But Do You Love Me?
She Insists on Knowing

Love, these days
  means so
  many things
it has become
  a meaningless
  word

“Yes, but do you love me?” she asked again.

“Yes. Yes. Yes,” he said. “How many times do I have to tell you?”

“As many as it takes,” she said. Pouting a little. Looking away. Knees close together.

“It takes to what?”

“For me to believe you.”

He groans inwardly, loudly, almost into the air though not, for that would have been disastrous under the circumstances. So close, so close, and yet so no cigar.

They had been going steady(ish) for going on two months now and he had spent a small fortune on her as his income goes, with only one aim in mind. To, as Holden Caulfield would have put it, give her the time.

To give her the time, however, he has come to discover, requires love. Love the way she defines it, not the way he defines it (which is simply wanting to give someone the time), and he was nowhere near sure exactly how she did define it. Such a slippery word that.

“I’ve loved you since I first set eyes on you,” he ventured. Maybe that would work. Along with a sweet smile.

She looked at him now, suspicious like. Knees still close together. And said, “You just want to get into my pants.”

Oh, yes, he thought. Oh yes, and isn’t that what love is all about? But he did have the intuitive survival-sense not to share that particular insight slash definition of that slippery word.

“No,” he said instead. “I just want to love you.”

“Define love,” she challenged.

“What?”

“You just said you want to love me. How? Define love?”

“Well, you know, love, like, well, love. Everyone knows what love means.”

“Humor me,” she said (for she knew and used words he did not know nor ever used).

“What?”

“Indulge me.”

He did know that word, had heard it before, but wasn’t sure how it applied here. “As in?”

“As in, explain to me what you mean by wanting to love me.”

Thin ice. Cornered. Paint far form dry. And he couldn’t really up and leave, though that solution did look attractive by now, but so did her knees though still close together. “I want to make you happy,” he suggested.

She nodded and digested. “Happy?”

“Yes, of course. Happy. To see you happy would make my day, my week, my month, my life.”

“Spreading it on a little thick here, aren’t we?”

Okay, perhaps that was one over-played hand. “How do you define love?” he said. Not really curious, but it could be useful to know.

She gave that some thought. “Love is when the life of the person you love is more important to you than your own.”

Now that was a mouth- slash earful. And did she really believe that?

What came to mind and what he said, trying to gain some wind back into his flagging sails, was: “Your life is more precious to me than my own.” Damn, that did not sound very sincere, he thought.

She scrutinized him for a while. “Oh, I doubt that.”

Okay, card played. Better follow up. “How can I prove it to you?”

“Promise me that you will not insist on making love we me until we are legally married.”

The stunned, brief expulsion of laughter-like air simply escaped. Cat out of bag. That is how ridiculous that notion was. No sex before marriage.

“This is not the middle ages,” he suggested.

“Aware of that,” she said.

“You just used the word yourself. Love. Meaning sex. That’s what you meant right? Making love.”

“It’s an expression. Making love means exactly that.”

“So if I say I love you does that mean we’re having sex?”

“Of course not. You’re not ‘making love’ me then, you’re loving me.”

“Meaning what, precisely?”

“That my happiness is more important to you than your own.”

“But it is,” he complained for the game was now sliding away way beyond his grasp. There would be no giving her the time tonight. Clear as day.

“Oh, I very much doubt that,” she said. Not angrily or anything, more like with a sigh.

“And that is what love is to you? Making a martyr out of me. No sex before marriage. Is that how girls define love? All of them?”

“All of them?”

“All of you then.”

“Mostly, I would have thought.”

“There’ll be no males alive.”

She smiled at that, even laughed a little—which, oddly, gave him some hope. Perhaps the game wasn’t up.

But then it was, “There’ll be no lovemaking tonight, Sweetheart,” she said. You’re cute and generous (to somewhat of a fault, he thought) and polite and such, but I don’t think you have a clue what love really means.”

He needs more takeaway from this abortive attempt at lovemaking than that, if for no other reason than a better grasp of how girls (them) thought about love for the next time, the next attempt, or the next girl. “So,” he said, “love means a lot of things.”

“That’s true,” she said.

“I love tuna sandwiches,” he said.

“Like very much,” she translated.

“There’s falling in love, which sounds a bit like stumbling.”

“Infatuation,” she translated.

“Infatu-what?”

“Lust,” she clarified.

“Ah,” he ah’ed. “There’s love at the end of a letter,” he suggested.

“An affectionate closing,” she translated. “Nicer than sincerely yours if you ask me.”

He nodded. Much nicer.

“Ever heard of loving-kindness?” she asked.

He shook his head. “No.”

“Disinterested love?”

“No. How could love ever be uninterested?”

“Not uninterested, disinterested.”

“Disinterested?”

“It means there’s no personal stake, nothing in it for you at all. Like the opposite of for you tonight.”

He shook his head again. “Greekish to me,” he said.

“I can see that,” she said. Then added, “A wise man once said that love is the absence of fear.”

“What wise man?”

“An old German writer named Erich Fromm.”

“A Nazi?”

“No, not quite that old.”

“I don’t understand it.”

“It means that one who truly loves does not fear anything. Are you ever afraid?”

What a question. I’m a boy for crying out loud, boys are not afraid. Not like girls. Not like them. “No,” is what he said.

“Not sure I believe you.”

These were words that brought to mind his maternal grandmother who often said the same thing. Not sure I believe you. Odd that. He mused for a while, then said this:

“My grandmother liked the Old Testament the best. Not much love there.”

“What?”

“The Bible. She was a Bible-Thumper who thumped the Old Testament the most. God’s vengeance and all that. Not all that loving if you ask me.”

She looked at him quizzically. “You have read the Bible?” She had donned a hard-to-believe expression.

“No, she read it to me, when I was little. Read all those parts that told me how to end up in hell. Mapped it out pretty precisely.”

“The Old Testament.”

“Yes.”

“I guess love didn’t really enter the Bible until the New Testament, Jesus and all that.”

The thing was that now he was hungry. Starving. As if a lot of love, per his definition, had been made, is what he thought.

Also, this conversation was heading in all kinds of weird directions. The Bible for crying out loud, although it was he who had brought it up, of course.

“I don’t know,” he sighed. “Would you like to head out for a bite to eat?”

::

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