I’ve been thinking a lot about the nature of love. Last week, I told a story from A Wrinkle in Time, about how even if someone shows no love for us, through our love for them, we can be transformed.
Something else occurred to me, about love.
We’re often told, “Don’t put words into other people’s mouths. Don’t assume you know what someone else is thinking. Don’t tell other people what they feel.” And generally, that’s very wise advice.
But one of my Secrets of Adulthood is: The opposite of a profound truth is also true.
This week, I’ve been thinking about two examples, from very different contexts, when one person says to another, “I know you love me.”
In both cases, one person was not acting in a way that seemed loving! And yet the other person tells them, well, I know you’re acting in an unloving way, but I want you to know: I know you love me.
Warning: both of these examples contain spoilers, so don’t listen if you don’t want to know an important plot point of the story I’m talking about.
The first example comes from one of my favorite TV shows, Game of Thrones. In season three, episode ten, Jon Snow, a brother of the Knight’s Watch of Westeros, has betrayed his lover, Ygritte, who, as a member of the Free Folk, is on the opposite side of a great conflict. Jon Snow pretended to fight on her side, the side of the Free Folk, but then he escaped to return to the Knight’s Watch to fight the Free Folk.
Jon and Ygritte encounter each other near a pond. Ygritte, who is a crack shot, holds an arrow drawn back in her bow, ready to shoot him.
“Ygritte, you know I didn’t have a choice,” Jon tells her. “You always knew who I was, what I am.” She responds with her signature line, “You know nothing, Jon Snow.”
He says, “I do know some things. I know I love you. I know you love me.” Then she shoots him, but she shoots him in a way that allows him to ride away to safety.
In the 1983 Academy-award-winning movie Terms of Endearment, the character of Emma is in the hospital, dying of cancer. Her two young sons come to visit her, to say good-bye, and her older son, Tommy, speaks to her in a curt, angry tone.
She says to him, “For the last year or two, you’ve been pretending like you hate me. But I love you very much. I love you as much as I love anybody—as much as I love myself! And in a few years, when I haven’t been around to be on your tail about something, or irritating you, you’re going to remember, you’re going to remember that time that I bought you the baseball glove when you thought we were too broke…” and she continues by listing some other happy memories they’d shared.
Then she says, very fiercely, “And you’re going to realize that you love me. And maybe you’re going to feel badly because you never told me—but don’t. I know that you love me! So don’t ever do that to yourself, all right?”
It is one of the great mysteries of love: Sometimes, we can show our love by telling someone, “I know you love me.” In that way, we save them from the anguish of thinking that perhaps we didn’t know.
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