Love Messages for Him: 42 Texts He Reads More Than Once
You want love messages for him and everything you type sounds already said. 42 texts sorted by moment: sweet notes, distance, poems, long ones, hard days.
He's driving, and at the red light he taps the wheel twice, the way he does with every song he knows by heart. You turn to tell him something specific, and what comes out is "did you call the garage back?"
You're looking for love messages for him, and everything you find sounds like those same songs on repeat. There's no shortage of cute texts to send your girlfriend, and even less of one when it comes to words for her. They're just not written for him. The last card you gave him went into his jacket pocket in three seconds. It isn't that you write badly, it's that we write to men so rarely that nobody ever told you what volume to use when you talk to them about love.
Sweet things to say to him, the ones you send for no reason
No occasion, no birthday, nothing to make up for. Just a Tuesday, him inside a day he won't tell you about tonight, and his phone buzzing for no reason at all. His mornings and his nights already have their own pages, good morning love messages for him on one side and goodnight love messages for him on the other, so everything here belongs to the hours in between. A general compliment slides right off him, a detail he thought was invisible stays for weeks.
You closed the door softly so you wouldn't wake me. I heard you anyway.
I have no news to tell you. I just wanted to be inside your day for two seconds.
You were right about the shortcut on Saturday. I'm saying it once, don't get used to it.
The neighbor asked me how you were doing. There are people who miss you and will never once tell you.
I'm thinking about the back of your neck. That's all. Go back to what you were doing.
I put your playlist on, the one with the song you always turn up too loud at the second chorus.
Three different questions this morning, three times "we'll see." I'm having it embroidered on a pillow.
You explained your project to me on Sunday. I didn't follow all of it, and I loved listening to you.
Good luck with your 11 o'clock. Talk to them the way you talk to me and they'll follow you.
I thought about you standing in the tomato aisle. It isn't romantic, it happened anyway.
Your brother says you've been in a good mood lately. I pretended not to know why.
I drove the extra ten minutes for the coffee you like, not the one at the end of the street. You know the one.
Your foot found mine without you even looking. You've been doing that for four years.
Nobody folds a towel as badly as you do. Don't change a thing.
I love you harder in the weeks when nothing happens.
Long distance love messages for him, when he wakes up alone
Three nights, one week, or five hundred miles all year long. The distance doesn't change what you feel, it changes the hour it lands on you (missing someone rarely picks a convenient time). He'll read these when he wakes up, alone in a room that isn't yours.
The platform emptied in thirty seconds and I stood there a full minute without moving. You've been gone eleven minutes.
Three nights now I've left the radio on in the living room so there's a voice in the house. It's the wrong one, but it beats the quiet.
It's 11 pm here and it's already tomorrow where you are. I like the idea of you seeing my day before I do, and telling me whether it's worth it.
I've been collecting stupid photos for you since Monday: a badly groomed dog, a sign with three typos in it, a pigeon that was very sure of itself. I miss you in pieces.
Room 412. I had no reason to memorize that number and there it is anyway, as if knowing it pulled you six feet closer.
What I miss isn't the big moments. It's you grumbling at the drawer that sticks while I pretend not to hear you.
You don't have to tell me about your day if you're wiped out. Just send me a photo of whatever you can see out the window.
Don't apologize for the hour. Wake me up, even at 3 in the morning, even if I grumble. I'd take that a thousand times over the silence tomorrow.
Nine days left. I'm telling you with no pressure attached: counting has felt good ever since I knew there was an end to it.
Tomorrow at 6:40 you walk through that door. I've rehearsed the moment about fifteen times in my head, and every single time I say nothing, I just look at you.
Love poems for him, five short ones
Some nights one sentence doesn't cover it. A love poem for him doesn't need to rhyme (rhyme sounds like a greeting card, and he'll hear it). Five short ones to copy out as they are, or to finish yourself.
You have a scar on your thumb
and you always tell it wrong.
Three different nights, three versions.
I know every one of them,
and I correct none of them.
Four hundred miles,
and your shirt over the back of the chair
that doesn't know yet
you aren't coming home tonight.
