{Love Language}: When Love Means Nothing

One of the most pervasive messages in our society is the importance of love. With family, friends, and significant others. How to get it, cultivate it, tend to it over a lifetime, and cope when we lose it. We devote time to analyzing the languages with which we convey it—affirmation, acts of service, etc. Love, we are taught, means everything.

Unless you are versed in the language of tennis.

On grass, clay, and hard courts, love means nothing.

You try to hold your opponents to love, while hoping to escape its grasp yourself. That is because in the game of tennis, love is a symbol of loss, the scoring equivalent of zero. Which leads a person to ask: What is the love language in a sport where love means nothing?

While love has no value, playing tennis requires one of its components­—passion—in premium. When watching the pros, their passion is palpable in every lunge for a return, whip of each ace, and grunt, like those of Aryna Sabalenka or Novak Djokovic. And that is just what we as the audience get to see.

Each match we see is the product of a lifetime of preparation. Hours on the courts—even those spent as a child playing a game for fun—build atop one another like a tower of bricks. Some layers are laid easily, while others take massive effort just to quarry. Progress may slow but it never stops.

That is where passion comes in. Players cannot willingly engage in such training and play if they don’t have a deep desire for it. They can’t continue to find joy, even in the face of failure.

With this, we welcome to the court one of tennis’ other languages of affection: fortitude.

As much as tennis is a game of incredible physicality, it is also one of mental acuity.

For many players, tennis is a solo game. That means that during rallies, you cannot confer with a teammate or coach. It all falls on your shoulders. You must track your opponent’s movements, search for tells to where their shots are headed, while hiding your own. You must think one step ahead without getting ahead of yourself. If you’re up three games and a set, you can’t think you’re up a match and take your foot off the gas, just as you cannot believe you’re going to lose the match under those same circumstances. Players must have confidence without being overconfident. They must practice as much mental fitness as physical.

And even then, the tennis gods may betray.

It can be fickle, the sport. Players can go on the court, swing to perfection, and minimize their unforced errors, but it may not be their match to win. It doesn’t matter if a player is the GOAT or ranks 500th in the world, wins will elude them, and love will rear its ugly head.

That is why tennis’ final preferred proclamation of affection is perseverance.

It is the mortar found in that tower of bricks that players build with skill throughout their lives.

As is emblazoned on Philippe Chatrier Stadium at Roland Garros, “Victory belongs to the most tenacious.” Though the saying is thought to have originated with Napoleon, it was popularized by Roland Garros, a pilot and World War I hero who had the quote engraved on the propellers of his plane. He believed that victory did not come to those who sought an easy way out, be it on the battlefield, in flight training, or on the tennis court.

Players will earn points with one well-placed ace, but they must fight for others, too, sprinting back and forth in rallies that reach 10, 15, 25 hits. In five-set matches, it does not matter if a player takes the first two sets if they collapse in the third. The victor comes down to the player who will endure the longest, physically and mentally.

That is why when players come to worship the tennis gods, they will not find deities satisfied with mere overtures of love. Love means nothing to them because love alone does not win matches.

It is the players who step onto the hallowed court, battle for every point, and—no matter the result—return again and again, determined to do better, that receive the tennis gods’ favor.

Tennis may never love them back, but it—and the fans in the stands, watching in hushed awe—will respect them.