By Hannah Webb | Focus Editor

I tell all my friends I love them.

I don’t do it dramatically or with some big emotional crescendo — just the way people say “drive safe” or “text me when you get home.” Sometimes they laugh, sometimes they say it back, sometimes they look startled, like no one warned them friendship could sound like that.

But there’s a particular kind of silence that settles after someone leaves your life; the kind that makes you relive every word you never said. And lately, I’ve been thinking about how many friendships fade not because of conflict, but because affection was assumed rather than spoken.

We treat friendship like background music: comforting, constant, easily taken for granted. Yet friendship is the architecture holding most of us upright. It shapes us, steadies us, reminds us who we are when everything else feels unsteady. And still, with the people who show up for us most consistently, we hesitate to offer the simplest words: I love you.

Aristotle once wrote, “Without friends, no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods.” It’s an ancient line, but it reads like an indictment of our modern habits. We’ve never been more connected, but our connections rarely stretch past convenience. We send quick texts, tap little hearts, exchange memes and then fall quiet where the real words should be.

But friendship isn’t built on repetition; it’s built on revelation. It asks us to be honest, sometimes embarrassingly so. It asks us to say the thing we hope the other person already knows: You matter to me. Your existence touches mine. I love you.

Maybe that honesty feels risky because friendship doesn’t have a cultural script. Romance gets anniversaries, candlelit confessions, sweeping gestures. Friendship gets late-night drives, shared playlists, coffee shop study sessions and the kind of quiet loyalty that rarely gets labeled as love — though it absolutely is.

Telling my friends I love them isn’t a grand gesture; it’s maintenance. It’s how I honor the constancy they give me. Aristotle believed the highest kind of friendship was a “friendship of virtue,” where two people are invested in each other’s flourishing simply because the other’s good matters. That kind of friendship deserves a language that matches its weight.

Besides, love doesn’t shrink when you speak it. It expands. It softens both people. It turns ordinary moments into little markers of care. And in a time when loneliness has become a public health crisis, saying I love you is a small corrective — a refusal to let our friendships remain casual or implied.

Some people worry that saying I love you to friends will make things awkward. But in my experience, the opposite is true: it makes things honest.

I think about how many of my friendships have survived heartbreaks, cross-country moves, raw confessions and the kind of laughter that rearranges your insides. I think of the friends who have listened to me spiral over nothing, who have celebrated my victories that didn’t benefit them at all, who have stood by me when I didn’t particularly like myself.

Why wouldn’t I tell them I love them? Why do any of us hold back?

Maybe because affection makes us feel exposed. Perhaps because we’re afraid of sounding too earnest in a culture allergic to earnestness, or just maybe it’s because we’ve convinced ourselves we have all the time in the world to say it someday.

We are not promised unlimited time with the people who make life bearable. We are not promised that our closest friends will always live down the hall, or even in the same city. People drift. Circumstances shift. Lives change shape. And sometimes, the only thing that keeps a friendship from dissolving into memory is the courage to name what already exists.

So say it now. Say it casually or deliberately, clumsily or confidently. Say it in the car, in a text, over a shared meal or in the middle of a laugh you don’t want to forget. Love doesn’t need a grand stage; it just needs your voice.

Tell them because friendship deserves language. Tell them because Aristotle was right. Tell them because silence is too expensive. Tell them because you mean it.