Getting to a declaration of love in a story is not much fun. Because no matter how you lead up to it, it’s always “I love you.” So sometimes it’s good to have somebody say it without saying it, in a way that both nails their character and shows real emotion. The clip below (terrible video) is one of my favorite examples of that, from a guy who was absolute rubbish at being serious and expressing his feelings. It was killing him to say it, but he was losing her because he couldn’t say it. So he said it his way. This show, Psych, was mostly farce, but I cared about the characters so it worked on other levels, too. (You can skip the ending, it’s just a lot of kissing.). The point here is, sometimes saying it without saying it is better than saying it.
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My favorite declaration scene ever was from The Gilmore Girls when Luke says to Lorelai, “Just so you know, I’m in. I’m all in.” I thought that was the most romantic thing I ever heard.
(Maybe because I’ve been waiting my whole life for someone to be all in with me. Sigh.)
Deborah, I hope you have that experience someday. I was married twice, and did not have that experience. I don’t know which is worse.
I was married once and had a few long term relationships. The relationships weren’t bad, on the whole (the less said about the marriage the better), but alas, there was never an all in.
Seconded. I don’t think it’s ever going to happen.
Is this theater Jennifer? How are you????
We have been thinking of you.
Same here! I was just thinking of you the other day Jennifer, and wondering how you were doing.
I got lucky. I don’t remember there being an ‘all in’ moment between us. But I was all-in when I moved from Milwaukee to Ann Arbor to be with her. But at some point it became obvious that we *were* both ‘all-in’. Perhaps it was when we bought a house together, after 6 years of living together. We didn’t get married until we had been together for 18 years. She didn’t feel the need, after having been married before to someone who never ‘in’ at all, and it was obvious we weren’t going to be having kids.
But I got almost 30 years of ‘all-in’. I was just hoping for another 20.
Makes me want to watch all eight seasons of Psych just for that episode.
Makes me regret having quit on that series.
Once of the reasons I love Cait Nary’s Lucky Bounce (not all people do) is that there is a unique I love you scene. I’ll say no more.
Yep, that’s a good one.
The “I love you” too often is too saccharine or drowned in pathos or long monologues.
Showing /making the reader feel it is sooo much better imho.
The words “I love you” were very performative and manipulative in my family growing up so I was never very comfortably handing them out. My husband was from a very undemonstrative family and so didn’t say them either. But he did text me hearts, which as a millennial I just read as a cute throw-away emoji. It wasn’t until he read a text thread aloud to me for some reason that I understood he read that as “love” in his head. It was actually very sweet.
I also recall being annoyed by a character in a book being really hung up on the hero never telling her that he loved her, even though they had reached emotional commitment, were happy together and all his actions were considerate and loving. I don’t remember what book it was, or which author, although I am pretty sure it was one I liked and read regularly. It felt like it was a cheap cop-out for drama. Of course the heroine was just waiting and pining and not communicating that need to the hero, because it wouldn’t mean anything if she had to ask for it…. Ew.
So, yeah, I have some baggage on this topic and also some pretty mixed feelings about the weight it holds in our society and our representations of love and relationships. But, I am an action over words person who often feels that people are disingenuous. Comes from working the teller line for too long, I think. Once you realize that most people are lying to you on some level it is hard to turn that awareness off.
On the one hand, it’s a cute scene and it does deliver the point. On the other hand, she’s saying “it’s okay” when it’s obviously NOT okay, or she wouldn’t need time to “figure this out” on her own. And of course I hear her say that and think “what she needs to figure out is whether she can long-term tolerate this relationship in which things she wants to have articulated are not being articulated, because it’s never just the one thing.” So she’s fibbing to get him to go away and to avoid the conflict she perceives as inevitable. To me the scene reads – having never seen the show, thus no backstory or history of loving acts to support the scene – as a woman once again capitulating to a man’s stunted ability or willingness to verbalize … which annoys me. 🙂 Sure, fine, kiss, whatever.
I, like others above, grew up in an emotionally undemonstrative family. It took DECADES for me to be comfortable saying “I love you” to my parents and sibling. They are all still uncomfortable hearing it.
As a family, we do demonstrate love through actions, but there’s a distinction to be drawn between doing something because you SHOULD and doing something because you WANT TO. When the words aren’t there, it can be difficult to see when an action is motivated more by love than duty. And it does matter.
On the flip side, my husband’s family throws around the “love you” like confetti, but supportive action – the meaningful kind – is rare. When his father died and we discovered an avalanche of impending catastrophes in the family records, NOBODY helped and EVERYBODY criticized him for not doing whatever they thought he should be doing instead of the real hard stuff he had to do. They can all choke, she said vengefully.
TL;DR: my romance MCs all act, but they also verbalize. Even the one who can’t speak finds a way. 🙂
I disagree. The meaning of a line of dialogue rests upon delivery and context.
