You, too

I was thinking about relationships the other day, as I’m known to do as of late. I mean, it’s been three years since my last legitimate relationship failed (I don’t count Sean, since that was more of a massive, unlabeled mistake spent almost entirely 300 miles apart). So naturally, I like to think about these 2 (and a half, if you really want to count Sean as something) relationships from time to time. I don’t have a new one to move on to, so I’m left constantly examining them. And I realized something.

Every boy I’ve ever dated (including Sean) told me that he loved me, and every single time it was over the phone.

Mike told me he loved me about three days after we started dating (keep in mind, we’re both barely 15). We’d been talking on the phone and he had to go, so he hurriedly panted “love you!” and then promptly hung up. I was sitting on the carpet of my room pawing through the remnants of my makeup collection, sizing it up like the 15-year-old girl I was. The first time a boy told me he loved me was, as you can tell, very romantic.

Cody told me he loved me via text messaging, a few months after we started dating. At least this time the time line made more sense. We were texting about something else and somehow it came up that he sort of wanted to say something to me but he didn’t want me to freak out about it and I told him I felt the same [as of yet unnamed, ambiguous] feeling, and then he told me he loved me. D’awww.

Sean told me he loved me over the phone at 2am during the summer before my senior year of high school. It was even more of a surprise than the other two, partially because we’d met maybe once at this point, and partially because the way things were going I thought he just wanted to be friends. In fact, just hours before this phone conversation, I’d stood out on my deck, in the rain, and decided I didn’t want to get overly attached to him because I was bound to get hurt. Then he dropped the L bomb and what was I supposed to do? I loved him too, with my whole heart, so much that it sometimes physically hurt. But of course, I ended up getting hurt. We won’t go into that again, though.

The other common thread between these three boys was that when I started nearing my decision to break up with them (or, in Sean’s case, my decision to honor his decision to go into his first year of college unattached) I started this “you, too” thing. They’d say they loved me at the end of some conversation, and because I wasn’t really feeling the love anymore but I didn’t want to hurt them just yet, I’d reply with a simple “you, too.” Of course, this was more obvious than I’d originally thought it would be, because each boy picked up on it immediately and got very, very upset.

There really isn’t a point to this post, other than to remark about the similarities between my sole three romantic interludes. Maybe it was also to muse on the fact that, for being so easily “loved”, I sure spend a heck of a lot of time getting rejected. It’s just strange, I suppose, that every notable romantic endeavor I’ve ever entered into at some point included the words “I love you.” Because people say love isn’t an easy thing to attain, and yet something about me inspires it in the men I’m romantically attached to. I wonder what, if anything, that says about me.