oh so meaning

the weight of the phrase "i love you" struck me as something very awkward. it happened when i woke up at 4:45pm. first i thought about writing it on a card. then i thought about saying it on the phone. lastly i thought about the face to face utterance. i think that people use the phrase mindlessly. the expression is not a joke, but it has so many levels and casual uses that there is only a general notion of what the fuck one is talking about when using it.



my problem is this;

when i think of love... i think of my mother, my father, my high school girlfriend of 3-4 years, some of my friends and some of my extended family. i don't love them all the same way. but there is certainly a complex mass of life-things going on in my relations with a person if i am willing to say that i love them. however i am not able to identify the characteristics to the point of a clear love-picture, and that makes me think that i am dealing with a folk-psychology relic. this ambiguous love-word.

i say "all right, i love you" or "i love you too" in phone conversations with three separate people consistently. and it never feels strange... but the only time that there are no questions floating in my thought space (whatever the fuck that means.... representational theory of mind, bitch) are when i say it to my mother. i think i have a grasp on what that mother-son love is. but when i say it to my high school girlfriend... i have no idea what it means exactly... it is not the mutual engulfing love that was once part of the equation. it is certainly not mother-love. but it is not casual friend love either. the word love just blurs over many realms.

is it "we have sex"-love? is it "i would give my life to save yours"-love? is it "irrational biological ties"-love? is it "we've been through a lot together"-love? i want to know what i am saying when i say that"i love". unfortunately, just like the rest of our existence we tend to smudge these details because we can survive with unrefined concepts. perhaps a simple retort would be that there are different kinds of love. but i would argue that every instance that is claimed to be an instance of "love" is going to have unique characteristics. therefore a normative definition should be put in place... because if we don't designate some common characteristics then we truly have no idea what the utterance means.

maybe a subjective instantiative definition is acceptable... but i think it leads to strange questions;

do i mean, come over here i care about you so much.... or do i mean, damn girl, show me your ass and fellate me? could depend on the moment and the boner.

dudes don't usually tell other dudes that they love them. unless something strange is going on. drugs, impending doom, etc.