Saying "I love you" is easy, a piece of piss, and more or less every
man I know does it all the time. I've
acted as though I
haven't been able to say it a couple of times, although I'm not sure
why. Maybe because I wanted to lend the moment that sort of corny
Doris Day romance, make it more memorable than it otherwise would have
been. You know, you're with someone, and you start to say something,
and the you stop, and she goes "What?" and you go "Nothing," and she
goes, "Please say it," and you go, "No, it'll sound stupid," and then
she makes you spit it out, even though you'd been intending to say it
all along, and she thinks it's all the more valuable for being
hard-won. Maybe she knew all the time that you were messing about,
but she doesn't mind, anyway. It's like a quote: it's the nearest any
of us gets to being in the movies....
-- Nick Hornby. High Fidelity (p.163)