Your hands know things
you never explain to anyone:
the faucet that drips,
the knot in a kid's first tie,
my back when I've slept badly.
I have never once thanked you for that.
Some evenings you say nothing.
I used to think it was aimed at me.
Now I know your silence
is the one place you're allowed to set it all down.
I don't promise much.
Only to be there
when the room empties out,
and to still know
how you take your coffee.
Long love paragraphs for him, when the evening counts
This one doesn't get typed between two doors. It gets written sitting down, on one specific evening, and it goes out whole like a love letter for him, not chopped into four texts tripping over each other. A long love paragraph for him isn't trying to impress, it's trying to be reread.
The night of his birthday, once everyone has gone home
It's late, the table still isn't cleared, and the house has gone back to its normal size. I wanted to tell you something before you fall asleep, and I'd rather write it, because out loud I'm going to fumble it.
I watched you all evening doing what you always do: filling other people's glasses, checking that nobody was left out of the conversation, laughing too hard at an average joke so the person telling it wouldn't feel stupid. You don't even notice yourself doing it. I do.
What I want for you this year isn't much. Just that someone does for you what you do for everyone else. I'm taking care of that.
The night before he leaves, with his bag already packed
Your bag has been sitting by the front door since last night, and I walk past it twenty times a day with a small detour around it, as if going around it pushed the departure back.
We're both going to be fine, I already know that. I'm going to miss you in a specific, stupid way: the noise you make closing the cabinets, the fact that you answer people on TV. I don't know how anyone sleeps without someone breathing badly next to them. I'll learn.
Go with an easy mind. I'll keep everything in working order, myself included. And come back with stories, even the boring ones.
A weeknight, for the thing nobody dares say
There's one sentence I can't manage to say to your face, so I'm writing it instead. You'll read it alone, which is better for both of us.
I admire you. Not for what you pull off, for the way you treat people who can do nothing for you. The server in the weeds, the bored security guard, my mother on the phone. I've been watching you for years and it pulls me upward without you doing a single thing about it.
There, it's said. You don't have to answer. I just wanted it to exist somewhere other than my own head.
A Sunday in November, with nothing to celebrate
Nobody's celebrating anything, we haven't argued, it's raining, and you're in the next room looking for the 10 mm socket.
I'm writing it once, in black and white, because we're always busy. What we have doesn't fit inside a date: it's fifteen hundred breakfasts, two moves across town, one year when we spoke to each other badly, and the night you came to get me at one in the morning without asking a single question.
If I had to start over, I'd choose this life. Not a bigger one, not a more interesting one. This one, with the 10 mm socket that's never where you're looking for it, and the way you say my name when you can't find me in the house.
Encouraging messages for him on the days he takes a hit
He didn't get the job, or he's burying someone, or he's been holding on for six months without saying so. He won't ask you for anything. This is the moment where the message isn't supposed to fix anything, only to stay in the room.
That was rotten, and you deserved for them to take you. I'm not going to tell you it's for the best. I'm here tonight, and I'm not going to try to fix anything.
That job says nothing about you. It says what a company decided on a Thursday morning, in a meeting you weren't even invited to.
You're doubting your work right now. What you're worth has nothing to do with it, and I can still tell the difference on the days when you can't.
Stop apologizing for being tired. There's no quota of bad days in this house, and nobody is keeping count.
You've been circling the kitchen for twenty minutes. I'm not asking you for anything. Whenever you want to put down what you're carrying, I'll be on the couch.
You cried in front of me on Tuesday. Nothing has moved since, except that I know you a little better than before, and that suits me fine.
I won't say he's at peace, I have no idea. I'll say that I watched you hold his hand right to the end, and that I won't forget it.
You don't have to answer this one. It's just here so your phone buzzes with something that wants nothing from you.
One message changes an evening. Thirty-one of them, opened one a day up to a date that counts (his birthday, the night he comes home for good), change a month: he wakes up knowing he has a word from you waiting. That card he slid into his jacket in three seconds, he kept it. That's what happens when you write to someone almost nobody ever compliments. A personalized gift for your boyfriend starts right there.
One word a day until the evening that counts
Thirty-one lines inside a calendar he opens one morning at a time.
Start yours