Two romantic tricks to seduce your partner: Be an attractive husband or wife!

Two romantic tricks: Language is born out of need—the need to communicate, the need to connect. Across the world, languages have emerged from these basic human instincts. Each may have its own history, but they all share the same origin: the desire to understand and be understood.

If you’re in a relationship, you’ve likely been part of this process without even realizing it. From sweet “baby talk” and funny nicknames to made-up words that only you and your partner understand—these unique ways of speaking aren’t just the weird and embarrassing quirks you think them to be. In reality, they are bona fide languages—borne out of love.

Here’s how these private languages come to be, and how they bring us closer together than words from our mother tongues ever could.

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Two romantic tricks

1. Baby Talk

Two romantic tricks: As embarrassing as it might be to admit, it’s not abnormal for couples to use baby talk in the comfort and privacy of their shared space. In fact, 75% of couples in a study from the journal of Personal Relationships admitted (anonymously) to using baby talk with their partners.

The study found that couples who made use of some kind of baby talk within their relationship maintained far higher levels of attachment, as well as lower levels of avoidance, than couples who did not.

While it may be cringe-worthy for outsiders to witness, those in long-lasting relationships can attest to the softening effect that love and comfort can have. And when we truly feel at peace with someone, baby talk may come naturally.

2. Private Languages

Two romantic tricks: According to research from the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, unique languages spoken between partners aren’t at all rare; they’re extensively observed, and serve to emphasize a couple’s shared identity.

The authors eloquently explain that “married couples create a ‘culture of two’ in which an idiosyncratic mode of communicating emerges to lend itself to increased intimacy.” Notably, the study found the more couple-specific language was used in relationships, the higher their level of relationship satisfaction was compared to others.

Simply put, the uniqueness of the language you speak with your partner represents the uniqueness of your bond and, in turn, it instills a sense of cohesiveness.

Two romantic tricks: The longer you spend with one another, the more unique ways you will find to communicate with one another in your own, special way—just like any other language.

As Cynthia Gordon, a professor of linguistics, explains in an interview with The Atlantic, “Any group of people that has extended contact over time and sees itself as distinctive is going to have some specialized uses of language.”

And if you and your partner live together, you likely know this firsthand.

Two romantic tricks: Suzanna Weiss—in her The Cut article about the embarrassing, private languages that couples speak—shared her experience of this: “A few months into our relationship, my boyfriend and I started adding funny-sounding syllables to the beginnings of words.

Hug became ‘higgle hug,’ bed became ‘bibble bed,’ dog became ‘diggle dog,’ and so on, following this unspoken ‘iggle/ibble’ rule.”

She continued, “We thought we were the only weirdos who did this, then a friend told us that he and his husband say ‘huggle’ instead of ‘hug.’”