Love Out Loud

Telling the people in your life that you love them may be the simplest and most powerful thing you can do.

H. Jackson Brown, Jr. once said, “Never waste an opportunity to tell someone you love them.” I couldn’t agree more.

This newsletter focuses on sexuality and relationships, but the word “love” in Love at the Edges was quite intentional. For me, love is at the core of all sex and relationships. I mean that. Whether a sexual encounter or relationship is fleeting or long lasting, I consider love at the center of it all. Your mileage may vary on that perspective, but it’s how I see it.

In Ancient Greek philosophy, love was categorized into eight different types – eros (passionate love), pragma (enduring love), ludus (playful love), agape (universal love), philia (deep friendship), philautia (self-love), storge (familial love), and mania (obsessive love). Eight categories are helpful in demonstrating the diversity of focus and expression for the emotion of love, but even eight is probably not enough to adequately describe all the ways we can love.

I tell people in my life that I love them all the time. I don’t know if gay men utter “I love you” to people in their lives more readily than heterosexual men, but I’m grateful that in my inner circle of gay and queer friends we say we love each other often. I can’t imagine a life without that sort of loving atmosphere. It keeps me going in hard times too.

Max Olesker writes in “When Did You Last Send Your Best Mate A Heart Emoji?” about how important telling friends you love them can be to one’s wellbeing.

You should strengthen your connections to the people who are important to you. Underscore the feelings you have with actions. Because there will come a time when you haven’t said all the things you wish you’d said, at which point it’s all too late.

This post is going to be short because its message is simple. Tell the people you care about in your life that you love them. Often. It matters. It will make you feel good. It will make others you say it to feel good.

Let’s break love out of the cage in which it’s often locked away to only be mentioned when you’ve found “the one” (I don’t believe there’s just one, but that’s another post).

Thanks for reading what I write. I love you for it (see what I did there?).

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