@wingdingsandbrokenstrings: 8. How loose is their use of the phrase ‘I love you’? — CHARACTER BUILDING QUESTIONS
sincerely? sphincter-tight. the poetic answer is that constantine doesn't say 'i love you' nearly as often as he wants to, or half as often as he feels it. the straight answer is, he never says it.
early on in life, the reason he didn't say it was because he never assigned any real value to the words: he never heard them from his dad or his sister, only on the telly or radio, or read in books. sure, there was an element of toxic masculinity at play, growing up being told it's unmanly to show or speak with frank affection, but that only furthered his lack of attachment to the phrase; it didn't create it. the words were alien to him from the start. in his teens and early twenties, he and his friends sometimes said they loved each other, but only ever jokingly or drunk; and that was sometimes dangerous, given that john was openly queer and a lot of his friends were men.
as time went on and john got older, he started to grow more familiar with the phrase in his own mind — if only because he often felt love so strongly that there was no other name he could put to the feeling that would clarify it for him — but the only person he ever really attributed it to directly in a romantic sense was his girlfriend kit ryan. even then, he was never able to tell her to her face; he came close, when she was breaking up with him, but never managed to finish the sentence. when that relationship ended, i think the phrase lost most (if not all) remaining significance for him, because what's the point in admitting to painful things like that when the feeling itself wasn't enough to keep him from driving away the love of his life? what's the point in admitting attachment if nobody will stay attached to him?
in canon, constantine never again got that close to saying 'i love you' to a romantic partner (we don't talk about milligan) and in my main verse, he still hasn't. he'll say it platonically on occasion — usually to chas or to his niece — or sarcastically to anyone, but almost never in earnest; if he's being sincere, he prefers to speak around it or substitute other, more innocuous phrases in its place. as he says in red right hand, "i could crawl face-down across an acre of glass, but frank affection floors me."
all that said? imo, he doesn't really need to say it out loud. anyone who knows him past the reputation and the bullshit can see plain as day when he loves someone, platonically or romantically. he wears his heart on his sleeve.
