2008 Woodie Awards
Yougottawanna
Katelyn Henry
Issue date: 2/18/05 Section: Letter From the Editor
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"I love you, Ryan."
He didn't say it back; he never does. Sometimes it's easy to doubt if he even feels it-he leaves without saying goodbye, turns his head when I lean in to kiss him, and has no problem yelling when he's upset with me.
Then again, such behavior is all I should expect from my one and a half year old nephew. It's at the end of the night when he plops his little blond head onto my chest and snuggles his body closely into my side that I know he is trying the say the words his small vocabulary won't yet allow him to utter: I love you.
Maybe its better that he can't say it out loud. The cliché that actions speak louder than words could not be better illustrated.
During the course of nearly every day, we seem to use the word love so haphazardly: I love my cup of coffee in the morning; I love you, (insert Professor's name here) for canceling class; I love taco night at Taylor; I love sleeping in on weekends, and so on.
How often do we truly and whole-heartedly mean these claims?
This always stands out most around Valentine's Day. Men fill the aisles of Hallmark the day before seeking the card their girlfriends will want to open; females make any kind of plans simply for the sake of being busy on that night. Children exchange valentines to everyone in the class, forced to offer them to even those they may not like. While all of this is kind and definitely in the spirit of the holiday, it seems to defeat the purpose of the day.
Maybe the real question to ponder is how often people feel love inside them without actually sharing it.
Author Orlando Battista put it like this: "The greatest weakness of most humans is their hesitancy to tell others how much they love them while they're still alive." Perhaps the weakness is Valentine's Day itself-a single day separate from the rest in which we have to tell those we love how we feel. The other 364 can fall by the wayside.
Throughout high school, my boyfriend and I had an on-again, off-again relationship that usually happened to be off when February rolled around. Although we talked occasionally in hallways or at different sporting events, everything remained casual and those three infamous words never passed our lips. Yet, as I opened my locker on the morning of each Valentine's Day, a dozen red roses sat atop whatever was piled into my locker along with a simple note ending in "I love you. Love always, Rob."
He didn't say it back; he never does. Sometimes it's easy to doubt if he even feels it-he leaves without saying goodbye, turns his head when I lean in to kiss him, and has no problem yelling when he's upset with me.
Then again, such behavior is all I should expect from my one and a half year old nephew. It's at the end of the night when he plops his little blond head onto my chest and snuggles his body closely into my side that I know he is trying the say the words his small vocabulary won't yet allow him to utter: I love you.
Maybe its better that he can't say it out loud. The cliché that actions speak louder than words could not be better illustrated.
During the course of nearly every day, we seem to use the word love so haphazardly: I love my cup of coffee in the morning; I love you, (insert Professor's name here) for canceling class; I love taco night at Taylor; I love sleeping in on weekends, and so on.
How often do we truly and whole-heartedly mean these claims?
This always stands out most around Valentine's Day. Men fill the aisles of Hallmark the day before seeking the card their girlfriends will want to open; females make any kind of plans simply for the sake of being busy on that night. Children exchange valentines to everyone in the class, forced to offer them to even those they may not like. While all of this is kind and definitely in the spirit of the holiday, it seems to defeat the purpose of the day.
Maybe the real question to ponder is how often people feel love inside them without actually sharing it.
Author Orlando Battista put it like this: "The greatest weakness of most humans is their hesitancy to tell others how much they love them while they're still alive." Perhaps the weakness is Valentine's Day itself-a single day separate from the rest in which we have to tell those we love how we feel. The other 364 can fall by the wayside.
Throughout high school, my boyfriend and I had an on-again, off-again relationship that usually happened to be off when February rolled around. Although we talked occasionally in hallways or at different sporting events, everything remained casual and those three infamous words never passed our lips. Yet, as I opened my locker on the morning of each Valentine's Day, a dozen red roses sat atop whatever was piled into my locker along with a simple note ending in "I love you. Love always, Rob."