Ever tell your father that you love him?

[diebitter]

I just realised, I never tell my mother I love her either, and we are pretty close.

Not Norman Bates close, but I do talk to her on the phone once a week or so.

Maybe it's an English thing, I dunno.

[Jorge10]

I feel the same as the OP. I have never told him that I love him and never will in my lifetime. Its just not ever going to happen. He knows I care, but I will never actually say it because it would be the most ackward moment ever. It sounds stupid, but its just the way my family is. The L word can never be spoken.

[Blarg]

So much of this thread makes me sad for what I missed. It's a strange comfort to hear that things don't have to be for others the way they were for me, but it's still a distant way of looking at life. Love as a possibility is so ... academic ... compared to love experienced. That there lived and lives yes's can't quite cancel out a lifetime of no's, though it does make for a soothing background buzz of sorts. I suppose it could make for a taunting one and seem an ironically cruel, smashing retort to a desire to be loved by one's father or even know what that's about, and that element is there a little and can't entirely leave, but mostly it's just reassuring in that it makes acceptable and clear that things don't always have to work one way, and that there are still possibilities between people, even if they seem to happen only elsewhere. That helps give hope to people like a brother and I, who have talked about this kind of thing, that perhaps we aren't doomed to repeat the mistakes of our parents and their parents before them. It's hard to live possibilities without help imagining them, or seeing them. It's very hard to imagine things into existence that are beyond one's experience. And the thought of a lapse can be terrifying to the point of being crippling. But others can illuminate one's own potential, and make it seem more a goal than something absurd and irrelevant.

[diebitter]

[ QUOTE ]
So much of this thread makes me sad for what I missed. It's a strange comfort to hear that things don't have to be for others the way they were for me, but it's still a distant way of looking at life. Love as a possibility is so ... academic ... compared to love experienced. That there lived and lives yes's can't quite cancel out a lifetime of no's, though it does make for a soothing background buzz of sorts. I suppose it could make for a taunting one and seem an ironically cruel, smashing retort to a desire to be loved by one's father or even know what that's about, and that element is there a little and can't entirely leave, but mostly it's just reassuring in that it makes acceptable and clear that things don't always have to work one way, and that there are still possibilities between people, even if they seem to happen only elsewhere. That helps give hope to people like a brother and I, who have talked about this kind of thing, that perhaps we aren't doomed to repeat the mistakes of our parents and their parents before them. It's hard to live possibilities without help imagining them, or seeing them. It's very hard to imagine things into existence that are beyond one's experience. But others can illuminate one's own potential, and make it seem more a goal than something absurd and irrelevant.

[/ QUOTE ]

so that's a 'no'? [img]/images/graemlins/confused.gif[/img]

[Blarg]

Once, that I can remember. When I was 16. It was awkward for both of us, and even though I'm not sure either of us meant it, it was still cool that we even said it, regardless. I think we were both a little bit stunned that even saying as much could even be possible. It had seemed so firmly established that nothing of the sort was true beforehand, and that the opposite was demonstrably the case.