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Uses and Abuses of “I Love You”

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.


Photo credit Kenny Eliason unsplash.com

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20140802-153718-56238227.jpgIn the photograph that accompanies this post, I’m on the ferry that runs between Edgewater, New Jersey and the far west side of midtown Manhattan.  I’m a tourist visiting her hometown, though native New Yorkers never describe “the city” as their hometown.  At least that is true of those of us from Manhattan; I can’t speak for those from Brooklyn or the other outer boroughs.  Brooklyn isn’t an “outer” anything anymore, but when I was growing up in the ’70s people from Brooklyn referred to Manhattan, where I lived on the upper west side, as “the city,” as if Brooklyn were a provincial outpost.  Of course it was, then.  My parents grew up in Brooklyn and my grandparents lived there, so I maintain a nostalgic fondness for the Brooklyn of my youth, which has little in common with the contemporary borough.  Not that I’ve been there, but one hears; one reads.  As a tourist who drives from Ohio to New Jersey, where I stay with family, and then takes the ferry to Manhattan in good weather, a car in bad, I never go to Brooklyn.  I barely get out of midtown.  This drives me nuts, but my wife and son want to see the tourist attractions.  I just want to walk down Broadway between Columbia and Lincoln Center.  If nothing else, I want to feel the heartache from seeing how much has changed since I last lived in the city.

I left for college in 1978 and never spent more than a month or so sleeping in my childhood bedroom after that.  I’ve lived in Middlebury, Vermont; San Francisco; Madison, Wisconsin; and Hartford, Connecticut.  For the past 19 years I’ve lived in the Cleveland area.  I’m happy here, a shocker for someone who grew up thinking Ohio was just a place where you stopped for gas en route across the country.  I came here for a job, and if I leave it won’t be until I’ve lived here for at least 34 years–the timing is based on retirement dates for both me and my wife.  I won’t ever live in NYC again–even if I wanted to attempt to go home again, I couldn’t possibly afford housing.  I’d sell my house in Ohio and be lucky to find a walk-in closet I could afford in Brooklyn, let alone Manhattan.  Anyway, I’ve lived in a suburban house for too long now to give up space for all the stuff I’ve accumulated because I could, and I have no idea how people buy groceries or run their other errands without a car.  I’m not interested in alternate-side-of-the-street parking or paying for a garage, but neither do I see myself crowding onto the subways where I used to sleep standing up on my way to high school in the Bronx.  (It was cool to leave Manhattan when heading to the Bronx High School of Science–or so those of us who made the daily commute deeply believed.)

So I live in Ohio and New York is no longer home, but it’s Vermont whose border brings me to tears each time I cross it.  I’m a sap for most of the New England states (I have no feelings in particular about Rhode Island and was unhappily employed in Connecticut), but it’s Vermont that comes to mind first when I ask myself this question: where would I want to travel if I found out my cancer had returned?

It’s easy to point to various appealing features of the Vermont landscape (mountains, lakes, farms) and culture (this is, after all, the state that keeps electing Bernie Sanders), but none of that explains my visceral response to the place.  I first fell in love with Vermont from the window seat of a Greyhound bus taking me from the Port Authority in NY to an interview at Middlebury College, where I wound up matriculating.  I was already attached to New England and the idea of attending a small, liberal arts college there.  I’d grown up spending my summers in the Berkshires and reading Louisa May Alcott.  By the time I’d declared an American Studies major at Middlebury I was half convinced I had been born a mid-19th century New England WASP.  Repeated reading of Emerson, Thoreau, and their pals in my American literature, philosophy, religion, and history classes did little to dispel the illusion.  By the time I’d graduated the limitations of my education had become clear to me, and I spent much of the next two decades catching up on the literature and history created by the many demographic groups omitted from the major I’d chosen, ironically, because it was interdisciplinary and therefore wouldn’t tie me down.

In my fifties, I love the idea of being tied down.  I want security, community, reliably fantastic restaurants and great medical care.   I want to be able to relocate once I retire, but when I think about all that I would be leaving, I hesitate.  I don’t get teary-eyed thinking about the Cleveland Clinic, but I do like knowing its main campus is ten minutes from my house.  I love the bakery around the corner, where people don’t only know my name , they know how to spell it, and what kind of Challah I always reserve for Fridays.  I love all my communities here–the people I know through work; the people I know through synagogue; the people I know from the neighborhood; the miscellaneous groups of like-minded people with whom my family has bonded over the years.   Of course I will never be a native of Northeast Ohio, but after 19 years here people no longer treat me like I just got off the boat.  I don’t know what will happen when I retire–or even if I’ll live long enough to retire.  I do know that if I leave Ohio I will be leaving behind a place that has come to feel damned near like home.