Ricardo F. Jaramillo, a finalist of the 2019 Modern Love College Essay contest, illuminates his writing process.
Ricardo F. Jaramillo never had any serious aspirations of writing for The New York Times when he was a senior in college. But then someone he was dating, who had just moved to the other side of the world and whom he was eager to impress, sent him a link to the 2019 Modern Love College Essay Contest and encouraged him to apply.
His essay, “Why Can’t Men Say ‘I Love You’ to Each Other?,” ended up being chosen as a finalist. He found, he said, that “Winning your crush’s attention is a good and sincere motivation for writing. When anyone decides to write anything down, they are always — at least in some part — motivated by one of two twin longings: the longing to not forget, and the longing to not be forgotten.”
Today, Mr. Jaramillo is a writer and a case manager at Oakland International High School in Oakland, Calif. We invited him to look back at his essay and annotate it to help illuminate the narrative-writing process for students in anticipation of our third annual Personal Narrative Writing Contest.
Below, the paragraphs from Mr. Jaramillo’s original essay are in bold, reproduced exactly as he wrote it. Following each bolded section are his comments about how to make your reader want to keep reading, how to balance scenes and ideas, why you can’t write a personal essay without “looking inside,” and much more.
You can listen to the actor Ncuti Gatwa read Mr. Jaramillo’s original essay, and hear a short interview with him, on the Modern Love Podcast.
Modern Love Podcast: Ncuti Gatwa Reads ‘Why Can’t Men Say ‘I Love You’ to Each Other?’
The “Sex Education” star reads an essay about the oppressive social codes regulating male behavior.“Why Can’t Men Say ‘I Love You’ to Each Other?”
By Ricardo F. Jaramillo
I’m having L-word troubles, but my troubles don’t involve a lover. There’s no romance or sex in this. No flowers, candles or dancing. My L-word troubles are with my boy, my best friend, Kichi. I’ve told him I love him probably five or six times now, but he never says it back.
Ricardo F. Jaramillo: We write to make our readers understand something, so it’s weird that one of the most effective tools in writing is to disorient your reader! If you want your readers to want to know more, you kind of have to create the sense that you’re keeping something from them, at least initially. With this first line, I wanted my readers to feel a little confused.
I also liked including “L-word” in that first sentence, since it kind of quietly gestures to the whole predicament of the essay without stating it in exact terms. It’s kind of like: you want to leave your reader bread crumbs in the first few lines, but you don’t want to give them Google Maps directions!
When people say, “I love you,” especially for the first time, there are a number of things they may be saying. Maybe it’s, “Do you love me?” (the question smuggled inside the confession), or, more urgently, “Please love me.”
With Kichi, it’s not like that. I know he loves me. I feel it all the time. I don’t need to ask for his love. I don’t need to wonder. I tell him I love him for a simple reason: Nothing could be more true.
But he doesn’t say it back. Mostly I’ve said it when we’re leaving each other, a couple of times over the phone, once when I was drunk, another time when he was hurt and I was trying to be supportive. There’s always silence for a moment, and then he says something like, “Yeah, bro, I’ll catch you soon.”
I don’t need him to say those exact words to me. I wonder, though, about what keeps him from saying them. What keeps nearly all young men from being able to tell their male friends that they love them?
This is the first time, in this piece, that I zoom out. In personal essays we are usually inspecting one life, with the quiet hope that what we say will somehow feel true about many other lives.
I think a writer’s instinct should always be toward the individual, the small. But here, and in a couple other places in the essay, I did want to gaze up from my life a bit and draw a line to other lives, to other boys who maybe experienced something similar to what I experienced.
When I was 8, I made my first best friend. Pedro was twig-thin, messy-haired and jittery, brimming with the kind of untamed tenderness found only in children. When I moved to Philadelphia, he took me — a nervous new boy at school — in his arms and under his wings.
Jumps in time are inevitable in essay writing. My feeling about time-jumps is that they should feel natural, which to me means they should mimic the movements of the human mind — how we remember the past and imagine the future — since I think essays are, at their best, the experience of someone’s mind.
While there is no exact formula for how to move between time periods in your writing, what’s most critical is that these movements never feel arbitrary. Here, the time-jump I employ is a common one, found often in both literature and life: We are presented with a problem in the present, then we must look back to experience and examine its origins.
Pedro and I spent our weekends on walks with his mother through the forest trails near their house. He and I walked slowly, holding hands while we stepped, interlocking our fingers. To this day, whenever I participate in the sacred human practice of hand holding, I think of Pedro.
On one of our walks, Pedro and I were interrupted by another boy, Pedro’s neighbor, who chopped his hand between ours, startling us.
“You two hold hands?” he said. “That’s gay.”
I remember not knowing exactly what “gay” meant, but sensing in the way other boys wielded the word that it meant something you didn’t want to be. I had a terrible feeling that the outside world had broken into our quiet green place. Pedro and I never held hands again.
I think every essay has a couple fundamental questions, and those questions need to lurk and linger throughout the writing in unexpected ways. In this piece, one question of mine was: What can words mean to us?
