[I have been thinking a lot recently about Valentine’s Day
and romance and tradition and lurrrrrve,
and I have too much to say in just one post! Thus, I present my thoughts in a
series; here is part 1.]
When my mom and my stepdad first got married, I remember
being somewhat shocked by the number of times they said I love you each day. Every time one of them left the house, every
time they spoke on the phone, every elbow-to-the-ribcage joke—they took every opportunity to toss out those
three words. After awhile I began to wonder how much meaning they could
possibly ascribe to the phrase while saying it so frequently; didn’t the
habitual nature of it all cheapen it somehow? Don’t many things hold weight and
value due in part to their rarity?
But then, what other conclusion could the child of an
acrimonious divorce come to? I have very few memories of my parents together as
a happy couple, memories that I can no longer be certain are even real because they
are so frail and frayed round the edges. What I remember much more vividly is
the day they sat me and my brother down in the living room in our pretty little
shiny-wood house in a nice neighborhood, the house where I had a big room and a
front porch and a back porch and kittens, and told us they were separating. I
remember how helpless I felt, how confused, how irritated I was that they
couldn’t (wouldn’t?) explain to me what had gotten us all to that point. They
told me repeatedly that they had grown-up problems that they simply couldn’t
work out. What they didn’t have the heart to tell me was that they didn’t love
each other any more—or rather, they had forgotten how to demonstrate their love
in a way that made them both feel safe and respected. Or perhaps they never fully
loved each other, not in the truly-grown-up way, because their love had never
progressed beyond their high school days. I don’t know. I suppose it doesn’t
matter, in the end, as it doesn’t change the outcome.
And so, when I look back at the relationships that were
modeled for me as a child, I can now see how I might have become a little… bewildered.
I was merely eight when my parents divorced, and in the years that followed I
watched both of them muddle through many forms of relationships with a variety
of people. Some of them were clearly silly little flings with an ever-looming
expiration date; some were rebellions, whether against my parents’ respective
social norms or against each other; some might have worked out in a different time and
under different circumstances, but ultimately failed; and one for each of them,
finally, stuck.
Throughout all of this, I managed to miss out on my
own trial-and-error in the dating world, and thus I was woefully unprepared
when, at 20, I finally landed a partner of my own. I’ve written about him
before, but I did not elaborate too much on how incredibly insecure—and perhaps
even desperate—I was by the time I met him. I am naturally highly anxious and
self-doubting, and by that point I felt I had no barometer for what constituted a normal
level of attention and affection from a partner. What I interpreted as sincere
love and admiration was mostly obsession and co-dependence, and I ignored many
a red flag because I needed to believe that I was worthy of all the time and
energy he directed at me. We know how that story ended, although I’m not sure
now if what happened between us could be described as real love. I suppose
that, too, does not matter in the end.
When I look back on our time together, I can recount in intimate
detail the ways that he devastated me psychologically, yet while I know I loved him
very much when we were entangled, I cannot remember the first time we exchanged
I love yous. I think perhaps it’s too
difficult to reconcile such tender words with the violent way by which our
relationship imploded. I and love and you became words with entirely different meanings in subsequent partnerships,
neither better nor worse. In one, they were bargaining chips—something to
withhold from me when I wanted them, only to be dangled tantalizingly over the
distance between us after our breakup. In another, they took on the sparkle and
bang of fireworks at first, only to turn into trails of dust that clogged his
throat a little bit more every time I said them. So it goes, says Vonnegut, and
how can I argue?
I’ve been with my current partner long enough now to admit
that I thought those three little-big words long before I actually said them.
It seems we both wanted to play it cool, keep it casual, all those
heart-guarding clichés, until suddenly I realized that I was swimming
hopelessly against an emotional tidal wave. I knew when that first flirty
moment occurred that I was in no position whatsoever to fall in love, but I was
powerless to stop it, and when I finally (and, yes, drunkenly) dropped that
L-bomb I was absolutely certain that I had launched a bullet through whatever
promise we might have had. The seconds that passed between my confession and
his reply felt like an eternity (another cliché, I am well aware, but never has
it been more true). But then he said it back—with no caveats, no apologies, no footnotes, he just said it back.
He said it back.
And now, just as suddenly, I find myself saying those words
to him every day. Like my mother, I see that saying I love you all the time doesn’t cheapen the sentiment—because every
time I drop an L-bomb, it bursts with
truth. Even if he’s already fallen asleep and I’m murmuring it into the
gently-heaving valley between his shoulder blades, I mean it. Even if he tacks
it to the end of an email sent at 3:00 am on a rare night apart after wreaking
havoc on Cambridge with his dude-friends, he means it. Even if it’s blurted out
on the phone just before one of us has to switch over to a work-related call, we
mean it.
Once a day or a hundred times a day, we mean it. And that means more than a silly blog post could ever explain.
