650,000 Hours

August 2021

The average human life lasts 650,000 hours. How will you spend yours?

My friend Todd and I near his home in Washington state.

I Love You, Man (Even Though I Can’t Say It)

After writing for The Washington Post Magazine about why straight guys struggle to tell their buddies “I love you,” I thought… there’s no way I'll read the comments. Comment sections are havens for trolls, and a story about men and love would surely attract idiotic hate from delusional "real men."

But my friend Todd was curious. Todd was the subject of the piece: For close to 20 years, Todd has told me “I love you” — and I've never said it back. He dove into the comments and found not only predictable examples of toxic masculinity, but surprisingly honest insights on fear, love, and emotional liberation. The same was true on Twitter, whether I heard from conservative men (the piece inspired an essay on the Christian site Mockingbird) or urban women (an editor with New York Times Opinion tweeted three times about the story).

Here are a few of the 200+ comments from the Post web page, which provide an interesting window into our personal and cultural views on masculinity (these have been edited for length):

“When I was in my 30’s, I heard my older brother tell our dad he loved him. I was taken aback. Dad was a good man but emotionally distant. I thought, ‘Hey, if he can say it so can I.’ So I started hugging my Dad and telling him I loved him. Then one day he said, ‘I love you too.’ That changed everything between us. Men who are unable to tell other men ‘I love you’ are wasting their life on a fairy tale of manhood.”
“I am a 70-something Irish man. For my entire life I have been terrified by the ‘L’ word. Using the phrase was a level of intimacy and trust I never knew as a child and couldn't fake as an adult. I am the oldest of seven. They all hug each other and say ‘I love you’ and I cringe and withdraw. I am a lesser person for having let these magnificent moments slip through my fingers.”
“In our culture, men aren’t supposed to show a full range of feelings. Furthermore, they’re taught at a young age to abhor all that is feminine, so the repression begins. Yet it’s much more serious than that: It creates hatred and a lack of respect for women.”
“When my dad dropped me off at college my first semester, I shied away from a goodbye kiss in the dorm lobby. I immediately saw the hurt in his eyes and vowed never to be embarrassed about saying ‘I love you’ or kissing my dad again. It is liberating indeed.”

My favorite comment came on Twitter. “Love comes in many forms and is expressed in many ways, but always, always wins,” a reader told me. “Most of you straight boys need to relax more.” —Ken Budd