Saying "I love you"
Audio version:
I don’t precisely recall when, or why, I made this decision, but it stuck with me.
In my early years I promised myself the following:
If I ever said “I love you” to anyone (in a any context - friend, family, all the flavours of love), I would mean it. Fully.
In my family we say it often to each other - so it was never something that felt embarrassing. It felt natural, but always important.
Maybe I was unnerved by the apparent ease with which I saw it being used - possibly overused and/or misused - in the early teenage relationships of my peers. Perhaps it was because of some story of heartache I was exposed to early on, and I had the reactionary thought to myself that I’d never want to lie to someone that way, unintentionally or not.
To my naive younger self “I love you” seemed to be sacred words - they carried weight.
I didn’t want to devalue that by using them without truly meaning them - they weren’t to be trivialised.
It was because of this pact with myself that put me in the following situation when I was 19. It was my first experience of being, to my horror, in love with someone.
We were dating, and had known each other for probably about 3 months. We were lying on the floor of my room, talking and laughing, when suddenly I became aware of a sensation in my chest. It had been creeping there for a few weeks, and suddenly it was a lot worse. It felt as if my lungs were continuously inflating with air. They threatened to burst unless I said some words.
I just had to get them out.
So, fulfilling precisely no-ones teenage dream, I paused, locked eyes, and uttered the following:
“Umm… I, uhhh (repeat x30)…. think I’m in love with you”
She, to my great relief, replied without hesitation, “I think I’m in love with you too”.
We were both right, and soon dropped the 'think’ from our declarations. Saying “I love you” to her always created a strong sensation within me, the same way saying anything true does. Your body becomes a tuning fork, feeling the resonance of the words land and permeate through you and who you’re speaking to. They’re real, it’s out there.
There were few things I knew to be true, but this was one of them.
As with most relationships, it eventually came to an end.
Months later, despite the fact that I was still basking in the nuclear glow of the fallout, I was perplexed to find that the feeling in my chest still remained. I was angry with the person, I wasn’t even sure I liked the person, but I still felt I could have said the sacred words truthfully. They were there.
It would be years before I saw her again.
The second time I was romantically in love with someone, wiser by experience, I was about 2% smoother with the declaration.
This time we were curled on her bed, spooning (me, the larger spoon). It was around 10 in the morning, and I had about 20 minutes before I had to leave to get on a train. We lived in different cities.
We had been at a party the night before. I had felt it then but the timing wasn’t right to say anything.
Actually, I confess, I had felt it over two months prior. Somehow, until that moment, I had kept my cool.
But it was now too much for me. Lying on the bed, that sunny morning, I said:
“Hey, erm, sorry to say this but, I, uh…”
“Go on” she said, in a playful patronising voice that she had surely already spent thousands of hours perfecting.
“….I kind of…love you”
She, to my great relief, replied without hesitation, “I kind of love you too”
In the next few minutes, before my departure, we dropped the ‘kind of’ and were delightfully gushy with each other, admitting we thought about each other all the time, and so forth.
Leaving to get on that train was difficult, to say the least. But as I sat on the journey home, and for days afterwards, I carried around a star in my heart.
As with most relationships, it eventually came to an end. Although this one gradually became more and more toxic, and arguably ended multiple, painful, times.
During this saga I felt trapped and permanently anxious. On one particular night, when things were really bad, she gave me an ultimatum, all the while insisting she loved me.
Her ultimatum was this: I had to be OK with her sleeping with other people, or she would self harm. She demanded I make the decision. She argued that she loved me so much, she didn't want to lose me. However, she was determined to do one of two things, so I had to choose for her. She was giving me the choice, she said, because she loved me, and didn’t want to lose me.
She told me she loved me, as she described in detail the other people she was going to sleep with, or the ways in which she was going to harm herself. She said she needed someone to hurt. Of course, she argued, that couldn’t be me, because she loved me. What was my choice, you might ask?
I could never ask anyone to self-harm.
