In a few minutes I hear the same sentence in three languages. In the bar where I take a bite a voice message disturbs the silence of the room. The few parishioners look up from the newspaper when we hear it, topped off by a shrill "te quiero mucho". Just going out into the street, I catch a mother dragging a small child and with the other hand holding her mobile phone while proclaiming with the enthusiasm of a trade union leader "I love you very much". Three streets away, two teenage girls say goodbye with big rattles and melodic "love you" back and forth. So much verbalized love in the middle of December overwhelms me. Could it be climate change?
I remember, right before the pandemic, having to call upon the ancient magic of Twitter to solve my computer's polyamorous weakness. Every time I typed a word that started with tem- the predictor completed "I love you so much". In mail and in the Twitter or WhatsApp applications. If I realized it too late, I was forced to write a correction without hurting anyone. The last straw was a tense email due to a dispute with an insurance company. I didn't realize that a typed theme had mutated into a very extemporaneous I love you. It turned out that the operating system in Catalan already came – in the Keyboard subfolder of the Preferences – with three shortcuts that replaced pq with because and TEM or TM with I love you.
The educational emphasis, in principle reasonable, on the importance of verbalizing emotions can also cause floods after years of persistent drought. In words of love, as in the coarse word, repetition cheapens the message. He trivializes it. Montserrat Roig's popular title Say you love me even if it's a lie could have a second part titled Don't tell me so much that you love me even if it's true.
