help! the l-word?

[cimorene]

for those of you who are happily settled in romantic relationships with life-partners:

how big a deal was saying 'i love you' the first time? did you ever say it? did it occur to you that it was a big deal? did you bypass it as sapped of all meaning and express yourself some other way instead? was there ever, like, a mutual confession, and if so, do you think of it as a milestone, or does it blend in because really, in retrospect, you both knew it already anyway?

(i have only my one, personal experience to draw from, and wax_jism and i differ wildly in our use of the 'love' word. i don't know how realistic basing myself on that is. fictional!BM and RFM are not like me. they are more the hallmark-card-buying sort of person, so i need a more representative sample.)

Comments

[penm.livejournal.com]

I don't really have anything interesting to say on this subject, because I've never been able to say the words and mean them romantically. I don't really think that at this point in time -- I mean, I don't, am not even sure what words mean in that context.

I use the word 'love' with a lot of things. My sister, my books, Neapolitan ice cream, shoes, and coffee, to name a few. I've said to an internet boy say 'I love you', signing off, but it felt hollow and shallow (when I was dizzy with that first 'real' crush. When he said it to me, though, I felt like it was something good and great and to be cherished because it was brilliant and new, and I thought he maybe might, even though at the back of my mind I knew he couldn't possibly, because grade school romances never last).

I've also said to another, more serious, older-and-wiser guy, 'Listen, I love you, or maybe I don't, or maybe I might, someday, just not right now, okay?' But I don't even think I knew what the hell I was saying. I still don't. Love is a very confusing business.

I guess I'm just sort of biding my time, waiting until it's my turn, until it's like, seriously my turn, until I've grown up enough to know if it really is cliched and trite, or if it's something real and important.

I've always seen myself with a guy, holding hands in the hallway, leaning against his locker and smiling, but it doesn't matter if it's a girl. I mean, the sort of love one reads about -- the sor tof love I think you mean, I like to think, in my romantic way, that it has no boundaries. Gender, age, social status. So I could fall with a girl five years older than I am, a princess, or maybe a girl living in a trailer, and if I was, indeed, in love, it wouldn't matter, would it?

I try to keep an open mind towards love, and its changeable nature, but a diet of cheap, high-school romance novels at a too-young age was really bad for me, and formed some sort of prefabricated view of love. Everything's just sort of being redifined as I go.

Also, this boy once told me, "You invented love." I said, surprised, "I did?" and he said, "Of course you did. Do you think anyone defines love in the same, precise way you do? You invented love." So I guess love is in the eye of the beholder. Might mean one thing to someone, another thing to another person, so on and so forth.

Whoa. Sorry. Didn't mean to ramble on and on at you. I guess what I'm trying to say is... from the bottom of the age totem pole, the world littered with bi-weekly recyclable boyfriends, love is just something weird and not altogether 'real'. It's a cheap and watered-down version of the 'real thing', used mostly in MSN screen names such as "OMG I LUV U BABY 4EVA U MAH BABYBOI 4 LYF!" It's Avril Lavigne on the radio, and couples snogging two seats away from you at lunchtime. That's the purest form of love down here. I hope it gets purer.

(And I ramble on again. I'm going to stop now, honestly. Thanks, by the way. This really made me think.)

[cimness.livejournal.com]

i don't think the meaning of 'love' will get purer, though. it's the nature of words for basic concepts to get diluted metaphorically, and by dumbness, into closely related meanings. plus no one defines it academically the same way. plus no one feels it the same way--not even, i suspect, the same person in love with two different people.

a romantic life-partnership is something you build--the emotion too, the commitment, although i'm not saying there isn't something magical there, because there is. but that's just the base. the vast majority of it is work (even if it's just psychological work, adapting in your own mind to living in partnership with someone else). and so relationships are organic changing things, like emotions. words about emotions can't have totally static meanings.

so it really makes sense to search more precisely for ways to say what you really feel, and what you really mean, than 'i love you,' which is awfully uninformative for your partner. but i feel that perhaps a relationship in which those particular words are *never* said may be unrealistic because they're such a, well, fixture of culture.