Most reasonable people would have thought she had been hurting me for a while prior to this point. Furthermore, most would agree that giving me a 'choice' was a terrible, manipulative thing to do to someone. She claimed this was under the banner of loving me. She said those special words, I believed her. My reality was so warped that at the time I actually thanked her for being so ‘honest’ with me about how she was feeling.
She continued to tell me she loved me, right until she eventually ghosted me.
Waking up in a cold sweat from a nightmare, more than a year after it was all over, post-therapy and endless ruminating, I had words in my chest. They weren’t love, they weren't hate - I still don’t quite know what they are. I'm still processing how someone could argue they love you and behave that way.
She kept saying it, I kept believing it.
All of this ultimately reinforced my view that the words "I love you" have to be meaningful for one to use them. Misusing them can range from mischievous to poisonous.
When I did meet my first love again, years later, I had a better understanding of the intricacies, nuances and colours of the emotion. We, in a somewhat sitcom-esque situation, ended up working in the same company, in the same team, two desks apart. Spending time with her once more, so many years after the fact, I came to realise something. I loved her, but not in the way I had done so previously. It was now something different, simpler - she had taught me so much, and I just wanted her to be happy. And after a year of therapy, nightmares and cold sweats (not about her, the other one), she reminded me that I had the capacity to love someone who was fundamentally good, and good to me.
It’s a strange thing, declaring a platonic love for an ex. But after some time, I did it. And, to my great relief, she told me she loved me too.
It felt right. I felt more complete.
I’ve been lucky. It’s only at the age of 25 that death is something that’s creeping more fully into my awareness. The older you get, the crushing inevitability of statistics dictate that loss will take ever more of the spotlight.
I’m not really sure what I want to do with my life before I die, but something I’ve decided to do - which seems relatively achievable - is to make sure that everyone I love, knows that I love them.
So, since my first platonic love declaration, I endeavoured to do this more widely.
I’ve dropped the L-bomb - sometimes with a fair amount of trepidation but always with a degree of earnestness - with many of my close friends. I still haven’t told all of them. For some, it’s still not the right time.
For the ones I have told, some of them understood my sincerity. They were really there and I was lucky enough that they said the same to me.
I said it to Adi after a long heart-to-heart. It felt like it had always been in the air, we just hadn’t mentioned it.
I told Tash sitting in my car by Hammersmith station, before she went home on a rainy night.
I told Chris on the phone, after racing on foot across a six lane highway rather than taking the underpass because it was an important conversation and it was not the time for signal to be cut.
Some others I’ve told and they didn’t pick up on it. Sure, they said the same back to me, but the weight wasn’t there, the note didn’t carry. That’s OK. I can only make sure that I’m still making the sound often enough that they can hear it when they’re ready. And if they don’t reply in turn, that’s fine too.
Every time I told someone I loved them, I felt almost more solid. My foundations were tightly bound, I could say heavier things - my soul was stronger. A secret of the universe that only I knew was now out there and was now real. I opened the box and found that Schrodinger’s cat was alive.
It’s made my life better.
Reading this, you might have thought of someone in your own life. You might have had a sensation in your chest. Perhaps you’re still working out the words, but I suspect that fully-formed some words are there, which haven’t been said.
Every relationship is an act of creativity between two people. And though love, much like any emotion, inevitably shares commonalities, it’s unique to every relationship. A melting of two personalities, a connection, an alloy. Each of mine are different. Maybe your words aren’t “I love you” - it could be far simpler, or more convoluted. Perhaps words aren’t your thing - you have an action to communicate. A hand on a shoulder, a shared evening silence.
Whatever it is, it’s sitting there, and you know it.
You know this too - whether communicating it will be good for you, and for them. Whether it, at the most basic level, is the right thing to do. Take a breath, sit with it.
It’s a human thing.
I just got off the phone with my friend Rick. He’s living in NYC, I’m in London, our lives are separated by time zones, space and people circles - the three fundamental components of the world. We caught up on life things, improv things, dancing around the fact that we’re both becoming adults and still have no idea what the fuck we’re doing.
At the end of the call, I said to him “love you brother”, and he said “love you too”. It was no big deal. We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again. We meant it.
The ground is solid beneath my feet.