Tim Bass mulls the word “Between Like and Love”

Years ago, I taught advanced English composition at the university where I work. The course got its name because some of the students had taken advanced-placement English classes in high school. Others had scored higher on the SAT verbal section than I had on the entire test. The crowd—the roster totaled 25—was so smart that everybody got bored about five minutes into the first class meeting. This is when they turned on me.

One day not long afterward, we were discussing some reading from some anthology—some serious-minded essay from some clever writer whom the textbook editors hoped the college kids would find provocative. I was going through my usual routine of trying to get the class to say something useful before our time ran out.

“What is this essay about?” I’d ask.

No response.

“What is the author’s point?” I’d ask.

Nothing.

“Anybody?” I’d say, and even I could hear my words sounding less like a question than a plea.

Though I don’t recall now, this day’s essay must have involved a reference to romance, however vague and tangential, because at that point a student perked up.

“What,” she said, “is the word for the feeling between like and love?”

I scanned the room and found her desk. I squinted but said nothing.

“Let’s say you like somebody,” she continued, “but you like him more than like him, but you don’t like him enough to love him.”

“OK,” I muttered. “I follow you.”

I didn’t follow her at all.

“Well,” she said, “what’s the word for that? What’s the word for between like and love?”

I fell silent again. She might as well have been speaking a foreign language—one uttered only on an unmapped island by a tribe who had somehow eluded every anthropologist in the world. For all I knew, my student was asking if I preferred to be boiled or fried.

“Yeah,” another student said. This voice rose from the middle of the room. “What is the word for between like and love?”

I looked around at the rows of eyes. For the first time all semester, everyone was paying attention.

Everyone.

Where do these students get this stuff? I wondered. And where does this college get these students?

_____

This will spoil the story, but you might as well know it now: No word exists to describe the feeling between like and love. It is the greatest gap in all of human language, and somebody could earn a fine linguistic reputation—maybe even win an award—by inventing such a word. Just line up a handful of consonants and vowels to fill the gap, and there you go: instant celebrity and a tenure-track job.

I have tried to make up the word, but I can’t do it. The easy way doesn’t work—combine like and love, and you get “live,” which is taken, and “loke,” which sounds stupid.

_____

I don’t know the word that fits between like and love. But I do know the feeling. I have been liked by some people, loved by a few (and, for the record, hated by many, loathed by several, and despised by two or three). No problem with those words.

But sometimes I have found myself more than liked yet less than loved. Each time, I have been thinking it is one or the other, and when I suddenly discover it is neither, I watch myself transform in real time and become Limbo Man in Limbo Land, a poor, primordial creature who can barely walk upright and will have trouble finding his way home tonight. Despite this realization, I have hung on in those undefined relationships. Despite all common sense. Despite conventional wisdom and compassionate advice from caring friends. Despite the alignment of the moon and the stars, all signs in all tea leaves, every portent from every wizard. There has to be a word for that.

Hopeful? Idealistic?

Foolish?

___

Between like and love takes me back to a night in seventh grade. It is a Friday, and I am at a party, the first social gathering I have attended that is not a birthday celebration or a church Halloween carnival. This party has no theme. It is simply an evening for a couple of dozen teen-agers to lie on the floor of the room above someone’s garage and search for love in the dim glow of the one burning lamp. We have music to help us along—someone has put an album on the turntable, and I hear what I believe is either “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” or Emerson Lake & Palmer.

I do not belong here with these people. They know things. They know about a world away from their homes, about getting through and getting by, about moving among strangers in junior high. These people know what to do in an unsupervised room packed with boys and girls who feel the first red pulse of lust in their veins.

This is alien territory for me, but here I am anyway, propped nervously on my elbows and gazing down into the blue eyes of the blonde girl whom I have heard is my girlfriend. I have not asked her to be my girlfriend, and she has not asked me to be her boyfriend. But everyone says we’re a couple, so we’re a couple, because that’s the way it works in seventh grade.