In this case, the context is that she’s walked away from him and he’s had to come find her, worried about the relationship. He does not do deep conversations, so to jolly her out of her mood, he goes for joking. She is not amused. She is not reassuring him. She flat out says this is not going to work. Her “It’s okay” is not saying “We’re fine,” it’s “I don’t want to fight about this, this is not your fault, but I cannot do this anymore.” And she clearly wants him to go away. She does tell him she needs time to think, but she also says that some things just aren’t meant to be. She’s not hiding anything, not pretending the situation is okay, she’s telling him she doesn’t want to listen to his jokes, that SHE is not okay with the situation, but that he doesn’t have to explain, justify, or otherwise waste her time by continuing the conversation. It’s the opposite of “she’s saying “it’s okay” when it’s obviously NOT okay, or she wouldn’t need time to “figure this out” on her own.”
That’s where the delivery comes in. She’s not saying that she’s okay because she’s not trying to hide the face that she’s not okay. She’s clearly unhappy, clearly distraught, clearly at the end of her rope. And while he’s making jokes, he’s also clearly not happy. He’s desperately trying to make her laugh, to defuse the situation and it’s not working, he can see that on her face. And when she tells him to go away, she’s not pretending everything’s fine, she’s clearly upset, but he goes because he knows his jokes are working.
I think it a great scene because of what the actors are doing, the context they give the dialogue, the fact that both characters are clearly unhappy even while he’s making jokes and she’s telling him that it’s okay. Something is ending here. Something does end here.
And then he comes back and tells her the truth the only way he knows how, by telling her a story. And it’s killing him, and she’s being patient but she’s not amused. And then he finally spits out that last line, and it’s a more powerful way of saying “I love you” because it tells her exactly how much he cares. And he’s serious. It’s not a punchline. She matters enough to him that he’ll give up the thing he loves best to be with her. And she doesn’t say “I love you, too,” she answers in his own language, making fun of his taste in cars, and her whole body changes, her face lights up.
Don’t judge the meaning of a line of dialogue solely on the line. Look at the context, the delivery, the body language of the speaker.
I can give you another example. There’s an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer where Spike is so enraged with Buffy that he stalks to her house with a shotgun (as I remember, could have been an ax) and when he gets to her backyard, he sees her crying on the porch steps. He drops the weapons and goes and sits beside her and puts his arm around her and they just sit there together.
Okay if you read that just on the surface, he’s a homicidal maniac and she’s a victim and he’s a horrible person (well, he’s a vampire) and she’s a mess. But in the context of the story, of who we know the characters to be, it’s a truly romantic moment. She’s not a victim, she’s been beating him up for several seasons, and he’s hopelessly in love with her and could never kill her. She’s been dead for awhile (dug herself out of her own grave) and he was in hell while she was gone, taking care of the things that she would have taken care of.
However, when words are a trigger for a reader, that wipes out everything else. The line I most regret writing is in Bet Me, when Min looks at Cal and thinks that any woman with a working ovary would want him. A woman who couldn’t have children wrote me and said that that line really hurt, and I was appalled because there wasn’t any context for it, it was just Min being snarky and worse than that it did nothing for the story. I hurt people for nothing. That kind of line would clearly be a trigger, and I should have seen that.
But not “It’s okay” in this context and delivery.
Re the regretted line: I’m not sure that that was an easily foreseen trigger, since the reference seems, at least out out of context, to be a reference to the ovary as a source of sex hormones rather than of babies.
I agree with Patrick. Anything can be a trigger for someone, but you can’t possibly foresee them all, and the meaning of that sentence if both clear and obviously not intended to be hurtful.
Makes me want to watch Psych again. One of the time we visited our son in Seattle we were driving to Vancouver and he insisted on getting off the highway and going to a little place called White Rock. I kept asking why and he said you’ll see. It was where they’d shot the exterior scenes for the Psych office. What a fun surprise! For me, things like that say I love you.
That was hilarious! I don’t watch TV, so never saw that before. It’s a good illustration of your point. Those three words do tend to be the hinge of most relationships, and a turning point of sorts. But they are also trite.
My family did not say those words until my father died unexpectedly of a massive MI at age 55. Life is tenuous and short
It’s a fun show. The earlier seasons were better. It falls into the cozy mystery plus farce genre.
My parents have only started saying it, occasionally, now that they are quite old (88 and 92). My middle sister only started saying it on a regular basis after she got and survived cancer a couple of years ago. I am still not comfortable saying it, but I do make the effort. Ah, families.
That was charming!
Words without action actually are painful. I hurt when my mom says she loves me because it’s inconsistent with her actions ( years of calls where she never asked about me but told me everything in her life, refusal to help when I had significant medical crisis).
Conversely my son rarely say it but when my mom had her catastrophic accident he reached out to reassure me that I had done every thing I can to keep her safe and I should not feel guilty. When he says I love you I know he means it.
I think people define love differently, and you decide whether to accept another person’s definition. I’ve read lots of romances, (probably several hundred Harlequins) and I am also the least romantic person I know. I actually worry that my feelings aren’t real or as deep. Imposter syndrome much?
In one of my books, the man had always just had an apartment. He and the woman lived in an area where winters had lots of snow. He bought a house and presented her with a gift. It was a garage door opener for his double car garage. That was his way of saying he loved her.