love.h

a helper file for early relationship conversations

Correspondent: One or more recipients to be named later.
Date: The near future. I haven’t actually sent this one yet.

Dear [Correspondent],

I love you.

Actually, I’ve loved you for a while now, which might be surprising under the circumstances. But I can’t just tell you that, because it’s very likely that you’ll misunderstand me.

Here’s the preamble that you’ll need, when you get my actual love letter.

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Most people don’t take the time to define what they mean, when they say “I love you.” That phrase has a standard meaning in our culture, or so they believe, if they stop to think about it at all, which they don’t.

And if you stop and define your terms before you say “I love you” — or worse, if someone says “I love you” to you and you reply with “what do you mean by that?” — well, that’s just not how it’s done. You’re already supposed to know! Everyone else does!

I guess I’m not everyone else, because I mean something pretty specific by “I love you,” and it’s not very close to the fuzzy standard definition, whatever that even is, so I like to take my time and explain myself. Problem solved —

Except now I have a new problem, which is that I sometimes I arrive at love (by my definition) pretty fast, much faster than the norm. So there’s this race. I have to explain what I mean by love, fast fast fast, almost as soon as I meet someone new that I really like, because pretty soon I’m going to love them and I want to have my definition out there before I blurt out the fateful and frankly terrifying words, “I love you.”

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It’s pretty simple.

When I say I love you, I mean:

I believe I have seen at least some of your character, your nature, your self, and I admire what I have seen. I feel drawn to it, maybe very strongly.

That’s it.

That’s the whole thing. There’s nothing else smuggled in there.

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My sense is that most people bundle a lot of implications into their declarations of love. When they say they love you, they’re also implying promises about how they will behave in the future, they’re conveying expectations. They’re making predictions about what will happen next, about what kind of relationship they expect to have, and about the relative priority of the loved one over everyone else.

I don’t mean any of that.

So just to head off some possible wrong interpretations:

Me saying “I love you” does not implicitly request or expect any change from you whatsoever; in particular you do not need to feel any particular way or say those words back, and nothing terrible will happen if you don’t. (If you do say them back, I will probably ask you what you meant!)

Me saying “I love you” definitely does not mean that I don’t love other people! I love loads of other people, and if I say “I love you” to you for the first time, then it is probably true that I love the others much more intensely and deeply than I currently love you!

Me saying “I love you” doesn’t mean that our relationship has “escalated,” whatever that itself even means. My concept of relationship is far too multidimensional to have a way to impose a clean total ordering on “escalation level.” There are a lot of ways for us to interact that can vary independently, and I think it’s best to consider each of those on its own merits rather than having some kind of giant step function that unilaterally advances every dimension because I said three words to you.

It doesn’t even mean that we have to have “a relationship” in any usual sense at all! I love some people with whom I have never had a close relationship, I just love them quietly from afar. I have loved people and then decided it was better not to spend a lot of time and resources on them, because we couldn’t find a solid win/win deal with each other, we didn’t fit right.

Me saying “I love you” doesn’t mean that you have to be more delicate, or considerate, or deferential, or anything like that. I don’t claim any special status by fiat. Just because I said I love you doesn’t mean you can’t de-escalate, or take more space for yourself, if that’s what’s right for you. Your options remain fully open.

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Because there’s nothing smuggled in, love doesn’t have to be rare. I get to love a lot, without things getting unnecessarily weighed down and complicated.

Some people now object: “There should be magic words, words that are rare, so that when you say them, they really mean something.”

To those people I say: First, the words “I love you” do really mean something to me, we went over that already.

And second, you are allowed to conduct your life however you would like, it is okay that we are different. But for myself, I don’t want to use a three word phrase, two words of which are pronouns, to express something so unique and special that I reserve it for just one or two or three people in my entire life. When I have something especially profound and personal to say to a central figure, someone uniquely cherished across my lifespan, I use more words than that, because it will take more words to express what specific thing I actually mean.

Furthermore I think it is something of a failure of our species that most people do seem to think “I love you” has a universal, perfectly understood shared meaning, and that the meaning is something as banal as “you’re in my lifetime top three, baby.”¹

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What if I’m wrong? What if I blurt out “I love you” and I realize later that I don’t?

First I ask, what would it even mean to be wrong?