This girl does not need me. She comes from good people. Her father is a doctor. She lives at the country club. She has a blue-blood middle name—Wesley—that was handed down through generations of old-money relatives. She is smart. She is beautiful. She is charismatic. She can do better than me. Even I know this.

And yet I lie here on this floor, looking at her, she and I alone in a crowded room, our eyes locked, and I’m nervous beyond words, this goddess and me stretched out in party town amid a cluster of people who I figure know a thing or two about love, and I’m looking down at her as she looks up at me, and I have no idea what’s going on but I think I’m supposed to kiss her, and in a moment I will—I will stop wondering what to do and fearing what I don’t know and I will lower my head to hers, and what will happen is less a kiss than a giving in, her force pulling me to her, teaching me the meaning of inertia, and as far as I know I am making love because this is as close to love as I have ever been and I am in it way over my head and I believe it will never end, ever, even though it will, the whole shebang, in a couple of weeks. Gone.

___

A few days after the discussion with my English class, one of my students sent me an e-mail in which she reflected upon the space between like and love. Her sentences read like a toxic recipe: equal parts introductory philosophy, narcissistic introspection, and pseudo-intellectual rambling about the psychology of the heart. She ended by asking me, “What do you think?”

As I read her long and advanced sentences, I could see her smirking face in my computer screen, along with the smirks of all the other bright, bored brains in my smirking class. It was just like them to keep this ridiculous and impossible conversation going, so they could dredge it up again at the next class meeting. Why, I wondered, are they so determined to waste their parents’ money on college?

I tapped out a few lines in response, telling the student I thought she was exactly right about the fine, elusive distinction between like and love. I changed a word here and there, but basically I repeated her thoughts to make her feel she was smarter than I was, which she probably did already, because she was.

What I should have written, though, was this:

Think of it in terms of food: Like is milk. Love is milk chocolate.

Think of it in terms of anatomy: Like is the head. Love is the heart. To get from one to the other, you have to stick your neck out.

Think of it in terms of psychoanalysis: Like is the super-ego. Love is the Id. Between them stretches a chasm of torment and madness.

___

I once was in love with a woman who was in love with me until she stopped loving me abruptly one weekend when I was not with her. It happened when a movie crew showed up in her town and she fell for one of the production guys. It was a fairy-tale romance: They met, they flirted, they jumped each other’s bones—all in a single work shift. She decided she didn’t love me anymore, and she pledged to tell me as soon as she dressed, left the hotel, and called me two days later.

I had a hard time with it. She didn’t find it tough at all. She moved on. I held on. I was in love. She was in like. She demoted me to friend, buck private in the Army of Love. Movie Boy, meanwhile, rose to four-star general.

To my satisfaction, the epic didn’t end well for them. Their curtain closed, and she and I had our own little sequel.

Of course, it bombed.

___

On the Internet, I found a discussion on the very topic of like and love. At a Web site called WayneAndTamara.com, a man named Kirby wrote to ask, “How do you know when you’ve crossed the boundary between liking and loving someone?”

Wayne responded.

“If you say, ‘I love my dog,’ but look at an apartment that doesn’t allow pets, you only liked the dog,” he told Kirby. “Love is the color which connects with the deepest level of your being. . . . When you reach the boundary between like and love, you know you are entering another country.”

Thanks to Wayne, I now know that the word for between like and love involves a dog, a bucket of paint, and illegal immigration. And I thought it was complicated.

___

My course in advanced English composition ended with no answer to the like-and-love question. I simply stopped talking about it, and soon I returned to lessons on college writing and the students returned to ennui. Their evaluations of my class came in weaker than stellar but stronger than neutral. They fell somewhere between liking me and loving me. Of course.

The word still eludes me. I have walked that razor between like and love, and I have seen what both sides offer—comfort on one, fulfillment on the other. And beneath my feet, only the pain of uncertainty, the blood of hope.

*Read Tim Bass’s “How to Find a Friend” in LAR 7, page 228.*