Love in the negative space
‘Love’ is one of the most universally understood feelings, and one of the most sought after. It follows, then, that it appears everywhere: in music, in film, in art. It is the subject more expressive of the human experience than perhaps anything else. And yet, somewhere in that ubiquity, something happened to the word itself. Seen too often, in Valentine’s gestures, rom-com scenes, social media, and pop songs, ‘love’ started to feel overexposed. Handling it began to feel faintly embarrassing.
By the time it reaches the place it is meant for, said plainly, to a person, the word itself has already been everywhere. It comes to these moments pre-worn. This is part of what makes the omission of ‘love’ in our everyday lives so understandable. To withhold ‘love’ is not necessarily to withhold the feeling. It can be, just as often, a way of protecting it. A refusal to let the word become cheap in the one place you need it not to be. So we indeed started leaving it out, among other strategies. We keep long texts in our notes app rather than sending them. We find dozens of ways to show the feeling without using the word. Often, we wince at the idea of being the first to say ‘I love you’ to a friend or a partner, because sincerity without guarantee is its own kind of exposure. Regardless, none of these acts take away from the emotion’s presence.
James Joyce understood something about this phenomenon. When Ulysses was first published in 1922, the question Stephen Dedalus asked his mother’s ghost, “Tell me the word, mother, if you know now. The word known to all men,” went unanswered. The word was omitted from the text, and it would take until 1984 for another editorial pass to reveal what had always been the answer: ‘love.’ What strikes me about that gap isn’t the omission of the word, exactly, but the way the text still functioned around it. The word was gone but the weight of everything unspoken was not. That scholars had guessed ‘love’ decades before manuscripts confirmed it showed how readers were working with its implication all along. Omission, here, is not the same as erasure. The word isn’t absent so much as implied by everything that surrounds it, present in its own negative space.
This is more or less how we treat love in practice. James Baldwin, in The Fire Next Time, writes that love “takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.” It is not a gentle word for Baldwin. It is an act of exposure: to proclaim your ‘love’ is to make yourself legible to someone in a way you cannot take back. Understood this way, the reluctance to profess one’s love begins to look less like fear and more like seriousness. If the word carries that kind of weight, then deploying it carelessly, or before you’re certain, or into a moment that cannot hold it, is a risk. Not to the relationship between individuals, but to the word itself. Every misuse is a small devaluation. Every ‘I love you’ said too fast, or retracted, or weaponised, diminishes the phrase slightly. To withhold love, then, is sometimes to honour it: to keep it in reserve for the moment it will actually mean what it is supposed to mean.
The problem is that this logic, followed far enough, becomes its own trap. The word gets protected out of circulation entirely. It stays implied, present in negative space, legible to us but never confirmed to the people we don’t say it to. And there is a significant difference between a feeling understood and a feeling said, not because the feeling is more real once spoken, but because language does something to a relationship that silence cannot. It creates a shared fact rather than two private ones. For sixty-two years, “love” was missing from Ulysses, but when editors recovered it in 1984, the scene didn’t suddenly mean something new. The word moved from being merely implied to actually there. The word is overused, pre-worn, and sometimes embarrassing to say out loud. Let it be all of those things. Maybe the point is not that ‘love’ should be said recklessly, but that the word, however worn, still does something significant when it’s finally said.