English has one word for love.
Japanese has at least seven.
We use them here.
Because they describe a love,
and a way of holding one another,
that is lived.
Not just felt.
Without end.
- SUKI好きSOO-kee
- I like you · the first honest word for love
- SUKI is where love in Japanese genuinely begins — lighter than AI, more casual than DAISUKI, but never insincere. It’s the word a teenager might use confessing a crush, and equally the word a grown adult might use for a favourite season, a favourite food, or the person they’ve just realised they’re falling for. Its lightness is exactly its gift: SUKI lets you say something true without needing to carry the full weight of a permanent declaration, which makes it the honest, unpressured first rung on a ladder that can, eventually, climb all the way to AISHITERU.
- AI愛ah-EE
- Love — deep, total, complete
- AI is the single kanji character for love itself, and it sits at a different depth entirely to SUKI — more formal, more total, describing not a feeling that comes and goes with the weather but an entire state of being. Where SUKI can describe liking a song, AI is reserved for the kind of love a person builds an actual life around. The character itself contains, at its centre, the character for heart — a quiet, built-in reminder that real AI was never meant to be love from the head alone. It is the word underneath everything else in this whole collection, the root from which AISHITERU, DAISUKI, and every other form of Japanese love ultimately grows.
- DAISUKI大好きdai-SOO-kee
- I adore you · I love you deeply
- DAISUKI takes SUKI and adds dai — great, large — in front of it, turning a light “I like you” into something with genuine chest behind it: big love, real love, said with warmth that’s unmistakable even though it hasn’t yet reached AISHITERU’s full formal weight. This is the word for the love that gets said often and easily in a healthy relationship — to a partner heading out the door, to a child before bed, to a close friend after a good night together. It proves that love doesn’t need to be rare to be real; DAISUKI is love spoken generously, and meant every single time.
- AISHITERU愛してるai-SHEE-teh-roo
- I am loving you. Now and always. Without end.
- AISHITERU is the single most serious declaration of love the Japanese language holds, and it is treated that way deliberately — not said casually, not said often, reserved specifically for love that has become genuinely foundational to a person’s life. Where SUKI can be said lightly and DAISUKI said warmly and often, AISHITERU carries the full weight of a permanent claim: you are irreplaceable to me, not just in this feeling, not just today, but as a settled and unshakeable fact. Its rarity is not a flaw in the word. It is precisely what makes it mean something enormous the moment it’s finally spoken.
- RENAI恋愛REN-ai
- Romantic love · the full arc
- RENAI is built from two characters held together: ren, the longing, the yearning, the falling; and ai, the deep, settled love. Together they name the entire arc of romantic love in a single word — not just the electricity of falling for someone, and not just the quiet steadiness of having loved them for years, but both, understood as one continuous story rather than two separate phases. RENAI is a useful word to hold onto in a long relationship specifically because it refuses to let the early spark and the later depth be treated as different things. They were always the same love, simply at different points along its arc.
- JIAI慈愛jee-AI
- Compassionate love · tender mercy
- JIAI is love with mercy built directly into it — not the passionate love of falling, but the tending love of staying, especially through someone’s hardest moments. It is soft with what is wounded rather than demanding it heal on schedule; it meets suffering with genuine care rather than rushing in with solutions the other person never asked for. JIAI is what you offer someone on their very worst day: I am not going anywhere, and I am not asking you to be anything other than exactly what you are right now, in this difficult moment.
- HITOMEBORE一目惚れhee-toh-meh-BOH-reh
- Falling in a single glance
- HITOMEBORE names the very specific, almost startling recognition that can happen in a single first look — not lust, not infatuation with an image, but a genuine sense that this particular person matters, arriving before the mind has had any chance to explain why. It is the beginning of a story rather than the whole of one; HITOMEBORE doesn’t promise anything lasts, it simply names that unmistakable moment before you understood what the moment actually was. Many long, real loves have a HITOMEBORE hiding somewhere at their very beginning, remembered fondly decades later.
- ISSHONI ITAI一緒にいたいees-SHOH-nee ee-TAI
- I want to be with you
- This phrase is disarmingly simple, and that’s exactly its power — the direct, uncomplicated expression of wanting someone’s presence, with no conditions attached and nothing else implied. It doesn’t promise forever and it doesn’t ask for anything in return; it simply states a true, immediate want. Said between two people who have loved each other for decades, ISSHONI ITAI is no less powerful than the very first time it was true — proof that the simplest sentences in a language are often the ones that carry love most honestly.
- MEDERU愛でるmeh-DEH-roo
- To cherish · to actively delight in
- MEDERU describes looking at someone with eyes that genuinely find them beautiful — not once, as a passing compliment, but as an ongoing practice, returned to again and again across years. It is the specific, deliberate act of continuing to notice and delight in another person’s worth long after the initial newness of loving them has worn off. MEDERU is the real antidote to taking someone for granted: the conscious choice to keep seeing what is remarkable about the person you already, fully know.