The words you weren't given as a child are the hardest words to learn how to give back as an adult, and I'm finding out, at thirty-eight, just how much harder than I had assumed
I want to write about something I am not proud of, and that I have not, in thirty-eight years, found a way to do anything about.
I have never said the words "I love you" out loud to anyone. Not to my mother. Not to my father. Not to my sister, who I would, if it came to it, take a bullet for. Not to any of the partners I have had across two decades of adult life, including the partner in New York I was with for three years and the partner in Manila I was with for two and the various shorter relationships in between.
I want to be precise about what I mean by this. I have, on a few occasions, mumbled "you too" in response to someone else saying the words to me. I have, in writing, in birthday cards and the occasional text message, produced the letters that spell the phrase. I have, in some sense, communicated the substance of the sentiment in a great many other ways, across a great many other channels, over the course of my life. What I have not done is, in any clean and direct sense, looked at another human being and said the three words out loud, on my own initiative, in the way that other people seem to be able to.
This is not, I want to be clear, because the feeling is not there. The feeling is there. The feeling has been there, for various people, for as long as I can remember. The feeling has not been the problem. The problem has been, more accurately, the structural impossibility of converting the feeling into the words. The conversion is, in my case, a piece of equipment that does not work. The not-working has been the case for so long that I have, in some real way, stopped expecting it to work.
The household that did not say them either
I grew up in a household where nobody ever said the words. I want to be clear about what this means, because the cultural register tends to interpret this kind of disclosure as a sign of an unloving household, and the household I grew up in was not, in any obvious sense, unloving.
My parents loved each other. My parents loved my sister and me. The love was demonstrated, across decades, in the various ways the British middle class of their generation demonstrated love. The careful provision. The attendance at the events. The small ongoing logistical support that ran throughout my childhood. The love was, by any reasonable measure, real.
What the household did not do, ever, in my entire childhood, was put the love into the specific three-word phrase that the cultural register has agreed is the standard articulation of it. The phrase was not, in our household, part of the available vocabulary. My father did not say it. My mother did not say it. They did not say it to us. They did not, as far as I ever observed, say it to each other. The phrase was, in some real way, structurally absent from the air of the house in which I was raised.
I did not, as a child, register this as an absence. The absence was simply what the household had. Other households, in television programs and films, had the phrase in active rotation. I assumed, at the time, that this was a feature of those other households that did not particularly apply to mine. The not-applying did not, in my childhood experience, feel like a deficit. It was just how the household I lived in worked.
What I now suspect is that the absence was not, in fact, neutral. The absence was doing something to my nervous system that I did not, at the time, have the equipment to recognize. The absence was installing, in me, the structural assumption that the words were not, in fact, something that got said out loud between people who loved each other. The structural assumption became, by long habit, identity. By the time I was twenty, I was a person who did not say the words. By the time I was thirty, I was a person for whom saying the words felt almost physically impossible. By the time I was thirty-eight, the not-saying had become so thoroughly the texture of how I conducted intimate relationships that I had, in some real way, stopped noticing that other people in my life were saying the words and that my responses to their sayings were, by any reasonable measure, structurally inadequate.
The woman in New York
I want to describe one specific situation, because the situation has been on my mind for the last few years and I think the description does some work that the abstract account cannot.
I was in a relationship in New York, in my late twenties, that lasted about three years. The woman, who I have written about elsewhere under various circumstances, was good to me in the ways that mattered most. She was warm. She was patient. She was, in some real way, more available to me, emotionally, than anyone I had ever been in a relationship with. The relationship was, by any reasonable accounting, the closest I have come to the standard cultural model of a substantive adult partnership.
About six months into the relationship, she said the words to me for the first time. We were in her apartment in Brooklyn. She had cooked something. We had been talking, after the dinner, about various things. There was a small pause in the conversation. She looked at me, in a particular way I can still picture clearly, and she said, "I love you, Daniel."
I want to describe what happened in my body at that moment, because the description is the article. What happened was that the words she said reached me, were received, were registered, and produced, in my interior, a corresponding feeling. The feeling was there. The feeling was real. The feeling, in some honest sense, matched the feeling she was, in saying the words, expressing.
