Why is it so difficult to say something simple when it matters so much?
There are sentences that require almost no vocabulary and an unreasonable amount of courage.
I love you is one of them.
Three ordinary words. No metaphor. No elaborate grammar. No particularly sophisticated vocabulary. And yet, depending on who is standing in front of us, they can feel more exposing than an entire autobiography.
So we soften them.
We turn them into jokes.
We hide them inside teasing.
We send them as a meme.
We cook dinner instead.
We say text me when you get home and pretend it was merely practical.
Or, occasionally, we compare someone to a Croc. Perhaps this is not an inability to express love. Perhaps it is one of the ways we protect ourselves while trying to express it.
The Problem With Saying the Obvious
We tend to imagine that emotional honesty should become easier as we become adults.
In reality, many of us become more sophisticated at avoiding it.
As children, affection can be remarkably direct. We run towards people. We climb into their arms. We announce that we missed them without wondering whether the admission makes us look needy.
Then something happens. We become aware of ourselves being observed.
We learn that affection can be embarrassing. That enthusiasm can be uncool. That caring too much can make us vulnerable. We discover irony, and irony becomes one of the great emotional technologies of adulthood.
It gives us distance.
Instead of saying: I really missed you.
We say: Well, look who finally decided to show up.
Instead of: I'm worried about you.
We say: Try not to die.
Instead of: I love spending my life with you.
We send a photograph of something ridiculous and write: This reminded me of you.
The feeling is still there.
We have simply placed a small layer of comedy between the feeling and the world. And sometimes, between the feeling and ourselves.
Humor as a Safety Net
Psychology has long recognized that humor can operate as a coping mechanism. But its role in intimacy is more interesting than simply “making difficult things easier.”
Humor can create psychological distance without creating emotional distance. That distinction matters.
A joke can allow us to approach an emotion while retaining enough distance to survive the embarrassment of having revealed it.
This is particularly visible in romantic relationships. Two people can spend an entire evening discussing absolutely nothing, laughing about the same absurd detail for the hundredth time, and somehow communicate something much deeper than I love you.
The joke becomes shared territory.
The reference nobody else understands.
The nickname that would sound ridiculous coming from anyone else.
The exaggerated impression.
The stupid photograph sent at precisely the right moment.
These things form what sociologists sometimes describe as a kind of shared symbolic world: a private collection of meanings built between two people.
The outside world sees a joke. The couple sees a history. That is one of the strange privileges of intimacy.
Eventually, you don't only know the person. You know the language that exists between you.
The Private Language of Two
Every close relationship develops its own vocabulary. Some of it is verbal. Some of it isn't.
There are gestures whose meanings would be completely invisible to anyone else. There are recurring jokes, invented words, routines, looks across a crowded room. There are objects that acquire emotional significance simply because they were present during a particular moment.
A Croc can become a love story. Not because Crocs are inherently romantic. They aren't.
But because one ridiculous little object can become attached to a memory, a joke, a person, a particular version of us.
This is how ordinary things become intimate.
A song becomes our song.
A restaurant becomes our place.
A particular mug becomes inexplicably important.
A side of the bed becomes a matter of international diplomacy.
The object itself has not changed. Its meaning has.
Psychologists studying autobiographical memory have repeatedly observed how ordinary sensory details can become powerful cues for emotional recollection. Smells, sounds, objects and places can suddenly transport us to moments that seemed insignificant when they happened.
Love does something similar. It turns the ordinary into an archive.
Why Sincerity Can Feel More Embarrassing Than Absurdity
There is something peculiar about modern emotional culture.
We live surrounded by declarations of love.
Songs. Films. Valentine's cards. Wedding vows. Instagram captions. Poems.
And yet, when it comes to our own lives, sincerity can feel almost indecent.
We can post something devastatingly beautiful about love online and then become incapable of looking at the person we love and saying:
I really need you.
Perhaps because performance and vulnerability are not the same thing. A romantic sentence written by someone else is safe.
A romantic sentence written by you, addressed to one specific person, is not. It has consequences.
The moment you say I love you, you have made something internal external. You have given another person access to a part of you that cannot be completely retrieved.
That is why people sometimes laugh immediately after saying something sincere.
The laugh is not necessarily evidence that the feeling is small.
Sometimes it is evidence that the feeling is enormous.
The Art of Saying It Badly
There is a particular kind of perfectionism that appears in emotional life.
