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

[http://users.livejournal.com/_swallow/]

I'm someone with a similar singular, personal experience-- like yourself, I imagine, I fell in love with another slasher via AIM and email. It was a bit of a big deal (I said it first, and it was less "I love you" than "I'm in love with you, OK?") because slasher friendships are archetypally between (usually straight) women who know each other intimately, spend significant energy and hours in one another's company constructing elaborate worlds of sexual fantasy for release into a huge system of their peers, but don't (supposedly) feel sexual-romantic longing for one another. Because there was a pre-existing social space for the kind of friendship we already had, there was no romantic-track feeling to our relationship; despite the many hours I spent every night on AIM with her, we weren't "dating", and presumably we could have continued on in that fashion interminably without feeling strain.

In the first few weeks after we became textual I was filled with a kind of stoic, butch hesitancy to say "I love you" or even reference our relationship as a romantic relationship. Then I loosened and gave in to my true nature which is that of incredible emotional puppy, and I say it all the time. And that's my story.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

heee. i'm an incredible emotional puppy too. wax_jism thinks i'm insane in an irresistably adorable manner. i don't really say 'i love you' all the time, though, because i know she considers it sort of a foreign language.

are you still long-distance?