Because “I love you” does not mean “so let’s be monogamous with each other forever,” the stakes are actually pretty low. If I am wrong, then all I lose are Bayes points.²³

So let’s say I’m wrong. What was I wrong about? There are only two pieces. I could be wrong about having actually seen clearly, or I could be wrong about my own opinions. Like maybe I saw clearly, and thought I admired them, and then realized later that no, I didn’t admire them after all.

That second one is a little silly. I think I’m just not confused about what I like. My preferences do sometimes shift over time. I learn more about how certain characteristics play out. Mostly my bar gets higher, it takes more to earn my admiration. So I guess in some cases I become retroactively “wrong” about who I love, in that if I met them today, I would not generate love from scratch.

This seems minor. If the Gretta of a thousand years from now has seen such splendors that she would no longer fall for the loved ones of today, I don’t think that is a good reason for the Gretta of now to pass them by.

Okay — so that leaves seeing clearly. What can go wrong there?

Well, obviously this part goes wrong! Nobody has ever done this correctly, ever!

All I ever have is a model of the person, and no model is ever fully correct in every particular.

So — is my model mostly pretty correct, as far as it goes? Does the model have enough coverage? And does it have enough detail?

Correctness first. My model might be incorrect because they lied on purpose, because they had their guard up and were hiding behind a mask, or because I fooled myself and fell in love with a construct that did not sufficiently resemble the person I thought I loved.

The correctness question is purely a skill issue on my part. I need to observe carefully and without bias, especially early on, and form the clearest picture I can, with as little wishful thinking as I can manage, and this will give me the data I need.

Also it helps if the person is not a skilled pathological liar, but if they’re that good at lying, I guess I don’t feel too terrible about falling for it.

What about coverage? People are many-faceted, they often behave different ways under different conditions. You never really know someone…

… until you’re in a crisis
… until you say no to them
… until you travel with them
… until you see them angry
… until you live with them
… until after they’re dead

(A quick web search yields many more suggestions, if you’re looking for date planning inspo.)

I think that’s all correct. I’d actually leave off the end of the sentence and simply say, “You never really know someone.”

But I also think it’s possible to form a good picture pretty fast, if you’re trying.

Usually, when I tell someone I love them, I have already noticed some of their unattractive facets, and I’m well aware there are likely to be more. And it is possible, in theory, that I will learn something later that will cast my entire picture of them in a new light and make everything fascinating about them look sickening instead.

Here I rely again on my own powers of observation and truth-seeking and on what I know of the probability distributions in our species. If I get to the point of saying “I love you” ten thousand times I will probably make some bad mistakes (but also, wow, my classifier will be so good by the end of that training run).

Most unattractive facets are not bad enough for me to unsee and unadmire the good things I already noticed — and so the love is not made wrong. There may be a new cap on how close we get, in what ways. If you’re a miserable travel companion, then I will not want to travel with you! But that’s okay, that doesn’t undercut my love for you.

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I enjoy getting to know worthwhile people. I have a lot of practice at it. In the same way that I can assess a potential rental house in about twenty minutes and correctly predict whether I will be happy living there, I can often get to know someone new pretty fast. I see them as clearly as I can, and then I just know. Do I love them? It’s not a hard question.

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Preamble done! Actual love letter(s) to follow. I wish I’d factored out love.h years ago, it would have saved me a ton of work. I am feeling some programmer-shame for not doing it sooner.

1. So this raises the question: if it’s such a bad phrase, why do I want to use it at all? I do know (and love!) at least one person who rejects the phrase on exactly those grounds.

My reply is that these words do still possess a little of the magical fairy dust, for me; they’re the words in every movie and every romance novel. They feel nice in my mouth and they feel nice to hear.

No matter what the specifics are of what they mean, clearly they’re strongly positively valanced.

So I like to use them, and use them freely. And why shouldn’t I get to have nice things?

2. I search in vain for an online definition I can just link to, and I do not find one. Alas.

I’ll just rephrase. “If I am wrong, then all I lose is a little pride.” That’s close enough.

3. I do actually have a pretty good track record here. I say “I love you” pretty often, and I am struggling to think of a time when I later updated to “uh, no I don’t actually, that person turned out to be awful.” Some loves deepened a lot over time, some did not. In some cases, when I learned more, the new data told me it was better not to form a close, ongoing relationship with that person, but I still loved the part of them that I truly saw and admired in the first place.