Tell your friends you love them. It's anticapitalist praxis, honest.

If you love someone, you should tell them. Tell your friends. Tell your family. Tell your partners. Tell your pets. Tell everyone!

It doesn’t especially matter how you tell them—whether it’s out loud and face-to-face, in a text message, at the end of an email, or shouted into the endless scroll of a social media feed. The important part is that you say it, and you mean it.

This is especially important if you're a man, or man-adjacent. There are endless think pieces about the so-called Male Loneliness Epidemic, about how men don’t have close friendships or community anymore. Ironically, a lot of the media aimed at men, especially on those darker corners of the internet, frames vulnerability as weakness and treats love like it's something shameful and emasculating. So of course men are lonely. They’re being taught that feeling love, let alone expressing love makes them less of a man.

It doesn’t, though. Obviously.

Love is a fundamental human experience. If anything, it makes you more whole. Tell your boys you love them. And not just once, whilst drunk, either. Tell them often!

Love is not, despite claims to the contrary, a limited resource. Loving one friend (and telling them!) doesn’t take love away from someone else. Loving your best friend doesn’t make you love your partner less. Loving your dog doesn’t mean you’ve run out of love for your kids. Love is not a zero-sum game. It grows, absolutely exponentially. Like everything else in the brain, the more you do something, the more synaptic connections you make, and the better you get at it. 

Right now, the world feels overwhelmingly saturated with hate. The news, the internet, politics - so much of it is designed to divide us, scare us, and isolate us. We’re taught to believe that needing people is weakness, that strength means standing alone, that love makes you soft. That asking for help, or admitting you care, somehow makes you less. But none of that is true. It's not even a little white lie for our own good. It’s a fucking trap.

Isolation isn’t just a side effect of living a busy modern life, it’s deliberate. It’s a feature of capitalism, not a bug. The system needs us to be lonely. It wants us competing instead of connecting. It wants us too tired to build community, too afraid to trust each other, too disconnected to realise we have any power. Unable to see that we have even more power when we're together.

When we love each other out loud and without shame, we become a danger. When we choose community over stoic individualism, when we say you are not alone, that’s resistance. That’s solidarity. That’s the start of something better.

In many queer, trans, and non-normative communities, love flows a little more freely. Chosen family, platonic intimacy, and open declarations of care are normal—and powerful. We could all learn from that kind of freedom and affection. It’s not weak. It’s revolutionary.

Love isn’t just a nice feeling - it’s survival. So many people walk through their lives feeling unloved or unlovable. That kind of loneliness settles deep in the body. It chips away at your mental health. It can turn into real physical harm.

My brother died by suicide in 2023, without ever having heard me tell him I love him. I did, of course. I loved him very much, even as I readily admit he was a pain in my arse. But we had a complicated relationship, and we didn’t really get to know each other until we were both in our thirties. He always struggled with his mental health. He especially struggled with feeling lonely, and othered. I don’t think that I could have saved him just by saying it; mental health isn’t fixed by a single act, or a single word, but I do think it could have helped. Just a little. It certainly wouldn’t have made things worse.

I can’t ever know, now.

That’s why I try to say it more often. Even when it feels awkward. Even when I’m not sure how it will land. Because we don’t always get another chance. And because hearing “I love you” might be exactly what someone needs.

It will feel weird at first, especially if you weren’t raised with that kind of openness. But! Awkward doesn’t mean wrong. Vulnerability takes practice. You’re rewiring old and brittle bits of your brain into something softer and more vital. The more you do it, the easier it gets. You can work through the cringe, it is worth it, I promise.

And it doesn’t absolutely have to be words, if that’s not your way. Some people express love through time spent together, through small thoughtful acts, or simply showing up. But even if it’s not your default, learning to say it can land in a different way. Words hit differently. Especially the ones we don’t hear often enough.

If you’ve never done it before, start small. Say “I love you” to a friend this week. Write it at the bottom of a message. Say it to your dog, out loud (dogs love people, there’s science about that, and I’m pretty sure they understand when you love them back). Just try. See what happens.

So yes, tell your friends you love them.
 

It’s tender. It’s radical. It’s rebellion. It’s essential.