I love you Archives - Love TV

9 Wordless Ways Someone Says, “I Love You”

Longing to hear, “I love you” from someone special? Try watching his or her body language instead. Some 60 to 90 percent of the meaning of our communication is delivered nonverbally — and in romantic situations, this jumps to 99 percent, says anthropologist David Givens, director of the Center for Nonverbal Studies in Spokane, Washington, and author of Love Signals.

“When it comes to emotions, our bodies do the talking more than words,” Givens says.

Here are nine surprising (and wordless) ways the body telegraphs, “I love you.”

Love sign #1: Shoulder rolls or shrugs

Who knew the shoulders were one of the more expressive parts of the body? Thanks to their rounded shape, smooth skin, and ability to move — shrugging, lifting, rolling — the shoulders are able to convey emotional nuances remarkably well, Givens says. Rolling a shoulder, in particular, reads as a gesture of affection or flirtatiousness.

Unlike some other large muscles, the upper trapezius has special “gut reactive” visceral nerves that are sensitive to your emotions. (Think about how your shoulders sag in defeat and shake when you cry.) The biceps, as a contrasting example, rely on somatic nerves, which help those muscles do intentional tasks, like lift weights. “The biceps aren’t very emotionally expressive,” Givens notes.

(Ladies, try a sleeveless top on that big date to help your shoulders do the talking.)

Love sign #2: Mirroring your actions

You splay your right fingers around your coffee cup; so does he. You take a sip; he takes a sip. Anthropologists call this synchrony of actions “isopraxism” (iso being Greek for “same” andpraxism meaning “behavior”). Couples tend to do this unconsciously as they fall in love; their bodies can’t help themselves.

Mirroring behaviors are a strong element in the courtship rituals of all animals that use courtship, Givens says. A female mallard hen, for example, swims close to her male target and bobs her heads in the water until he copies her, and they do this back and forth until they mate. The behavior demonstrates that neither is threatening to the other, allowing them to get closer.

“The more alike you are, the more you like each other,” Givens says. “It strengthens your bond.”

Side view of passionate young couple embracing in bedroom

Love sign #3: Locked eyes

If an object of attraction gazes deep into your eyes, your heart just may skip a beat. Eye contact is a potent emotional link — in ordinary circumstances, both parties feel a strong urge to break a gaze after three seconds. (People make less eye contact when they dislike each other, feel intimidated, or disagree.)

But if you like someone, you tend to hold the gaze for an extra few beats without even being aware of it. This says, “I’m really, really interested in you.”

Like most of the nonverbal communications that express love to other adults, the tendency to gaze long and hard at a beloved is rooted in the caring ways that parents treat children, Givens says. Mothers tend to gaze longer at babies than adults because they’re so interested in them and need to be attentive to them; in this way we grow up associating a long gaze with love.

Love sign #4: Sitting close by

Does your loved one move in close to you — maybe your hips touch when you sit side by side, or your knees knock into his or hers when you sit across from each other?

“Reducing the distance between you and the other person is a strong way our bodies send a message of love,” says Jamie Comstock, a professor of communication at Butler University in Indianapolis.

Someone in love almost can’t help the urge to be physically near his or her object of affection. When you’re drawn to someone, it’s almost literal: Often the body knows the attraction before any words of love have been exchanged, Comstock says.

Love sign #5: Head tilts

When you’re talking, watch your listener. Does he or she cock his or her head, either to the left or right? In a friendship, a tilted head fosters rapport. In courtship, it reads as flirtatiousness.

Leaning the head toward the shoulder connotes harmlessness and submissiveness, the Center for Nonverbal Studies’ David Givens says, which makes the relationship “softer.” As with the shoulder muscles, the muscles involved in tilting the head are controlled by visceral nerves, which are equipped to reflect emotion. A tilted head is a gesture that adds warmth and immediacy to the dialogue between you. Subtle? Yes. But like many aspects of body language, these cues speak volumes about the relationship.

Sexy and romantic couple wearing lingerie with the man embracing

Love sign #6: A fingertip caress

Being lightly, casually touched — on your shoulder, your forearm, the back of your neck, a little side hug — instantly registers in the brain as warmth and reassurance.

The emotional centers of the brain register touch more quickly than messages that come through the language center, Givens says. The touch doesn’t have to be long to register as warm and reassuring. (This kind of touch is different from having breasts or genitals touched in a nonsexual situation, which sends a confusing message rather than a simple “I love you.”)

