According to writer Gary Chapman, there are five love languages: words of affirmation, quality time, receiving gifts, physical touch and acts of service.
I would like to add a sixth — let’s call it “WhatsApp intimacy” — for people like my extended family and me who love each other desperately but, because of war, can’t be together.
We are from Syria. As a young child, I spent summers in Damascus — bouncing between my parents’ childhood homes and the apartment they bought when my brother and I were born — and winters in the U.S., where they had immigrated.
But that ended abruptly when war broke out. I was only 8, watching my parents struggle to talk on the phone with relatives who remained in Syria. Their calls were short, terse, at risk of being swallowed whole by anxiety and the unspeakable.
