Three Little Words by Phillip

Love and marriage

Love and marriage

Go  together  like  a

Horse and carriage

     So we heard in the fifties; archaic expressions to bolster old-fashioned values. We didn’t think how the song was a commercial jingle rather than a poetic and musical reflection on human activity. It was show music for comedy. The simplicity of the words belied the complexity of the relationships, even the ones being portrayed on the screen. But this fanciful appeal to the medieval literary tradition of romantic love with its Lords and Ladies, royalty and riches, princes and princesses, troubadours and trouveres, lutes and loyalties, knights in shining armor riding trusty steeds and hoping to win the attention of the most important Lady of the realm; scenes from movies with white dresses, tiaras, and happily ever afters. It’s a dream of Edenic idealism based on the combination of three little words: I love you.

     Back when I was nineteen, my girlfriend manipulated me into saying those words to her. Of course I had heard the words in movies, but not in the house in which I grew up. I had no doubt I was loved appropriately by my parents and that they loved one another. Their actions showed these truths. Still, they didn’t go around saying it. In fact, few people I knew said the words which were were groan words for us boys watching movies. We so hated that romantic syrup, and thus I was unprepared to say it to my girlfriend. With great difficulty I played my part in the fantasy and finally stuttered out, “I love you.”

     Analytical logic demands that I was unprepared because what I felt for her was something other than love. Oh to understand the relationship between words and feelings, something that’s always been difficult for me. Anyway, I did learn to say the three words in combination to my girlfriend. I believed them although the feelings I had were more related to sexual hopes than falling in love.

     So I married the woman who taught me to say “I love you.” I practiced and practiced. I loved her in practical ways that made for a fine marriage. We liked and respected one another. We treated one another with kindness and love. I didn’t use the words to manipulate, but I did employ them daily. I taught them to my children. I was judicious in their use, and when I fell in love with a man, I didn’t use them with him for quite a few years. Eventually, I signed my letters to him, “Love, Phillip.” He never fell into line with my practice; so I noted. We never talked about love. I came to love other people as well—women and men. I said the words to a few. One young man said them to me. I explained my perspective, that these words can never mean the same thing to two people. Feeling meets feeling. What fantasies arise from such feelings need to be handled with caution should a couple of people want their sexual attraction and deeper affection to grow into a lasting relationship.

     Gay male romance may focus more on “Harder, deeper, faster,” than on pledges of “love and marriage”, yet even “Harder, deeper, faster,” is a convention not original to gay men. It surely became a focus due to the combination of two testosterone-laden individuals getting together sexually. These days modern gay experience does play with hopes of love and marriage in a growing movement for equality before the law. Perhaps American gay men want to say to one another “I love you harder, deeper, and faster.” Still love, words of love, and that potent combination of I, love, and you have a long history, and most American relationships want it to become personal.

     Words have creative potential. It’s an old tradition from any number of cultures. The ancient Hebrews believed in such creativity. For them, Yahweh called into existence the moon and stars, earth and innumerable varieties of life forms. God spoke. It’s a metaphor with great power in the imagination.

     Shall we not sing the possibility of creative love? After all St. Valentine’s Day falls tomorrow and creative love is a romance, one to pursue in both feelings and thoughts. Perhaps we need to approach “I love you” with the realism of my late mother-in-law who advised her daughter about sex in marriage: “You’ll get used to it.” Yet even this practicality didn’t mitigate her daughter’s fairy tale fantasy about marriage. The advice probably did help her survive the separation and the divorce that ended it.

Denver, 2012

About the Author

Phillip Hoyle lives in Denver and spends his time writing, painting, giving massages, and socializing. His massage practice funds his other activities that keep him busy with groups of writers and artists, and folk with pains. Following thirty-two years in church work, he now focuses on creating beauty and ministering to the clients in his practice. He volunteers at The Center leading “Telling Your Story.”

Read more at Phillip's blog: artandmorebyphilhoyle.blogspot.com