“The presence of touch is a sign of affection because it sends a message of inclusion: I want to be closer to you,” says Butler University’s Jamie Comstock. “You can say, ‘I love you’ 30 times a day, but if you only touch the person minimally — rarely hug, kiss, or show appropriate physical affection — that ‘I love you’ will ring pretty hollow to him or her,” she says.

Best of all, touching is a shared message: “The fingertips are extremely sensitive to touch, so you get a good message right back,” Givens says.

Love sign #7: Rapid eye blinking

Is she batting her eyelashes at you? Does he look especially vulnerable and cute — because he’s blinking? The normal rate of eye blinking in humans is 20 times a minute. Faster blinking indicates emotional stress — such as when the person is attracted.

“We blink faster when excited because eyelid movements reflect bodily arousal levels established by the brain stem’s reticular activating system (RAS),” Givens says. The result: a chain reaction. Emotions from the limbic system stimulate the RAS to act on the brain to release the chemical dopamine in a part of the midbrain connected to the eyes.

A warning about reading the right message into this signal, though: A faster blink rate is also triggered when the speaker is lying.

Love sign #8: A warm smile

Smiles warm our hearts — but not any old smile is a sign of affection. What to look for: a genuine smile (called a “zygomatic smile”), the kind that can’t easily be faked because it’s produced not on demand but by pure emotion. In heartfelt smiles, the zygomaticus muscles are strongly contracted, so that corners of the mouth curve upward and the outer corners of the eyes wrinkle into crow’s feet. Pay attention to the eyes: In a genuine smile, they tend to be crinkled more tightly.

The face is more expressive than any other part of the body because all facial muscles are controlled by visceral nerves, which are connected to emotions. Some people say they can see their dog or cat smile, but these animals have little facial flexibility compared with our evolutionary kin the primates, who developed this ability in order to communicate. Reptiles, in comparison, can’t move their features at all, save to open their mouths.

Love sign #9: A higher-pitched and softer voice than usual

Notice how a parent talks to a child: The voice takes on a slightly higher, warmer tone — not loud, no edge to it. This same love-infused relationship is the model for the tone that people in love use. It’s a softer pitch than usual. “It’s innately friendly,” Given says, “and suggests a nonaggressive, nonhostile pose.”

That doesn’t mean that if your crush isn’t speaking to you in baby talk or falsetto, he or she doesn’t love you. The tone of a voice in love isn’t that exaggerated. It’s simply more loving.

The tone of voice is so important — and so revealing — because we “hear” the way words are delivered separately from how we process the words themselves. Tone of voice carries both emotion (love, hate, anger) and social information (sarcasm, superiority).

In fact, humans are so good at reading voices that you should probably trust what you hear in the tone more than the words themselves — especially when that “I love you” rolls off the tongue of the object of your affection. Comstock says, “When there’s a discrepancy between the words and the tone” — whether it’s detached, monotonal, defensive, sarcastic — “people believe the nonverbal.”


Curated by Erbe

Original Article

How to Say, “I love you”

What does it mean to “fall-in-love” with someone? Is it an emotion? Is it a choice? Is it both? Is loving someone a subjective or objective concept?


“I love you.” We have all said those three words with as little effort as it takes to breathe.  Maybe it was to a parent before you left home to drive back to Starkville, or maybe you whispered it into the ear of someone special cuddled up on your couch. Maybe you exchanged that magical phrase this morning over a text message, or maybe it has been so long, you have forgotten what it feels like to hear someone say, “I love you too.” Regardless of who you said it to or how long it has been since you have said it, you have undoubtedly used the word “love” to describe an overwhelming feeling of attachment, desire, joy and thankfulness to someone who means or meant a lot to you.

Love, of course, exists in a variety of different forms, yet I firmly believe the form of love we understand the least is the very form that our culture idolizes the most: romantic love.

What does it mean to “fall-in-love” with someone? Is it an emotion? Is it a choice? Is it both? Is loving someone a subjective or objective concept? These questions are not easily answered, yet they point to the vital importance of understanding both the love that we accept and the love that we give.

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines love as “a feeling of strong or constant affection for a person,” or “attraction that includes sexual desire.” The former of these two attempts to balance only half of the love equation, and the latter is the perfect example of why our perverted concepts regarding what romantic love should look and feel like are so rampant.

