Say these three words to the world.

It’s a crazy thought, but what if you did? What if we all did?

Photo by Margaret Barr

“Thank you. I love you.”

Oh my God! Did Andrew say, “I love you?” It sounded like it right before we hung up the phone. How weird is that? This was the first time he and I had talked. I don’t even know if his name was “Andrew.” He was a technician from Verizon. Maybe something got lost in translation between Bangladesh and my house in San Francisco.

Within minutes of my Verizon phone call, I came to my senses. Of course, Andrew didn’t say, “I love you.” He must have said, “Thank you, ma’am.” It was an auditory dysmorphia, a fancy way of saying I was hearing things.

But then I began to imagine a world in which we all said, “I love you” openly and with genuine feeling, a 21st-new world salutation. What if we said, “I love you” to our mail delivery person? “I love this mail and Deborah, most of all, I love you.”

To Martha at Whole Foods, I would not just say the usual, “How is your day going, Martha?” but, “Martha, I see you working so hard here all the time, and you are so friendly. “I love you so much.” (Martha works this minimum wage job in her sixties and looks exhausted all the time. But never tell a woman she looks tired.) To the people in tents living on the sidewalk only a…