When at work where other people can overhear, I used to reply “the same to you, and more of it!”. Covers all the bases.
Similarly, when I bow out of my usual lunch posse to have lunch with my wife if she’s in the area, I claim I’m “seeing my ex-girlfriend” for lunch. Which is true; she’s the last woman I dated before getting married, eh? (I do let any actually shocked co-workers in on the joke.)
I do draw the line somewhere, though. I can vividly recall the idea springing into my head as the Zero Minute approached at my own wedding, to respond to the judge’s question, “Do you take this woman to be your lawful wedded wife…” by taking a coin out of my pocket and flipping it before saying “I do”. I think I would have been dead before the coin hit the back of my hand, though.
Oh, yeah. You would have been a hunk of dead meat the second the coin left your thumb. I thought of doing something like that at my wedding, too. Thought again, and just smiled and said what I was supposed to say. For some reason, women don’t think stuff like that is funny. Mystery of the sexes…
Hey, not all women! I usually think it’s hysterical. In fact, at our wedding, both ElzaHub and myself wanted to respond to the ‘Will you take this man/woman’ question with a shrug and an ‘I guess so.’, but we didn’t think my parents would find it funny (his would have found it hysterical).* We did get in an ‘Annyong!’ to one another as my dad dropped me off at the altar - it’s how we always say hello to each other (from Arrested Development) and it just seemed fitting that we say it at the altar.
*For those thinking we don’t take our vows seriously, I needed something to keep me from crying at the altar. I was desperately trying not to burst into tears while we were saying our vows, and luckily, without meaning to, I started talking over our minister instead of letting him finish the responses for me to repeat, which made me giggle. Had I not done that, both of us would have been blubbering idiots.
“I love you too, but you still have to clean the snake pit.”
This response is one I remember hearing in my Navy days. I was in the engineroom standing watch and one of the lower seniority M-Div guys went to the LPO for the Division and asked if there was a task he wanted done.
He was told to go to the segregated bilge outboard of the shaft coming from #1 engineroom and clean it up. This particular bilge was known by the affectionate name of The Snake Pit.
Now, if any of you have experience with nautical matters you’ll know that bilges are gross, oily, things full of everything that can fall down in an engineroom, including both vomit and excreta. (I can neither confirm nor deny having used a bilge for a urinal while on watch.) To say that cleaning them was an unpleasant and unpopular job is understating things.
Segregated bilges were worse. First, unlike the regular bilges these often lacked a means of pumping the water out of the bilges, or if they had the means to be pumped dry, they were only rarely used. So, any organic material that fell into a segregated bilge would often have time to ferment, under a film of oil, making for a truly vile cleaning experience.
So, in a desperate effort to avoid a messy, sweaty, and disgusting task the junior mechanic turned to the LPO and said, “But Mike, man, I looooooove you.” Which got a chorus of laughs. Mike’s response brought great hoots, however.
I have absolutely no experience with it being anything like mutual, or at least the same meaning of love.
However, I can say that if you’re dating your best friend who is trying to figure out why he thought he was gay for several years but has been finding himself immensely attracted to girls as of late, and he says, “I love you”, the appropriate reaction is not “Oh, shit.”
But he always tells me he loves me when he drops me off at work - every single time - and if he forgets, he stops at a pay phone and calls me to tell me.
[tangent]My girlfriend’s and my favorite cheezy “audible” on yahoo messenger is the Happy Tree Friends Disco:Roar…the orange one, on the far left, looks like a beaver with an orange afropuff, but I believe he’s supposed to be a lion…or something.[/tangent]
Request/statement/question from Crusoe (I don’t know which it was, I wasn’t paying attention).
Me: Love you too babe.
I was doing that thing were you just try to drop in whatever you think is the right response and hope for the best. I haven’t tried it since, it annoyed him quite a lot!
