Myself, not very. I never did it much with my parents and I’ve only been close enough with one girl in my life. It sounds gay when you do it with one of your buddies too.
That doesn’t mean the emotion is not real if you don’t vocalize it. I have a great amount of appreciation and respect for lots of people in my life. I jus don’t tell them.
Not sure why. I think it’s because saying it without really feeling it is very disrespectful and most peoe dont want to make that blunder. But I think we’d all be a lot better off if we did take the chance once in a while.
It feels awkward for me to say to anyone but my kid. I eventually get mostly used to it if I’m in a relationship where we say it, but it takes a while and I don’t say it first (I mean, I’ll say it first on that particular day, but not the first time ever). And I love my family just as much as any family who goes around declaring their love for each other all the damn time, but it’s still makes me a bit uncomfortable to say.
I do too readily. I’ve tried to cut down on its usage and have been mostly successful. One day, though, my assistant called me on business and at the end of the call, I said, “Love you”. :eek: That’s when I realized it was habit rather than twoo wuv.
The last time I said “I love you” to my dad, I didn’t know it would be the last time I would ever speak to him (he died very shortly after our final phone call).
For that reason, I would highly recommend saying “I love you” as much as possible to anyone who you really do love before it’s too late.
However, that being said, I really only say “I love you” to people I am extremely close to such as my husband and my best friend of many years. Those are the people I truly love. I seldom say it to less close friends or extended family (I am not very close to my extended family - I haven’t seen most of them in a number of years). I will say it if one of them says it first, because it would be jerkish not to, but I don’t really feel compelled to say it first. To me, the love I felt for my parents when they were alive and the love I feel for my husband now is in a different category than the general positive regard I feel for an uncle I last saw in person 10 years ago.
Only with my daughters, and when she was alive, my mom. The rest of our family was loving but a bit standoffish. So even on holidays there wasn’t much hugging or telling each other we loved. I guess it rubbed off because I’m like that now.
In my experience, most guys, even though they act like that, do really appreciate it. You just aren’t supposed to show it.
Anyways, I don’t overly easily use “I love you,” although I don’t find it hard to say if I mean it. However, I did notice that I get too used to saying “Love ya” as a form of good bye to relatives, to the point that I do it to friends and freak them out a bit.
My reason for starting doing it in the first place is probably kinda morbid. I want to make sure that, if I never see someone again, the last thing I’ve told them is how much I love them.
When I do it with one of my buddies, it actually IS gay.
Anyway . . . My partner and I say it all the time, both to each other and to our pups and kitties.
When I was a kid, nobody in the family ever said it. There was no doubt that my mother loved us, but it took several decades to understand that my father did too, though he had an odd way of showing it. In his later years he had Alzheimer’s. Once, after he’d been diagnosed, but was still sort of able to have a conversation, we were talking on the phone, and suddenly, without context, he said, “I love you.” I don’t think he ever said that to anyone, and I wasn’t sure whether he knew what he was saying, or to whom he was saying it (for all I knew, he may have thought he was talking to Fay Wray). Then he said, “When you were a baby, I more than loved you.” If it weren’t for the Alzheimer’s I would have told him about my very first memory, and what kind of “love” occurred between us.
So anyway, even though I never heard it when I was a kid, I love saying it. And I always hear it echoed back to me . . . even from the pups and kitties.
I tossed it around far too indiscriminately in my youth, when the hormones were flying. Now, there’s only one person I would say it to, and I doubt that there will ever be another one. For that one person it has sort of stood the test of time.
She’s not actually speaking to me these days, unfortunately, but still.
I used to be one of those people who almost never said “I love you”. I remember listening to a radio segment where the host complained about how her boyfriend never said the words, even if she said “I love you” to him he’d just say “OK” or something, and realising with shock that I did that too. (To my family, not a partner, I was a young teen when this happened.) It’s not that I didn’t love them, and I wasn’t consciously avoiding it, I just did what felt comfortable and the words never happened to come out.
I’ve gotten better at it since I started dating my girlfriend. Partly because once we got together, I was so happy that I finally could say it to her I leapt at the chance, and partly because she’s a very emotionally expressive person and it was easy to follow her lead on this. Now we tell each other “I love you” every time we part company. After getting used to it with her, I can say it more frequently to my mother, siblings and best friend as well - not half as much as with my girlfriend, but more than I used to.
Daily with my wife and kids. No one else. Ever since I was a kid, I’ve had a hard time saying it to my parents, and can only think of 1-2 times that I’ve done it. Probably makes me a really bad son. I love them both, just have a hard time vocalizing it with them.
Only to my husband. My parents have never been particularly demonstrative with the ‘I love yous’, although I notice that my siblings are with their kids, and that has rubbed off on my parents so I now hear them say ‘I love you’ to their grandkids, which is nice.