So, a discussion on another thread has me thinking more generally - what DOES it signify when grown up adults say “I love you” in a dating situation? And how soon in a relationship do you say it?
I mean - it SHOULDN’T mean “omg my soulmate has arrived!” the way young people in their 20’s mistake infatuation for true love. We are wiser than that now.
It shouldn’t mean you are committed forever to the relationship - you can love someone and still figure out while dating that they are not right for you. (Aren’t most of us here because we truly loved someone who wasn’t really right for us, in that cheaters aren’t right for us?).
Thinking back over my post-divorce dating, I think I only said it to crazy ex-bf and CMM.
I loved my first post-D boyfriend but he was clearly an avoidant and it didn’t seem appropriate to say. I still love him in an agape sort of way. He’ll always be my friend, I’ll always be grateful to him for the role he played in my recovery from my divorce, and I would always help him if he needed it.
Crazy ex-bf and I said it to each other, I don’t have any memory of when we started. I don’t remember any awkwardness. Of course now we know he was duplicitous. But we were in a loving relationship where it seemed appropriate to say.
CMM started saying it to me way too early, maybe 3-4 weeks into dating. I told him he didn’t even know me yet. He was clearly infatuated, and I wasn’t sure how I felt about him. I did say it to him a couple months later as he was going into surgery that would diagnose his lung cancer. Why did I say it to him then? I cared enough for him that I knew I would stand by him through his cancer treatment if it was cancer. And I knew if I waited until after the diagnosis was confirmed that he would always think I was only saying it because of his diagnosis.
I didn’t think he was the love of my life, although I was enjoying the relationship. I certainly cared for him, although he turned out to be difficult to live with at times. I committed to traveling his cancer journey with him, and our relationship deepened through that. He loved and cared for me, and I chose to love and care for him.
Adult love post-divorce isn’t always fairytale, but that doesn’t make it invalid.
Would I be pissed the way some people suggest they would be if someone said ILU to me while we were dating and later broke up with me over some incompatibility? Nope. Would I feel I had been abused or misled? No. Dating is a process by which you learn whether someone is right for you, and someone can feel love for you but still decide - for whatever reason - that a longer term relationship with you isn’t a fit, for whatever reason. We need to be careful not to drag our sense of rejection from our marriages into our dating life. Saying ILU isn’t a marriage proposal.
So, my question for you all is, when do YOU think is the right time to say ILU in a dating relationship? When you’re feeling infatuated? When you decide you’re really really enjoying your time with a person? When you decide you really really like who they are as a person? When you decide to be exclusive? When you decide you want to live with them? When you decide you want to marry them?
I’d say waiting until a marriage proposal is too long, and saying it in the first flush of infatuation when you don’t know the person that well is too soon, but there’s an awfully wide swath in between.
