I recently devoured Lac Su’s memoir I Love Yous Are for White People. And I kinda reviewed it at BPRLive.

I explain in my “review” – I’m not very qualified to review books, but whatever – a little why the title appealed to me so much, but to go a little deeper with it…

When I was younger, I think I put a lot of weight into that magical phrase. Why? I think because you’re expected to, here in America. But I never really felt it, I think I only thought I felt it.

In one way, I really love almost nobody. I can count on two hands the number of people who have ever lived I truly love or loved. That would be the members of my immediate family, some members of extended family, and my wife. I certainly care for and wish the best for many other people, but I can’t say with confidence that I love or ever loved those others.

In another way, I feel like I love almost everybody in the world – even, nah, especially the people I’ve never met. I have a sincere hope that all people in the world experience endless joy in healthy ways, and are able to avoid feeling sadness and anger and hate as much as possible. That’s a simplistic way to say my ideal world has no war and no exploitation or people, resources, and surroundings. My ideal world is the world where everyone has enough of what they need.

But I honestly recoil when people tell me they love me. Not because I’m mad at the emotion of love – but because saying the words “I love you” is shorthand. It’s played out. It’s both teams played hard. It has no meaning in real life. Relationships don’t get built on explicitly spoken pledges, no, it’s the opposite.

Anyway, this was the topic of a pretty well put-together blog post over at Stuff White People Do a while back. At the time, I left the following comment:

i am annoyed by the need for people to hear that they are loved from people close to them. this also – for whatever reason – sounds like a white thing to me.

the only person who i don’t mind hearing it from is my mother. i don’t even care to hear it from my wife, as i shouldn’t need her verbal confirmation for what’s already obvious. and then i actively dislike hearing it from other family members or friends – it makes me feel less close to person who says it.

in any language, we’ve loaded too much power into certain words, and “love” may be the worst of them. people say things like “i love to eat cheese!” or “i love star trek!” that it no longer means what we pretend it means – yet we still pretend it means love.

the actual concept of “love” is far too complex and large to be encapsulated or represented by any word or combination of words. so for me, using the phrase “i love you” is like showing a cell phone photo of the grand canyon or niagara falls to you…

i don’t, however, make judgment against people who freely use the phrase with each other – that means they’re into expressing themselves the same way. but i resent the phrase being thrust into my life by people who i don’t want to hear it from. it sounds cheap to me.

I feel I might have come across more harsh than I meant to there, but the gist is correct. I’m not big into the use of the word “love” because words can’t mean more than what they mean, and loving someone in real life is different from simply telling them so.

By the way, this is the point of poetry, where we try to get words to mean more than they mean.

Anyway, read the review at BPRLive, read the book, and holla back.

Tags: books

This entry was posted on Friday, October 23rd, 2009 at 11:41 AM and is filed under reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.