Sharing Mana‘o
Public Service Announcement: Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day! You procrastinators and unsentimental types still have time to scare up a last-minute gift or card for your significant other. Do NOT try to get away with “But honey, every day is Valentine’s Day when I’m with you!”
My late husband used that line every year of our two decades together. I’d say, “Well, if every day is Valentine’s Day, shouldn’t you be bringing me chocolates and roses every day?” Then he’d counter with the argument that Valentine’s Day is a commercialized, made-up holiday, invented to sell greeting cards and such to sentimental fools like me. That excuse didn’t work any better than the first one.
On the other hand, Barry had no problem saying “I love you” on Valentine’s Day; in fact, he’d tell me that every day of the year, several times a day. The first time he said it, we got into a big argument. Not because I didn’t respond with “I love you too,” but because I did. Those four little words offended him as if I’d replied with four-letter words. He felt that the “too” somehow diminished the sentiment. From then on, whenever Barry said “I love you,” I answered with “I love YOU.”
I think “I love you” is probably the most misused and misunderstood sentence in the English language. Some people say it when they don’t mean it, to get what they really want. Others mean it when they say it, but it may not mean the same thing to the person hearing it. Most of us don’t say it nearly enough.
Like most local Japanese families, mine was not verbally demonstrative. In our house, “I love you” was heard only on TV or in songs. I never heard my parents say it to each other and although they both gave me lots of encouragement and praise, they rarely said it to me. Not as a stand-alone sentence, anyway. I do recall hearing more than once, “I love you and that’s why I’m punishing you, to help you learn to do the right thing.”
Of course, my parents had many other ways of showing their affection for me, including hugs, lots of hugs. I didn’t need to hear the phrase to know I was loved. In fact, I didn’t even want to hear it. Not from my parents, anyway.
As a preteen, I longed to hear it from the lips of whichever classmate I happened to have a crush on. I practiced saying it myself, to Davy Jones’ face on my Monkees album covers. My diary was full of declarations: I love you, (insert name here). But the notes passed between my 7th-grade classmates said “1-4-3” in place of those three little words. We were too shy to say or write the actual words.
High school hormones easily conquered bashfulness, and it didn’t take long for me to get comfortable with saying “I love you” out loud. It took much longer for me to grasp the consequences of doing so and the complicated politics of the phrase.
You know what I mean. If you say it to someone and they don’t respond in kind, you:
a) feel hurt
b) get angry
c) say it again, only louder
d) all of the above
Now, many years and three marriages later, I have a different perspective on the phrase and on love itself. I now know that it really is possible — preferable, in fact — to love more than one person at a time. In different ways and for different reasons, I love many people. Unconditionally.
Tomorrow, although I don’t have an official valentine in my life right now, I plan to celebrate the day by freely distributing “I love you’s” to anyone who needs to hear it.
And I will buy myself some dark chocolate. Because, you know, every day is chocolate day.
* Kathy Collins is a storyteller, actress and freelance writer whose “Sharing Mana’o” column appears every Wednesday. Her email address is kcmaui913@gmail.com.