Letting feelings out is all well and good in therapy sessions or support groups or in a Blu-Ray of The Notebook, but let’s get real: life is hard enough without having to be obligated to open the floodgates every time you realize you truly care about the people stupid enough to count you among their loved ones.  We all put in long, hard days and most of them conclude with summoning just enough will to microwave some fettuccine Alfredo and scarf it down while getting to our Tivo of Burn Notice.  It is just not possible to confront on a daily basis the fact that we would crumble without the abiding affection of those we hold dear.  It’s Oprah overload.

Yet, common courtesy requires us to contact these selfsame people on a fairly regular basis, and the last thing we need is to be reduced to a puddle just thinking about what they mean to us.  Thankfully, nature has provided an age-old remedy for this dreaded onrush of deep feeling.  And that remedy is “ya.”   Replacing “you” with “ya” as one closes out any correspondence or conversation is crisp, convenient shorthand for: “you mean the world to me and my heart swells with bittersweet fondness at the very thought of your existence—however, if I so much as attempt to actually say this I will implode like the bespectacled Nazi at the end of the first Raiders.”

This is particularly convenient for men, especially siblings, who are about as accustomed to “opening up” as a chair.

Example: “Miss ya, bro.”

Sometimes, the diminutive “ya” can actually provide an opening for the person being addressed to move directly into the full “you,” with the unspoken agreement that though the frightening word was used, it was only in response to the previous use of “ya.”

Example: “Miss ya, bro.”  “Miss you too, bro.”

It goes without saying that employing “ya” instead of “you” also on most occasions bypasses the troublesome pronoun “I”: a particularly unwanted word in the quest to avoid intimacy. Nowhere is this fact more glaringly apparent than in the timeworn tradition evidenced in the classic “love ya!” versus the daunting, nay frightening “I love you.”

“Ya” is also really useful to those involved in an unrequited romance.  Okay, so she hasn’t given you a single indication that you will ever taste the sweet nectar of her adoration, so what harm is there in closing out an email with a quick “love ya?”  No harm at all is the answer to that question.

Conversely, ladies may sign off a response to an unwanted suitor with a “love ya” as a not-very-subtle-but-completely-socially-acceptable way of saying “don’t love you, never will.”

Family members of all stripes can and should make regular use of the all-purpose “Thinking of ya!” as they communicate to sons, daughters, cousins, even wives or husbands.  And notice how the added exclamation point can provide an extra layer of emotional distancing!  “I’m thinking of you, but in a kind of offhand, don’t worry about it way!”  For an even greater don’t-think-for-a-moment-that-I-care grace note, take the ‘g’ off the end of the word ‘thinking’ and add a crisp, informal apostrophe (‘thinkin’ of ya!).

These are just a few of the ways you can cope with your own pitiful (but utterly understandable) lack of desire to “go there,” as well as more fully grasp the motivations of other loved ones who also don’t want to “go there.”  For “going there” means a sudden, unchecked outpouring of thoughts long held in check, and ones that could make you a blubbering idiot within a millisecond.  And God knows we can’t have that.  Now get back to work, everybody.  Lovin’ ya!

HOLY CRAP! PAUL MAUL IS AVAILABLE IN BOOK FORM!--DOWNLOAD "SHOVE IT UPWARDS!" THE E-BOOK!

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