I find excuses, at improv practice, to tell the cute boy that I love him.
It’s not entirely on purpose but not entirely an accident, either. One approach to improv is walking on stage and knowing, immediately, who you are to each other – in spirit, in feeling, if not in detail. So when I walk on, and look at this floppy-haired blue-eyed sharp-tongued goofy-grinned boy, the overwhelming feeling that flows into focus is love.
(Okay, maybe not love, but something like it. We’ll get to that later.)
I’m his wife in too many scenes, his girlfriend, or the moony admirer with whom he becomes entangled over the course of a longform set. I don’t know if he notices, but other people do. “I think you should try pursuing more non-romantic storylines,” my coach offers offhandedly at the end of practice one day. I blush, because I know what he means, I know why he’s saying this, and I know I probably won’t take this note. Improv is a wildly careening ship and my love is a tumultuous river pouring downstream toward disaster. Anchors aweigh.
“I love you,” I shriek in improv scene after improv scene, terrified the cute boy knows I mean it.
“I love you” is weighty, a Big Deal, perhaps too much so. But any time I find myself wanting to believe it can be casual, it just means I’m flooded with love and embarrassed about it.
My shame about my lack of chill is sometimes so intense that I could probably talk myself into thinking “Will you marry me?” and “We should be buried side-by-side” are breezy things to say.
But who decided love was embarrassing? Who, like John Lennon, argued we’ve got to hide our love away?
These fears all stem from the root fear of reciprocation or lack thereof. When you Say The Thing, you’ll find out pretty quickly whether the person you’re addressing Feels The Thing too or very much doesn’t. We all want to live in the will-they-won’t-they illusion a little longer, suspending judgment about Schrodinger‘s love, because “I’m not sure if they…” is uplifting, while “They definitely don’t…” is soul-crushing. So even when love seems likely, we still hedge our bets, guard our cards, crunch the numbers before we make our move.
The dreaded “I love you” is a big deal because it signals the end of one chapter and the start of another. The end of plausible deniability and the start of a reckoning. Whether it goes poorly or beautifully, you’ll learn even more than you thought you would.
Polyamory perk: being comforted by one partner about another.
Or maybe the person you’re crying about isn’t even a partner of yours. Maybe they’re just a crush you somehow let fester into love. Maybe your Actual Boyfriend knows what the deal is, and likes you anyway. Maybe your Actual Boyfriend is therefore a goddamn saint, but still not the person you’re devastatingly in love with.
“Hey, it’s okay,” Actual Boyfriend assures me, late one summer night, as I cry in my bed over a man who isn’t him. “I’m here for you.” He’s right; he is. But I wish he wasn’t. I wish he was someone else.
“I’m just scared that when he leaves at the end of the summer, I’m going to have a mental breakdown,” I sob. The object of my affections doesn’t live in my city, so this was always a time-limited endeavor. As if unrequited love isn’t painful and risky enough as is. I’m sick with contrition, my heart inconsolable. If I can’t have him then I just want to be alone.
Yet here is the boy I’ve been dating for not-even-a-month, his warm-but-wrong arms wrapped around me. “If you do, I’ll be here for you,” he promises. “I know we haven’t known each other that long, but I love you and I wanna support you and I don’t want you to feel alone.”
I can tell, from the way his sentence stretches out like taffy, that the “I love you” was an accident. Whether he meant it but didn’t mean to say it, or meant to say it but didn’t really mean it, is irrelevant. It’s between us now, screaming to be acknowledged.
I laugh a little, through my tears. “Did you just…?”
He laughs a little, too. “Yeah.”
This would become a cute, funny anecdote from our early relationship, if indeed I liked him enough to progress past this stage. But I don’t. It’s hard to love someone good and kind when you’re accustomed to love feeling distant and cold.
Later, when we break up over the phone, he yells that I’m clearly not capable of loving anyone but that other man right now, and that I shouldn’t have led him to believe otherwise. He is right. I wish I could have caught his embarrassing leap in a plush net, but instead I just let him shatter on the ground. You can’t save everyone, hard as you might try.
The weight of “I love you” comes partly from our cultural conviction that it ought to be a Special Moment, much like a proposal or asking someone to prom. The right time and place, the right ambiance, must permeate the memory upon reflection. It should live on in our minds like a Tiffany’s catalogue centerfold, sparkling and emblematic.
But of course, first I-love-you’s aren’t always this picture-perfect in reality. Many are whispered against sweaty skin after sex, or cackled in irresistible cacophonies, or lobbed automatically at the end of a phone call. We’d all like our lives to look like a perfect three-tiered cake, but sometimes the yummiest desserts are the crumbly, misshapen ones from an amateur baker trying their best.
We’ve known each other for 35 days when you accidentally tell me you love me. It’ll only be a few more weeks before you say it for real.
We’re having phone sex – a thing we’ve done a dozen times or so, and will do hundreds more times as we fall harder – and I’m a subspacey mess. Unraveled, wanton, slurring my words. I know how this aligns with your kinks, and I know you put me here on purpose, but I’m still nervous: what if you find this messy gibberish version of me unattractive and you’re too nice to say so?
“Sir, do you like me like this?” I ask, uncertain, seeking feedback that will calm my heart.
“I LOVE you like this,” you retort without thinking. There is a split-second of silence. We’re both too smart, perceptive, and overanalytical to have missed what just happened, but we’re both also too polite and socially fluid to make it into the big deal it obviously is. We launch back into dirty-talk as before, like cocks and cunts can overshadow what’s developing between us.
When you really say it, later, in a dimly-lit bar, it’s slower, more considered. I feel like I’m hearing you perform dialogue we’ve been rehearsing for weeks – the words were empty and now they’re full, dripping with meaning. You preface the phrase with my name, so I’ll know you really mean it and you mean it about me, specifically. “Kate, I love you.” I tell you “I know,” because I do, I do, I deeply do. And then I add, “I love you too.”
We didn’t plan to fall in love; we didn’t plan to say it tonight. But it wasn’t an embarrassing accident. It was a perfect surprise.