What did not happen, in any way available to me, was the production of the same words in my own mouth. I tried. I am not, by my own honest accounting, exaggerating when I say I tried. I opened my mouth. The mouth produced, after a small pause that I can also still picture clearly, the words "I know." Just that. "I know." Followed by a small attempt at a warm look that did not, by any reasonable measure, succeed in conveying what the warm look was trying to convey.
The "I know" was, on its face, a disaster of a response. I know this. I knew it at the time. She, to her credit, did not make it a disaster. She produced a small confused half-smile, and we went back to talking about whatever we had been talking about. The moment passed. The moment did not, however, fully recover. There was, between us, a small structural fact installed in the relationship that night, which was that she had said the words and I had not been able to. The fact remained, in some real way, for the remaining two and a half years of the relationship. She said the words, at various points, again. I, at various points, produced increasingly desperate substitutes for the corresponding response. The substitutes were never, on any of those occasions, the actual words.
The relationship ended for various reasons, most of which had nothing directly to do with this. But I have, in the years since it ended, occasionally wondered whether the not-saying was, in some structural way, what made the eventual ending possible. The not-saying had built, in our relationship, a small ongoing asymmetry. The asymmetry was that she was, by saying the words, doing a kind of work in the relationship that I was, by not saying them, not doing. The work was real. The work was not, in our case, distributed equally. The asymmetry, across three years, was, I now suspect, more corrosive than either of us recognized at the time.
What I now understand, that I did not understand then
What I understand now, that I did not understand at twenty-eight in Brooklyn, is that the not-being-able-to-say was not, in any sense, a failure of the feeling. The feeling was, in her case, fully present. The feeling was, in some real way, more present than I had previously been able to recognize. What was failing was the apparatus for converting the feeling into the specific verbal output that the cultural register had agreed was the appropriate articulation of it. The apparatus was the thing that did not work. The apparatus had been built, in my childhood, by a household that had not, in any model I had access to, demonstrated what the working version of the apparatus would have looked like.
This is, I want to be clear, not an excuse. The apparatus is mine. I am, by this point in my adult life, the only person who can do the work of repairing it. The fact that the apparatus was installed in conditions I did not choose does not relieve me of the responsibility of doing what I can with it in adulthood. The not-saying, across the years since New York, has had real costs in real relationships. The costs are not, by any reasonable accounting, the fault of the woman in Brooklyn or of the women who came after her. The costs are, much more accurately, the structural consequence of an apparatus that has not, despite my having had thirty-eight years in which to do so, been adequately repaired.
What I am, slowly, trying to learn
I have started, in the last year or so, a small private practice that I have not, until now, written about, and that I want to mention here because the writing about it is, in some real way, part of the practice.
The practice is that I have started, on a few occasions, saying the words out loud, in private, to myself, in the direction of people I love. I will be alone in my apartment, and I will say, quietly, in the direction of my brother, who is in London, "I love you." I will say, in the direction of my mother, "I love you." I will say, in the direction of my father, "I love you." The words, when produced in the privacy of an empty room, do not produce the small physical resistance that they produce when there is another person in front of me. The empty room can absorb them. The empty room does not, by its presence, activate the part of my nervous system that, in the presence of another person, makes the words structurally impossible.
The practice is, by any reasonable measure, small. It is not, in any visible sense, doing the work of repairing the original apparatus. It is, however, a small ongoing demonstration to myself that my mouth can, in fact, produce the words. The mouth has the capacity. The mouth has not, in some real sense, ever been allowed to use the capacity in the presence of another human being. The empty-room version is the version I currently have access to. The empty-room version is, in some real way, the start of being able to access the in-person version, even if the in-person version is still, by my honest accounting, some years away.
I want, before I die, to have said the words out loud, at least once, to each of the people in my life I have, in some real way, loved. I do not know if I will manage it with all of them. My father, in particular, may not, by the time I get there, still be alive to receive them. I am working on this, slowly. The work is uncomfortable. The work is also, on the available evidence, the most important conversational work available to me in the time I have remaining. The not-having-been-given-the-words as a child is not, by my honest accounting, a sufficient reason to spend the rest of my adult life not giving them back. The work is mine. The work is, finally, starting. The work is, in some real way, more overdue than I would like to admit. The starting is, at thirty-eight, the part I can manage. The rest, I will have to figure out.
