Both words and actions make love real
How will you say “I love you” this Valentine’s Day?
With your mouth, I hope, first of all. I mean, saying “I love you” doesn’t get old or stale. It’s not realizing on the fourth or fifth slice of coconut cake that the sweetness diminishes with each added bite. Say “I love you” a hundred times, and it still tastes good to the ear.
A woman complained to her husband of many years that he never says “I love you” to her any more. “I told you once on our wedding day,”
he replied, “and if anything changes I’ll let you know.” Saying “I love you” is not a matter of passing information; it’s a matter of making the information matter. Every time you speak it, it becomes truer and realer.
Lingusitic philosophers distinguish between two kinds of words: expressive and performative. Expressive words simply say what is felt or seen in a given moment. Performative words perform: They make things happen, they create new things. “Let there be light,” God said, and there was light. Performing words. “I do,” she said; “I do,” too, he said. A new world of marriage was made with those words. Marriage or no, “I love you” makes a space into which two people can live together as if they formed a room for two.
So, say it first. But do something, too. Words say and words do, but actions speak, too — sometimes even louder than words.
In an article on novelist Walker Percy’s thinking on this, Michael Baruzzini writes: “Husbands and wives do not merely sit across the room maintaining a cerebral love for each other. Affection is made concrete with actions. Handshakes between colleagues, hugs and kisses between friends not only display, but actually create or make real the respect and affection between people. The true value of a family dinner lies at this level: We are a family because we eat together; we eat together because we are a family. It is in this act that our being as a family is made real, not fantasy. To take what may be the most powerful example, marital love is incarnated in the marital act. The coy euphemism making love has more truth to it than we may realize.”
All of this is rooted in a spiritual view of the world. So Baruzzini again: “Looking to the concrete helps us discover the Christian notion of sacramentality. It is in water that we are born again; it is with bread and wine that we encounter Christ in the flesh in today’s world. [… If it’s a Sunday] and you are a Christian: sing a song of praise, go to Mass and eat God’s flesh. You are a loving husband, so kiss your wife. You are a father: play catch with your son or help him with his homework. You are a man at the end of a day of work: make a cocktail. If you want to be these things — a husband, a father, a son of God — there are things to do to make it real.”
Valentine’s Day is a Hallmark tradition. It aids the economy by giving restaurants, florists, chocolate makers and greeting card companies a little boost. But none of that substitutes for words and deeds that say “I love you.”
Say it so. Make it so.
