In the immediate aftermath of Valentine’s Day, I’m contemplating the words “I love you.” I use these words daily or nearly daily. My wife and I exchange them regularly. I frequently tell my adult son I love him—sometimes when we hug, sometimes in response to one of his snarky remarks about my age. On occasion, my son warms my heart with a reciprocal “I love you.” The words feel all the more precious and sincere because he doesn’t use them as a tagline or a strategy. The phone calls with my father and step-mother always end with a round robin of “I love you.” That wasn’t the case years ago, but as we all got older and confronted increasing evidence of life’s fragility, we committed to affirming our love at the end of every interaction. Nobody ever said anything about the change. A similar shift occurred with my sisters and some of my close friends. Maybe growing older just made the words easier to say.

Some of my close friends and relatives use these words regularly, some on rare occasions, and some not at all. The presence or absence of those words doesn’t inform my perception of a relationship. In some cases, they have been a clue to someone else’s perception of the relationship. In other cases, those words were first used after my cancer diagnosis and were likely an affirmation of care informed by fear of loss. Then there are the people with whom I send love back and forth, saying not “I love you” but sending love to each other as a way of signifying affection, fondness, care for each other’s well-being.

Finally, there are the abuses of “I love you.” In the context of an unkind or abusive relationship, these words feel like manipulative tools at best, weapons at worst. My biological mother, from whom I am estranged, has a long history of sending extremely abusive letters and emails that assure me of her devoted and abiding love—as if that excuses or erases her cruelty, her narcissism, her lies. Those expressions of love helped keep me emotionally bonded to her when I was a child and young adult. As I got older, they felt like something she was doing to me. Does the thought of her oldest daughter evoke some kind of feeling in her? I imagine that it does. Is this feeling love? I can’t say. Is love what she conveys when communicating with me? Only if we define love as a set of handcuffs, or perhaps as a drug meant to blunt my awareness of the meanness that accompanies it.

A few months ago, a friend of over two decades texted “I love you” after long silences and repeatedly refusing to meet to discuss long-running problems in the relationship. I was furious. The memory still causes my whole body to tense. What do these words mean to someone who has treated me poorly and refuses to listen to me? Do they mean “I care about you even though I cannot or will not treat you well”? Do they mean “because I said ‘love you,’ you should forgive and forget my actions”? Do they mean “this is all I have to say”? I don’t know, and ultimately what the words mean to her is beside the point. What matters to me is that the words feel manipulative. They ignore all that preceded them. They leave me feeling enraged, not loved. Is this reaction informed by my history with my mother? Of course. Do I nevertheless trust my gut? Yes.

When my son was younger, I constantly said “I love you soooo much,” with my arms stretched out to illustrate the point. I still tell him I love him soooo much. I believe people need to say and hear explicit words of love. But the words don’t compensate for poor treatment. When used by someone who has treated me badly or may even have been abusive in their previous sentence, they feel like a stab to my abdomen.

Some people seem to think the words “I love you” are magical, that they make history go back into the hat with the rabbit. They aren’t. They don’t. I believe in the power of language, but I don’t teach a literary text without attention to its context. Similarly, the meaning of “I love you” varies with the context. These can be powerful words of affection, connection, and protection. They can also be cruel and hurtful. It’s not always easy to tell the difference, but I have learned that the meaning of the words lies in how they make me feel.

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