The L Word

It was Valentine's Day not too long ago.

I'm trying to think of the first time someone told me they loved me, romantically.  And what did that mean to me?

Upon reflection, I'm usually the one to say it first, and I'm not sure how I feel about that.  If I squint really hard and remember back, I can remember the breathless butterfly feeling leading up to it all.  That nervous energy was just vibrating throughout my body and it needed somewhere to go, I think, so it just came out of my mouth as a blurted, "I love you."  Now I'm not sure if what I was feeling was actually love, or just the excitement of someone reciprocating my attraction to them.

While I say that, I'm trying to look back with as much objectivity as possible.  I've said a romantic "I love you" to four people in my life, and three of those relationships ended, so obviously the loving feeling ended for one or both of us at some point.  And it's not as though I didn't truly love each of them at some point in our relationship.  But the more I think about it, that first declaration probably had more to do with my feelings for me than it did my feelings for them.

I can pinpoint my insecurity to a particular year in school.  I don't remember being popular, although being popular is not traumatic, so it probably didn't register if I ever was.  That particular year, though, I was emphatically not popular. It feels really strange to say that my premature professions of love to men actually have to do with girls, but here we are.

Those girls were mean and they made me feel like garbage. They would make fun of how I looked and talked and dressed.  Once, one of them offered to tell me a secret, then shrieked directly into my earhole.  On more than one occasion, some girl I knew to dislike me would quietly inform me that some boy who had never given me the time of day had a crush on me.  Even at the time, I was certain this was a plot to get me to approach the boy so they could watch him recoil in horror at the idea of being romantically linked with me and then point and laugh.  I never took the bait.  

I didn't make it hard for them. Because of an infestation of lice the year before, I wore my hair in braids, which I was unfortunately not particularly skilled at styling.  I wore skirts and lace-collared blouses and floral stirrup pants my mother bought for me that year, which happened to be in the thick of the grunge era when everyone else was wearing ripped jeans, plaid shirts and bodysuits.  My parents thought nirvana was a state of perfect quietude.  I didn't have my finger on the pulse of the most popular music, although truthfully, the mean girls didn't either.  We had a local AM radio station that played mainly country music  One of them had a cousin in the city who would send her tapes of CHUM FM, which we were allowed to play at lunch on the classroom tapedeck.  In my mind, Salt-n-Pepa's "Shoop" is followed by Ace of Bass' "The Sign" is followed by The Proclaimers' "500 Miles" because of one of those tapes...in the same way I think most early millennial Canadians start humming the intro to "Semi-Charmed Life" any time they hear "Song 2" by Blur.  They know why.

ANYWAY, the whole thing is that I didn't think I was cool enough, cute enough, fashionable enough for someone to love me.  When it seemed like someone even MIGHT love me, the unbelievable excitement of the idea would bubble up from that spot in my stomach, past my larynx and out my mouth.  Because maybe if I let them know I was serious, they'd stick around.  

They always said it back, though.  And they usually did stick around for a good while.  Maybe because they had endured similar abuse to their developing egos in their formative years and felt the same excited vibrations I did.  Maybe because they didn't want to be rude.  Maybe they actually did love me but were too nervous to say. But in the end, there was always an end.

This doesn't seem very uplifting, and I'm sorry about that.  The moral is that eventually, I learned to exercise some control over that crazy vibration I was feeling and to be more considered about when I actually brought the L word to the table. Part of that came from acknowledging that those girls were just not being good people and that I was worthy of romantic attention. So, that's good, right?

The answer, by the way, is my grade 9 boyfriend, in a note he wrote to me, in which he says that if it's true that I love him, then the feeling is mutual, which is kind of a cop-out. I didn't see it that way at the time.