I’m thinking about this mostly in terms of the word “love,” but I did want to visit it briefly, here, with the word “gay.” It was a word I knew as a boy only by its implications and consequences, and not by its meaning. So this paragraph ties to an earlier one about how people mean many things when they say “I love you”; the connective tissue is that we are almost never saying exactly what we mean, and, in further truth, that words never mean absolutely one thing.
He and I still cared for each other, but that day we learned our care was something we needed to regulate, subdue, place in a chokehold and never let loose. We learned this at the hands of another boy our age, who probably had learned it at the hands of another boy of whatever age.
Pedro and I learned what men in America have learned repeatedly: that tenderness must be tamed in accordance with a set of codes we must become fluent in, as if our survival depends on it. This lesson is learned over many years, passed between generations, and like the best-taught lessons, it claws into you until you can hardly distinguish where the lesson ends and you begin.
Most paragraphs in a narrative can be divided into two categories: scene and idea. Scenes are the moments and actions we depict, and ideas are our thinking around those moments and actions. In this paragraph, I am moving from scene — this moment between Pedro and I — into idea — my thinking about what my experience with Pedro indicates or represents about the larger world.
There’s no perfect ratio of scenes to ideas — every essay requires something different! — but there should be a balance. You want your scenes to be the shadow of your ideas, and your ideas to be the shadow of your scenes; it should feel like each has been leading you right to the other.
Sometimes, I print out an essay and highlight the scene sections in one color and the idea sections in another, and look to see if I need to do any suturing or rearranging. Also, ideas have always come more naturally to me, so — like sports players who intentionally practice their weakest shots — I always make an effort to practice scene in my writing.
Somewhere inside each man is a list of all the other men he’s loved without ever finding the words to tell them so.
This is one of the first lines I wrote in this piece, and when I first wrote it down, it meant a lot to me. Reading the whole piece over now, I actually think it would have been the right decision to cut it, to let readers arrive at this idea for themselves, in their own words, instead of handing it to them.
I point this out because it’s demonstrative of one of my most firmly held beliefs about writing: that sometimes we write things that lead us to other, better things, and then we no longer need those original things. But often, we get too attached to our original words and keep them out of some strange sense of loyalty, thereby not giving space for the new, better things to come.
I always think about how rockets have pieces of themselves that fall off mid-flight. Those pieces help rockets get up to a certain point, and then, when they become more of a weight than they are useful, the rocket is designed to let them fall away. Sometimes we need to thank a line or section of writing for its service to us, for having gotten us to where we’ve arrived with our piece, and then: let it fall away.
I met Kichi in the middle of my freshman year, when I was once again a nervous new kid, this time throwing a party. I have gone through life with a rotating set of anxious tics. That year, I had become fond of swinging my university lanyard with my key in circles, wrapping and unwrapping it around my finger.
When people started flowing into my dorm room, I began my nervous swinging, not noticing what I was doing until I heard a crack and saw that my key had struck a stranger’s iPhone screen, leaving a minor scratch. That stranger was Kichi.
My first message to him was an apology, sent the next morning. He was kind and forgiving. We agreed to hang out.
A friend of mine (who’s smarter and a better writer than me) once pointed out that, in this essay, there are a lot of classic romantic narrative gestures, but they work here (and aren’t cliché) because I’m talking about two male friends. This is Kichi and my meet cute! I tried to riff off the love story narrative arc a little to speak to the theme of the Modern Love column.
Freshman year is an easy time to attach to people. I started hanging out with Kichi more and more, almost every day, then several times a day. When it was time to choose housing for sophomore year, we decided to room together. We fell into each other’s lives quickly because we were both hungry for closeness in a new place. We stayed in each other’s lives because nothing has ever felt more natural.
Kichi and I are both mixed race, with white mothers, immigrant fathers and hard-to-pronounce names. We are from cities — him Seattle, me Philadelphia — that we take pride in. But mostly, we are different. He’s calm, cool, rides a skateboard, keeps his clothes neatly folded, writes poems and loves immunology. When he’s sad, he doesn’t stay sad for long.
I admire how quietly deliberate Kichi is and the balance he brings to his life. When I go to him with girlfriend problems, writing problems or any other kinds of problems, some little thing he says or notices always stays with me for days. I appreciate his steadiness, and he appreciates how emotional I am, how I’m rarely balanced or collected at all. How I’m messy and clumsy.
One really underappreciated aspect of writing, especially in prose, is rhythm. Think about the most entertaining people you know; it is likely the cadence and pace of their speech that makes listening to them riveting, perhaps more so than what they actually have to say.
Again, there is no formula to writing rhythmically, but I will say that when you read your work out loud, you get to hear its natural rhythms and sonic arcs, and you can tell where the rhythm gets stuck and needs smoothing out. I always read my writing aloud. If something feels awkward or clunky to say, I change it (sometimes my spoken voice even edits my writing for me, changing words or phrases by accident as it’s reading — those edits I never question).
As we became closer friends, I started taking some of him with me, and he started taking some of me with him. He appreciates the mess of me, which is maybe how I know that he loves me. What else is there to love, anyway?
Reading this paragraph now, almost three years after writing it, makes me want to change my name or give up writing forever. “What else is there to love, anyway?” SMH, younger Ricardo, that is so corny!
