Talk Blurty To Me

Why are women so worked up about hearing "those three little words," and why must they turn them into such a minefield? If a man says "I love you" too soon, he gets dumped because he's a clingy, needy Nice Guy. If he waits too long, he gets dumped as a suspected commitment-phobe. Even when a man operates without any calculation -- freely and happily telling a woman he loves her -- he runs the risk of some cutting or insulting response from her or no response at all. (I have gotten tripped up by timing this wrong a number of times.) Methinks there's a bit of self-loathing to the women who pull this baloney.

--Expressing Myself

"I love you," said right away, suggests that you have great admiration for a woman's unique and special qualities, such as being female, human, and willing to return your calls. Early on in dating, should you find yourself brimming with emotion and unable to hold back, "I love bacon!" is a safer thing to blurt out. When somebody says that, even on the first or second date, nobody suspects he's just hoping to use bacon to patch some gaping emotional void. This is probably why, no matter how soon or how fiercely you express your love for bacon, bacon will never respond by running away. To be fair, bacon also lacks feet. The "I love you" a woman does want to hear is the one that's shorthand for "I'd like to be the one who's there for you when you can't quite get the Velcro to close on your adult diaper" -- or that at least indicates a desire to point the relationship in that direction and see how it goes. This is not a conclusion you hop to in a handful of dates. It comes out of feeling that who the woman is resonates with who you are and what you care most about, and takes seeing her less-than-lovable sides and deciding that the downsides aren't big and hairy enough to cancel out the upsides. As for your stumbles in the "three little words" zone, if you've told a woman you love her and gotten an "insulting" response, could it be because you scribbled it on a dollar bill and tucked it into her G-string? Being into a woman isn't enough. First, she has to be together enough to be open to being loved. And, yes, there actually has to be a relationship between you -- one developed enough and mutual enough that even if her response to "I love you" isn't "I love you, too," at least it won't be "Sorry...have we met?"