Valentine’s Day is this weekend. This is the time of year where displays of candy hearts, boxes of chocolates, and roses are unavoidable. The time of year where Cupid’s arrows are winging at high speed, and if you don’t have a dinner reservation yet for Saturday night, well — good luck.
But love is a lot more than that. It exists in romance, yes, but there is also love that grows in a deep friendship. Love between a parent and child. The enduring love of longstanding commitment. There’s intense love and playful love and duplicitous love and wholehearted love. Love is complex and varied, and it means different things to different people at different times in our lives.
As the world contemplates love this week, producer Anna Van Dine talked to a handful of Vermonters about what love means to them.
She spoke with Theo on the couch in his living room in Winooski, in the house where he lives with his mom, dad and little sister.
The idea of an interview, with a microphone and a bunch of questions, was a novelty for Theo, something brought in from the world of grownups. Theo does not live in that world. In his world, candy is currency, Lego is king, and life is still relatively uncomplicated. He’s seven.
This is exactly why Anna wanted to talk to him about love: as a kid, Theo lives in a world that many of us forget as we grow older. But it’s a world that stays with us. The way we experience love in our earliest years informs the way we go on to love ourselves and others for the rest of our lives.
Theo doesn’t know that yet. But he does have some ideas about love that he agreed to share.
Our show is made for the ear. We highly recommend listening to the audio. We’ve also provided a transcript, which has been edited for clarity and concision.
Theo Lamothe: Love is like, "I love my mom," or, "I love this toy," or different things like that.
It feels, like, special.
My name is Theo and I'm seven, and I live in Winooski.
You can feel love in lots of different places. Like your heart, your — anywhere. Because your heart's connected to everywhere.
I love my mom, my dad, everyone in my family and — I love outside. I love the snow. I love trees. I love the sky. I love plants. I love pictures. I love colors. I love presents. I love lots of and lots of things. And that's all I can think of.
The ways I show love are, probably, by being nice and kind. Like once my sister fell over and I helped her up.
I feel loved when — I don't really know. A lot. I feel loved a lot. Like when my dad said me and my friend Milo might be going to the arcade together. Today.
There’s so much that’s, that’s good.
A few days after Theo was interviewed, he wrote a note saying, “I LUV YOU DAD ♥ ♥ ♥,” and taped it to the toilet seat. He said he wanted to leave it where he knew his dad would see it.
