How Many Ways Can You Say "I Love You?"
Turns out it's more than you think.
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about all the different ways that we say those three little words: I love you. I say them pretty often, not just to Casey, but to family and friends too. But the more I think about it, the more I find it sort of hysterical that we bundle the enormity of love and the various shapes it inhabits into such a compact phrase. And not only is it just one big emotion wrapped up like a little sausage, but there are so many different types of love, and yet we just funnel them all into “I love you.” And yet it’s kind of beautiful that we all use the same language to express vastly different things. It’s like one rare thing that we all have in common.
So today, I dive into all the ways in which you can love someone. From family love to friend love to platonic and sexual, there are so many ways. But then, I make it a little more interesting. What happens when you mix sexual and friend love? What about if you’re feeling puppy love for someone while also romantic love for someone else? All that and more below!
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Love
The first time you say “I love you” to someone is a wild moment. I have said I love you in moments that were perfectly appropriate and ones that were wildly embarrassing. Once, I accidentally told someone that I loved him when I meant to say, “I love being gay.” Needless to say, that relationship did not continue much further. Once, I said, I love you while in bed with someone who said it back, only for both of us 20 minutes later to turn to each other and say, “That was too soon, wasn't it?” And beyond the funny instances, I’ve also done it the ‘right’ way, taking the time to get to know someone, letting our feelings build, and after a few heart-pounding months, saying it with deep purpose, commitment, and intention.
Casey and I said I love you for the first time on a freezing cold bridge in Chicago in December 2018. We’d been dating for about three months, which, as it turns out, is about the average amount of time that it takes couples to say it. Although I did find out that men are more likely to say it sooner (around two months), and women usually wait until three. Regardless of the timeframe, I personally love the lead-up to saying it for the first time. There’s that middle period where you want to let the person know how deeply you feel about them, but you aren't quite ready to say I love you. That period is so fun.
The Types of Love
In order to unpack some of the more fluid definitions of love, first, we have to look at the types of love that we encounter most often in our day-to-day lives.
Familial: This is usually our first introduction to love. In a ‘typical’ family, we get love from our parents, maybe our siblings, and then we learn how to express that back to them. This is a love that is womblike, deeply nurturing, and intimate because it is the first type of love that we experience and the one we need when we are youngest and most vulnerable to the world.
Friend Love: This is the type of love that exists within friend groups (duh). These are usually the first people we say I love you to after our families. Friend love is usually our training wheels to romantic love, and frequently can get confused with the other when we’re young. We’re told that these platonic relationships should then take a backseat once we find our partners, but Queer people frequently treat these platonic loves just as sacred as romantic ones since we don’t always follow a heteronormative life path. Our platonic groups sometimes become families of our own, and therefore, we are taught to put that love on a deep level.
Puppy Love: Okay, I take it back, this is the true training wheels to romantic love. I believe that puppy love exists in two forms: one when we are young and just learning about relationships. It makes me think of the girlfriends and boyfriends I said I love you to before I really even knew what love was. The other is the chemical chaotic love you feel before the feelings deepen and lengthen over time. I think that puppy love or honeymoon love eventually morphs into a deeper kind of romantic love.
Romantic: This is the type we’re most familiar with and the one that everyone seems to want. Everyone wants the Ryan Gosling in the rain, I love you, or the Titanic, I love you. When I love you is said in these contexts, entire personalities, hopes, dreams, and lives get wrapped up in three little words. But it’s also the deep familiarity that comes with time, weathering hardship together, and a deep knowledge of the other person.
Sexual: This type of love comes from a more primal place. It’s connected to romantic love, but it lives lower, deeper, in the instinctual part of you that needs love as a form of connection to survive. It’s a love that is driven by hormones and lust, you know, like when you accidentally say it too soon in the throes of passion.
Self-Love: This one is arguably the most important, but the hardest to practice. Self-love is simple in explanation, but so hard to implement. We find it so easy to celebrate and love the other people in our lives, but when it comes time to turn that love inwards, it’s nowhere to be found. Self-love is precious, and self-love is tender. It cannot be faked and must be nurtured and cared for; it must be given room to grow. And the more that you have love for yourself, the easier it will be to give that love to someone else. There’s a reason that RuPaul ends each Drag Race episode with “if you can’t love yourself, how in the hell you gonna love somebody else?” And while the line is fleeting, this is such a powerful message to deliver to Queer people. Because the world is not going to love us, we must be strong enough to love ourselves to make up for what the world lacks.
Now Let’s Get Messy
Now that we’ve gotten some of the definitions out of the way, I want to dive into the real reason I wanted to write this piece. I want to explore what happens when these ways in which we’re supposed to love someone get blurred. I think this happens way more frequently in Queer relationships than straight because we don’t have the same built in strcutre like I’ve mentioned before. We’re more likely to be open, nonmonogamous, or not have traditional family structures.
Our friends can be our lovers, our friends can be our parent-figures, our lovers can be our parent-figures, our puppy love can coexist with our deep relationship love. There are so many fascinating ways that we get to blur the lines between all of these categories. Not to say that straight folk can’t do that too, it’s just less common. But if you want to, go and do it!
Familial x Friend: This type of love can exist when your friends become family. There’s a reason that chosen family is a term coined by Queer people. When our families won’t accept us, we find those who will, this can look like Houses like in the Harlem ball scene, groups of friends, mentors, and mentees. This type of love can be born out of necessity or just come about as friends turn to family.
Puppy x Romantic: This type of love can occur when these new puppy love feelings coexist with a primary romantic partner. This is really common in polyamory or other forms of non-traditional relationships. This is a really interesting dynamic because it allows people those intense rushes of chemicals that we are told we’re only supposed to get once, with our one true person. I once dated someone in a relationship who said he really valued what we had because it allowed him to experience feelings he thought he’d had to say goodbye to forever.
Friend x Sexual: This is one that is particularly fascinating to me. How do you say I love you to a friend with whom you also have sex? This can happen when a person has existed in your life for a long enough time that true feelings of deep, friendly love have developed, but because you’re also in a sexual relationship, the rules are suddenly different. What feels like a great step forward has the possibility to be misconstrued simply because sex is involved.
Friend x Puppy: This can be an interesting dynamic that usually appears as you start to get to know a new friend. This can happen in a similar way to puppy love in a romantic relationship, but it’s just because you’re so excited to be making a new friend. Those new honeymoon feelings can still crop up even if you’re not interested in having sex or being romantic partners. And like in romantic ways, they can then grow into a beautiful level of friend love down the line.
Those are just a few of the many types and combinations of love that exist. In a world that is so deeply divided and isolated, it’s more important than ever to continue to nourish those types of love that you have so that your cup can be full. When your cup is full is the best time to use that energy to enact change and care for those you love. So, whoever and however you love, I hope you let them know it today.
I certainly love you….