We wait for the right moment. The right words. The beautiful message. The perfectly planned dinner. The handwritten letter. The cinematic sunset.
We imagine that love deserves a flawless delivery. But perfection has a strange relationship with intimacy. If everything is perfectly composed, there is almost nothing left to risk.
Awkwardness is different.
Awkwardness reveals the person behind the performance.
It says: I don't quite know how to do this. I'm embarrassed. This matters to me. I'm saying it anyway.
There is something deeply human about that.
The philosopher Søren Kierkegaard wrote extensively about anxiety as the dizziness that accompanies possibility. We tend to think of courage as the absence of fear, when often it is simply the decision to act while the fear remains.
Perhaps emotional courage works the same way.
You don't wait until saying I love you feels completely natural.
You say it while your voice sounds strange.
You say it after making a terrible joke.
You say it badly.
You say it too early.
You say it too quietly.
You say it with a metaphor involving footwear that absolutely should not be in a love letter.
And somehow, that may make it more meaningful.
When Ridiculousness Becomes Tender
There is a reason lovers become ridiculous around each other.
They sing badly.
They invent voices.
They make absurd faces.
They dance in kitchens.
They send photographs of their lunch.
They argue passionately about completely inconsequential things.
They develop strong opinions about the correct side of a bed.
From the outside, none of this looks particularly profound.
From the inside, it can be one of the clearest signs of safety.
Playfulness requires a certain suspension of self-consciousness. We become willing to look foolish because the relationship has become a space in which foolishness is survivable.
The developmental psychologist Donald Winnicott wrote about the importance of play in human development: play is not merely entertainment but a space in which the self can become spontaneous.
Perhaps mature intimacy requires something similar. A place where we can stop performing competence. Where we don't have to be impressive. Where we can be strange. Where the most sophisticated thing we can do is be completely unserious together.
This may be one of the quiet markers of love: you become less afraid of looking ridiculous in front of someone.
The Vulnerability Beneath the Joke
But there is a danger here. Humor can protect us so effectively that it can also become a hiding place.
We can become so good at joking that nobody ever gets to hear the sentence underneath the joke. I love you. I'm scared of losing you. I need you. I'm proud of you. You make my life better.
Sometimes the joke is the bridge. But eventually, someone has to cross it.
This is perhaps the difference between emotional avoidance and emotional playfulness.
Avoidance says: I will make a joke so I never have to reveal what I feel.
Playfulness says: I will make a joke because what I feel is so vulnerable that this is the only way I know how to begin saying it.
The first creates distance. The second can create intimacy.
The difference is not whether we joke.
It is whether, underneath the joke, we are willing to be seen.
Say It Before You Become Good at Saying It
Perhaps we have misunderstood what emotional maturity looks like. We often imagine it as becoming articulate enough to explain exactly what we feel.
Maybe sometimes it is simply becoming brave enough to express the feeling before we have found the perfect language.
The beautiful declaration is not necessarily the honest one. The beautifully written letter is not necessarily the most vulnerable.
Sometimes love sounds like:
Drive safely.
Did you eat?
Look at this.
Come here.
I saved you some.
Text me when you get home.
You have to see this.
And sometimes it sounds like: You are the ridiculous little heart on my Croc.
Which is objectively terrible poetry.
But perhaps poetry was never the point.
The point was recognition.
I see you.
You matter to me.
My world has become slightly more ridiculous because you are in it.
And I wouldn't have it any other way.
Coda
We spend enormous amounts of time trying to become better communicators. We learn how to negotiate. How to present. How to persuade. How to speak confidently in a room full of strangers.
And yet some of the most important conversations in our lives require none of those skills. They require something much less impressive. The willingness to be a little embarrassed. To risk sounding sentimental. To risk being laughed at. To risk saying something that cannot be made clever.
Perhaps that is why the most courageous love declarations are not always the beautiful ones. Sometimes they are awkward. Sometimes they are funny. Sometimes they make absolutely no sense. Sometimes they arrive disguised as a ridiculous comparison about a bald head that isn't even bald.
But underneath the absurdity is something very serious.
Someone is saying:
I chose you.
I notice you.
I want to share the ridiculous details of my life with you.
And I love you.
Maybe we don't need better words. Maybe we simply need the courage to use the imperfect ones we already have.
With love,
La Séance