I remember talking to him about this and telling him why I no longer said "too". I think it was actually multiple conversations over time. Even after those conversations, he still always responded with "I love you, too." I can't say I thought a lot of it. My intention in telling him my reasoning was not to change him but to explain to him what the phrase meant to me. In my mind, it was a reassurance to him and an alignment to what I felt.
In hindsight, I feel like there were a lot of little ways I was constantly reassuring him. He always seemed to have more doubts than I did. Or maybe there just never was any space for my doubts. I wonder if all my efforts to reassure him also served as a way to convince myself of something that wasn't quite true. When you say something enough times, you start to believe it is true. Or the repetition doesn't leave space in your brain to recognize when the truth of it evolves into something less true.
I really paused during therapy last night as this memory came up. I hadn't yet thought of it in the context of the clarity and hindsight I have now.
It's one more example of how unbalanced our relationship was and how the consideration only flowed one direction. If he truly had consideration for me, he would have dropped saying "too" himself or talked more with me about how he felt about it. Instead he just silently accepted my explanation of something that was important to me yet did what he wanted regardless of my feelings.
When I start adding up all the big and small ways he disregarded things that were important to me, it starts to feel really intentional. His "I love you"s feel really meaningless. How can someone profess to love another for over two decades and have so little consideration for them.? How can someone love a person they don't actually care about? I suppose I will never understand that because I can't see myself ever treating a person that way.
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