How to Heart

It began as a logo, designed by Milton Glaser, for an advertising campaign for the City of New York. The heart shape is a rebus, a picture used to replace a word, like the early-reading books that insert pictures of the main characters, their house, their pitcher of milk, etc. The word being replaced is “love.” Now, that metaphor deserves a slight pause before we proceed. The heart has not always and everywhere stood for love. As Robert Erickson pointed out in his brilliant book The Language of the Heart, much Enlightenment thinking was given over to debates between aligning the heart with language, writing, and thought or with sex, passion, and gender (women have heart, men have mind, and so on). Partly as a result of those debates, we have come  to associate the image of a heart—particularly a red, beating one of the I Love Lucy variety—not simply with affection or kindness, but with romantic and sentimental love.

At least, until now.

I’m not great with emoticons. I’m sure there are hearts available. But unless they’re large and red, they don’t have quite the impact of the much-imitated logo. So at some point—my sleuthing suggests the late 90s—people began writing, and later texting, “I heart.” Clearly, they wanted the reader to envision the big red heart, which at that time meant love, so that “I heart” translated to “I ♥” translated to “I love.”

But a strange thing happens when you substitute a word for a rebus that meant a different word. The meaning morphs. Google now gives more than 37 million results for “I heart,” most of them direct phrases: I heart peanut butter, I heart Publix, I heart chaos, I heart soil, I heart climate scientists, I heart Hamas, I heart Dad … and so on. One of the most prominent, of course, is I Heart Huckabees, the 2004 movie satire of detectives solving existential issues, whose title originally used the rebus but which, curiously, never seems to have gone by the title I Love Huckabees.

So what, exactly, does it mean today to heart someone or something?

Asking the question most often are teenaged girls whose boyfriends text I heart u, and who seem keenly interested to know how the avowal stacks up against the “L word.” Answers are mixed. As one advice-giver put it, I heart u “is a way to make your girl feel good about NOT telling her you love her.” Girls apparently use the phrase more often and sprinkle it more generously among friends of both sexes, animals, family, and clothing brand names, making the meaning possibly more elusive. But another self-appointed expert observes that a girl will write I heart u “to someone she likes but doesn’t quite want to have sex with.” In other words, by availing ourselves of heart as a verb, we’re wreaking even more havoc on Mars-Venus communications.

But I’m wondering if the prolific use of heart isn’t carving out a space tangentially related to, rather than on a continuum with, both “L words,” like and love. There is, at the least, some sense of intention involved in the expression of those emotions. If you like or love something or someone, you will behave in certain ways to demonstrate that disposition. But if I write “I heart jelly donuts,” it could mean I just ate a dozen of them, or that I’m on my way to eat one right now; or that you just wrote me that you ate a jelly donut or you heart chocolate-chip cookies. The effect is as basic as the image of a tray of jelly donuts next to an animated, beating red Valentine heart. I heart X is expressed in language, yes, but it scarcely seems to be a unit of thought. The feeling expressed may or may not be passionate, but it is surely transitory, far more transitory than romantic love. Perhaps the closest equivalent is the slang term I’m into, with its own elusive meaning and lack of agency. Finally, having descended from a slogan, it’s about as commercialized as an avowal can get. Of the first 25 entries supplied by Google for “I heart,” 13 promote a money-making activity with the phrase in its name or slogan. One Web site offers the following:

I Heart Daily is a free newsletter of stuff we like. Each day, you’ll find out about one thing: The band you should hear, the girl who’s kicking ass in the world, the lipstick color that looks good on everyone, the designer who doesn’t have a fashion show yet but is completely amazing … you get the idea.

The idea being—I think—that hearting (unlike loving) is spontaneous, up to the minute, and emphatically public. No one need be shy about a confession of hearting.

But we should perhaps be careful. As Erickson points out, the one thing that the evil Lovelace, rapist of Clarissa in Samuel Richardson’s epistolary novel, desires upon her death is her heart. What he thinks he can do with it is unclear; but he does seem to view her physical heart as the center of her soul. Perhaps we should not heart quite so casually as we do—unless your soul truly lies, let’s say, with peanut butter or Publix, organizing or guts. In which case, heart to your heart’s delight.