This TED Talk features writer Mandy Len Katron, recorded live at TEDx, SFU, 2015.

Okay, so today I want to talk about how we talk about love, and specifically I want to talk about

what's wrong with how we talk about love. So most of us will probably fall in love a few times

over the course of our lives, and in the English language, this metaphor, falling is really the main way that we talk about that experience.

And I don't know about you, but when I conceptualize this metaphor,

what I picture is straight out of a cartoon.

Like there's a man, he's walking down the sidewalk.

Without realizing it, he crosses over an open manhole,

and he just plummets into the sewer below.

And I picture it this way, because falling is not jumping.

Falling is accidental, it's uncontrollable, it's something that happens to us without our consent.

And this, this is the main way we talk about starting a new relationship.

So I am a writer, and I'm also an English teacher,

which means I think about words for living.

And you could say that I get paid to argue that the language we use matters,

and I would like to argue that many of the

metaphors we use to talk about love, maybe even most of them, are a problem. So in love, we fall.

We're struck. We are crushed. We swoon. we burn with passion, love makes us crazy, and it makes us sick,

our hearts ache, and then they break.

So our metaphors equate the experience of loving someone to extreme violence or illness.

They do.

And they position us as the victims of unforeseen and totally unavoidable circumstances.

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