I wonder, though, if a disapproval of our younger writing selves is not only inevitable, but something worthy of aspiration. I want to be editing myself, constantly, as a writer and person. So, maybe, if we feel squeamish about our old writing, it means we are doing something right; we are participating in the world and letting it make new what we understand in ourselves to be beautiful and true.
And I can extend grace, too, for that younger Ricardo who was very much just trying his best, as I hope future Ricardo will extend grace to me, present Ricardo, who is also very much just trying his best.
The codes men follow in love are tricky. For example, while saying a straight “I love you” is frowned upon, sometimes saying to another man “Much love” or “I got love for you” is O.K. “I love you” might even be passable if it is quickly followed by “bro” or “man.”
These are the linguistic gymnastics masculinity asks us to perform, the negotiations we make through language to keep within the acceptable bounds of manhood.
I came up with the phrase “linguistic gymnastics” really early on in the writing of this piece. I don’t outline my writing. I usually just start with some lines and phrases, like this one, collected on a page in my journal. I never think about what an essay is “about” before, or even as, I’m writing it; I let it, over time, inform me of the many things it’s about.
You might start with a phrase or line or sentence that you love but don’t completely understand, and then go from there, scratching the surface, attending to the mystery of what you just wrote, understanding, in time, both its meaning and its place within a larger cohesive whole. Because the best things we write never feel like they really come from us; they feel like mysteries, as though they came through us, from some other distant place. The writer Adrienne Rich said once that “poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don’t know you know.”
Another way to think about it is this: I begin with phrases and ideas I love, and then build the scaffolding to hold those phrases up, and the bridges to connect them. Little by little, all those pieces begin to collect around one shared nucleus — one story, one question, one gesture.
A footnote should be added to the code. Sometimes the most inconvenient or terrible circumstances can occasion an acceptable expression of love, but only at that moment, never to be spoken of again.
Two years ago, Kichi and I took semesters off from college and spent that time in Colombia, where my father is from. One day, while in the coastal town of Capurganá, I got so suddenly sick with fever and dizziness that I dropped to my knees while walking on the beach.
I was scared to be mysteriously ill in a place where I knew it could be hard to find help. Kichi searched all over town for a doctor. When he couldn’t find one, he decided his pre-med coursework would have to do, and he tended to me. He put his hand on my forehead. He whispered into my ear. He told me over and over that I was going to be O.K. — until I was.
This was perhaps our most intimate moment, brought about by my sickness and unthinkable at any other time.
Here is another place where you can see scenes and ideas at work. There’s a popular piece of writing advice that says “show, don’t tell,” meaning, essentially, that depiction is always stronger than declaration. It’s a dictum that I mostly — but don’t entirely — agree with. Perhaps this is because the sentences in my reading life that I tend to treasure, that I inevitably memorize and quote in letters or transcribe in the margins of other books, are often those beautiful declarative, idea-y sentences.
Maybe an alternative way to think about it is to “show and tell,” like a show and tell in school! Let people hold the old photograph of your grandmother in their hands, but as they hold it, tell them what it means to you. Here, I’m in another “show” moment — this scene of Kichi and I at the beach — but I’m gearing up for an important “tell” moment.
This is the code, as intricate as it is far-reaching. Kichi and I do not possess the flagship qualities of masculine college boys. We aren’t in fraternities or on sports teams. We have even talked, more than once, about masculinity and the illogical things it requires of us. But still, we have lived in this world. We grew up as boys in America. We learned this code and we practice it. There’s no immunity.
There’s a part of this story I haven’t admitted yet: Each time I say, “I love you” to Kichi, it feels uncomfortable. I feel the weirdness of it in myself. The lesson is burrowed in that deep. I hesitate, flinch. But in my conscious mind, I know it’s what I want to say, so I try to say it.
This is a really important moment in the essay for me. Whenever we are writing about a problem in the world, our first instinct will be to locate that problem away from ourselves, in the outside world. But a writer’s instinct must always be to look inside.
When I think about this, I always think about the end of “Harry Potter” — how Harry went everywhere searching for those Horcruxes, and how it took him so long to discover that the last Horcrux had been attached, the whole time, to his soul. And how before he could fight Voldermort, his true enemy, he had to first go inside himself, to let that piece of enemy that lived within him die.
So often, what we despise most about the world resides, somewhere, in us. To confront those things, we first have to be willing to really look at ourselves. This, to me, has everything to do with writing, and everything to do with being alive. I wanted, in these lines, to locate myself inside the problem about which I was writing, and not to spare myself as simply an observer, or as a victim of the larger problem I’m observing.
I want to say “I love you” to Kichi and mean just that. I don’t want there to be any desire or questioning or expectation lurking inside my words. I want to love in a way that surpasses the need for affirmation, for return. This is what I have come to know as the purest kind of love: expecting nothing back.
I remain hopeful. It’s not that I need to hear those words. I’m just ready to be free from all the forces, voices and gestures that keep us from saying them. Still, I can’t help but wish that one day Kichi will forgo all the masculine clatter, look me in the eyes and simply say “I love you, too.”
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