I Love You??

Once upon a time my friend Sandy lived next to another friend named Megan in the dorms. One night, on a whim, Megan yelled out to Sandy “I love you” in an Irish accent as she was going to bed. Sandy, tickled by such a sentiment, told Megan the feeling was mutual. So began the nightly tradition of expressing love to one another before falling asleep.

Any good story needs a conflict. Sandy had a roommate, whom she had known for a longer amount of time and was arguably closer since they slept within the same four walls. Every night, this unnamed roommate had to endure the agonizing confessions of love and, finding her self alienated and the world absurd, sunk deeper into an existential crisis. And she hated Irish accents.

Often is the case, when someone lets something bottle up inside of them, the lonely roommate confronted Sandy about it in a poor manner. She waited until the two of them were together, alone in their dorm room, and out of the blue said, “How can you love Megan and not me?” Sandy, taken aback by the obvious resentment she was unaware of, didn’t know what to say. After a long silence she said, or perhaps I should say questioned, “I love you??”

So last night, in the early hours of the morning, we began talking about how guys are so different from girls when it comes to indicating love. I think we all have different ways of expressing our love for one another, and for guys at least, rarely does it come in the verbal form. I said to the girls, “I mean Sean and I would never say that to one another. In fact the only reason that we can even discuss this stuff is because there are five girls in the room. If it was just the two of us in the car together, this conversation would never take place.”

I looked over at Sean who was probably mirroring my own expression of discomfort and had a real worried look on his face, as though we had gone somewhere we shouldn’t be. I panicked and began to violently clear my throat. But then a wave of confidence rushed over me--I lowered my voice and bit and said, “Well tomorrow we’ll go lift weights or chop some wood.” Sean agreed, and mentioned he needed to change the oil in his car. Luckily there was no shortage of guy activities to bring us back into the safety of our masculine allure.

A friend of mine once theorized that a good sign of intimacy between two guys is whether or not they will sing together with a song while driving. I couldn’t agree more; any situation in which you’re face is less than two feet from another guys (with the impending danger of direct eye contact) and you’re trying to hit a certain note is a dangerous one.

But my friend took it a bit further and said the ultimate sign of intimacy is not whether they’ll sing together, but if you’ll harmonize with your guy friend.