple verbs that mean, “to love,” which are each situational, while, in English, we derive the meaning through context

Like, “Te quiero,” refers to love for friends and family, aka platonic love, while , “Te amo,” or, “Ai shiteru,” in Japanese, is so achingly tender and romantic that you might as well write the other person a receipt for your heart, because it’s theirs now

At some point, English did have multiple verbs for, “to love,” but eventually English speakers decided, “to hell with it, I only want 1 broad term for these big mushy feelings,” because we hate having multiple words for things almost as much as we hate punctuation

TL;DR: cultures that are non-English speaking do tell their kids they love them, they just have multiple words that mean, “To love,” and English is the odd man out because it got tired of that and went

Edit: covering my ass now bc people seem to be reblogging this a lot, but I 1.) admittedly know only a little bit about a small handful of other languages and 2.) know English also has a ton of highly specific words we’ve made ourselves or stolen from other languages but, on top of being emotionally stunted bastards, we also take a firing squad to quite a few words whenever we get too confused by the perceived “excess,” even if they’re still useful (example: people using, “empathy,” instead of, “compassion,” and how we’re having to push back so that folks don’t kill that very useful word.)