Language is a tricky thing. For as complicated as the English language is, our hundreds of thousands of words don’t mean much on their own. Even though saying “I love you” is a huge milestone in any relationship, those three short words hold practically no weight in comparison to that intense, insatiable yearning in your chest.
Everyone uses the same word to describe that feeling — love — but everyone ascribes a very different meaning to it. Love is desire, is comfort, is safety, is carnal, is lust, is danger, is loss — love is anything and everything. Love is coming home to your partner after work, and love is lying, greened out, on someone’s thigh.
While saying “I love you” is a wonderful reminder that you have strong feelings for the object of your affection, it doesn’t quite communicate what those strong feelings are. Those feelings crawl into your stomach and overtake your body, desperate for a way to express themselves beyond the limits of language. And when that happens, you should let them — in whatever way that may take.
You may want to squeeze your partner, or make them a mixtape, or force them to dance with you in the kitchen while you’re making dinner. Or maybe you want to bite them or embarrass them in public. You may even want to chuck a stick at them from across the street or poke them directly in their asshole. There is no wrong way to love someone — barring severe physical harm — and you should feel comfortable doing whatever your love compels you to do.
Love is a time to free yourself. It is one of the deepest and most intense emotions a person is capable of, and suppressing those urges deprives you of experiencing what makes us human.
But as humans, we experience love differently. Your vision of love will likely be far away from your partner’s. Your unshakeable desire to grab your lover’s face and smoosh it around like Play-Doh may be entirely unfamiliar to them, and their compulsion to lurk behind your door to jumpscare you may be entirely unfamiliar to you. No one other than you will fully understand why your love takes the form it does, but someone worthy of your love will appreciate it regardless.
“I love you” is, in some ironic way, one of the safest expressions to say to someone you have feelings for. Once you’re past the fear that they might not say it back, “I love you” allows the other person to interpret your love in any way they want. It’s a beautiful thing to say, but it’s not a true expression of you.
When you do truly express yourself — when you decide to act on that urge to flop your entire body on them like a weighted blanket — it opens up the scary possibility that even if they like that you love them, they may not like the way that you love them. Sometimes they’ll take a bit to warm up to you, but other times the person you love may never appreciate the specific kind of love you’re willing to give them.
It’s a hard reality to accept — that the person you love so intensely cannot accept the form that love takes. But I firmly believe that it’s better to come to that reality than to spend years suppressing your experience of love out of fear that it might not be accepted.
This Valentine’s Day, don’t tell your partner you love them. Don’t choose the safe route and filter those gnawing feelings into something universally palatable. Show them exactly how you love — the form your love takes that is unabashedly you. Risk scaring your partner away so that you can finally push those feelings into the world.
You are a human. Maybe you’ve been in love, and maybe you are in love. When you feel it — in whatever way you feel it — act on it. Every day you push those churning feelings back down into your stomach is a day you deprive yourself of the expression you deserve. Someone out there is waiting for you to impose your love upon them. Give them that privilege, and let them experience everything you feel and everything you are.
Thomas Riley loves love. Email them about it at [email protected].