If love is a “constant affection for a person,” then I assert that nobody is capable of experiencing true love. Our affection for others, be  our spouses, our children, or our friends, can be described in a number of ways, but constant is not one of them. This is not to say that affection stops all-together, of course, but it is to acknowledge the inconsistency of human emotion. Personal intimacy brings forth a beautiful connection unlike any other, yet with this closeness comes the recognition and clarity of character flaws. As the cliché saying goes, nobody is perfect, and because of this, we will not wake up every single day for the rest of our lives and feel like showing unhinged love to the ones we commit ourselves to. That being said, the simple fact that our affection wavers due to circumstance does not discredit or devalue our promise to love that person with our entire body, soul, and mind.

As far as the definition regarding “sexual desire” goes, people often buy into the idea that sexual attraction and love are heavily linked as is evident by the way teenagers and some adults treat the foundation of love like it is little more than an emotion rooted in attraction. While some certainly cherish sexual intimacy as the ultimate physical display of love, sex, in and of itself, has absolutely nothing to do with loving someone. Having a strong physical attraction to someone while also finding them to be nice and funny is no more a spark of true love  than finding someone sexually attractive at a frat party constitutes a marriage-proposal. Furthermore, if your desire to be with someone is primarily contingent on that person’s physical or sexual attractiveness rather than who they are as a special, unique person, the foundation of your relationship was built on lust, not love.

This idea of love being centered around constant affection and sexual desire completely misses the mark. To say, “I love you,” is to say, “I choose you today, tomorrow, and everyday thereafter because you are the one that I want.” To say, “I love you,” is to say, “I see the good and the bad in you, and still, I choose you.” To say, “I love you,” is to say, “I choose to have these eyes for you and you only.” Loving someone is a constant, conscious choice to show kindness, respect, loyalty, compassion, forgiveness and appreciation for that person regardless of circumstance. The moment we begin to understand love as having a clear element of choice to its composition, we become capable of truly experiencing love with a heart of devotion and personal accountability long after the honeymoon-phase has dissipated and reality has set in.

I know that some of you are in serious relationships, engaged or married while the rest of you are either going through a heartbreak, trying to stay single while you focus on your education or waiting to feel the magic of falling in love. Perhaps, like myself, you told someone that you loved them, yet you stopped choosing them when the reality of the cost of love replaced the butterflies, or maybe you were on the opposite end of the pain and someone told you they loved you, yet after your first big fight, they chose to find comfort in the arms of another. Regardless of your experience with love, it is my sincerest hope that you all understand love for what it truly is, that you find it in the heart of someone who understands it too and that you both choose to cherish the love that you share, forever and always.

Falling in love is certainly an emotional experience, but staying in love is a privilege of choice. Loving someone goes far beyond emotional and physical attraction and demands that a choice be made daily to guard your heart, body, and mind from the forces coaxing you to jump-ship. If you are unwilling to make the daily choice to honor the promise of such a serious commitment, save their heart the pain of a meaningless, “I love you.”


Curated by Erbe
Original Article

10 Creative Ways to Tell Someone Just How Amazing They Are to You

Saying “I love you” can become a form of punctuation in a long-term relationship.


People say it at the end of a phone call, or on their way out the door, or as they’re falling asleep at night. And there’s nothing wrong with this. Expressing love often is a good thing! And it’s a nice way to check in with your partner each day — or multiple times a day.

Except that when you say it so often, the phrase can become rote. How often do you say those three words, “I love you,” without stopping to think about the fact that you love this person? Most of the time, right? Again, there’s nothing wrong with this. We’re all busy. We have jobs to do, Facebook statuses to update, weeds to pull, mail to open, sex to have. If we paused to consider what it means to love someone every time we said “I love you,” we’d never have time to shop for groceries.

That all said, sometimes it’s nice to stop and actually think about how much your partner means to you. So here are 10 things you can say to your partner to convey this — words that are much harder to recite without thinking about what they really mean. Especially the parts that make you blush. Just don’t use them all up in one day!

1. You’re so effing hot.

That sneaky swear word is there to say: I’m so overwhelmed by how good-looking you are that only an f-bomb will truly convey my feelings.

2. I’m more in love with you today than I was yesterday.

We like the specificity of this. It’s not just that you love your partner more than you used to — it’s that today you actually sat down and thought about the fact that your love grew in the past 24 hours.

3. You just made me laugh so hard I almost peed my pants.

OK, maybe skip the pee mention. But you get the idea. Fortunately, for long-term monogamous couples, a sense of humor doesn’t droop in the same way an aging penis or aging boobs do. Still, it’s easy to forget how funny your partner is. This is a reminder to take the time to make each other laugh… and to appreciate it when it happens.