How Not to Say I Love You
Tags: Love, Love And Sex, Adultery, Marriage, Affairs

How Not to Say I Love You

Lines That Don’t Get Crossed in Adultery

Photo by Artem Beliaikin from Pexels

“I really care about you.”

“You make me feel so good.”

“I love spending time with you.”

The last one is my personal favorite.

I have a lover who tells me all the time, “I love you.”

I never say it back.

I don’t feel it.

I don’t want to hurt his feelings, but he knows I don’t care the same way he cares about me.

The issue is compartmentalization — a long word for tough emotions. I am married. I love my husband. I don’t love my lover. I can’t love two men at once, can I? Or could I?

Saying “I love you” was either a harbinger of doom or the beginning of a deeper connection with your lover. Adulterers had very clear lines about the ILU’s. Some would drop you like a hot plate if it was ever uttered. Some will say it back willingly. Some will ignore it and pretend it wasn’t spoken. Some will joke, “Oh, no, you don’t, baby.”

It was a seismic shift in the relationship, though. Those three little words wrap around your brain stem and hijack all reasoning. My single lover had been pining for me for years. At first, I didn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t feel worthy of this kind of devotion. I didn’t say it back.

“But you had lots of other women,” I said.

“None like you.”

I looked at him blankly.

“I really love you, baby.”

He whispered it first to me in bed after we had been together for ten months. Part of me wanted to snatch it in the air and shove it back in his mouth. “Noooo. Not that!”

“Oh, sweetie…” was as much as I could get out in that instant.

“I love you like I’ve never loved nobody else,” he added.

Oh boy. He was a player. How was that for irony? He had never wanted to settle down with any woman, and he’d had plenty. Now that he was with me, I didn’t want him.

I felt sorry for him. I didn’t love myself that much, let alone have the capacity to love another person in the same way.

You broke the rules! We discussed this in the beginning.

“I thought this was ‘just sex,’” I said.

“I know, but I can’t hide how I feel.”

Yes, but I can…

“You know I can’t leave.”

What was I doing playing with his heart?

This had gotten out of control.

I couldn’t fall for any sentimental crap.

I had to be an unfeeling monster.

I’M NOT LEAVING MY HUSBAND. Do you understand? I felt like throttling him awake. Why did he have to say that he loved me?

I was happy with my lover and his ILU’s as long as they stayed within my boundaries.

The boundaries were crucial. I wanted predictability and borders. I cared, but I needed to keep expectations in check. Conversations about love never ended well.

For some adulterers, ILU’s level the playing field. You both have a lot to lose. It can make the relationship feel more secure because you both put your “cards on the proverbial table,” so to speak.

Now that we both know that we love each other, it makes it less complicated.

Or more complicated. Since “loving” was rarely equal.

“I know you can’t say it, baby, ” my lover said while caressing me in bed.

I can’t or I won’t? I’m not sure.

We said we would be upfront and honest with each other. And I think we were in some ways. I was more open with him than I had ever been with any other lover.

“I think people can love more than one person and love in different ways,” I said carefully.

This is going to blow up in my face.

He argued that I had to choose, “You can only love one of us.”

My husband or him?

Well, I don’t love either. How’s that?

I didn’t say it out loud. I knew my silence was painful enough.

What he doesn’t understand was that I’ve never been honest. He thinks I am a far better person than I was.

“You are the perfect woman.” He idealized romantic love because he had never married. He didn’t see the harsh compromises, the lack of passion, the unending slog of daily life together pushing apart love like a bad seam.

“You haven’t lived with a woman to know what it’s really like,” I argued.

“Yes, I have. I had been with that woman I told you about for seven years.”

“Seven years? And what happened? It ended?” I said. “Things are never good for long,” I added.

“I know,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean I can’t want more.”

“You just want me because you can’t have me,” I insisted.

“I do want you.”

Well, we don’t always get what we want. I should know.

I think loving more than one person was possible but infinitely complicated. How could you measure which love was better? Which was more real? Until I fully loved myself, I couldn’t love another. I knew I was broken. I just had to figure out how to put myself back together again.

My “I love you’s morphed into “I love you being inside me.” Much safer.

It was a fine line that I wasn’t going to cross. Yet.