Why Is Everyone Saying “I Love That for You”?

It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment when a phrase achieves meme status, but it seems to be happening more than ever. From “I’m baby” to “You hate to see it,” expressions that first gained currency in the shadowy depths of Twitter and Instagram often go mainstream, but it can be tricky to trace the precise etymology that takes, say, “Weird flex, but okay” from extremely online slang to all-purpose catchphrase.

The expression “I love that for you” and its variants (“I love that for me/us/them”) has picked up steam of late. If you’re a culture vulture, you might suspect that its origins could partly be traced back to The Bachelor’s Arie Luyendyk Jr., a living manifestation of compulsory heterosexuality who exclaimed “I love that” in 2018 enough to merit a three-minute compilation video. It’s now become a widely used phrase within queer communities, appearing even as the title of an LGBTQ+ lifestyle blog.

Gretchen McCulloch, internet linguist and author of the best-selling book Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language, took to the Google Ngram Viewer—which tracks phraseology usage dating back to 1500—to search for possible linguistic predecessors to “I love that for you.” What she found wasn’t entirely surprising: “There are no results for the full phrase ‘Love that for you’ until 2008, so it seems like its origins are more recent,” she tells Vogue.

So how did “I love that for you” gain traction in the first place? The answer is complicated, and—like so many things in our current dystopia—at least partly YouTube-related.

“Like many queer cultural artifacts, ‘I love that for you’ comes from teens, and we’ve picked it up,” Rose Dommu, a senior staff writer at Out, who employed the phrase in a February interview, tells Vogue. Dommu attributes “I love that for you” to beauty guru James Charles, while cautioning that Charles is the equivalent of “a human retweet.”

Charles made headlines in May for his gummy-supplement feud with fellow YouTuber Tati Westbrook, but to his ardent, primarily teenage fan base, he’s been a star for years. At his zenith, Charles boasted 16 million YouTube subscribers who flocked to his DIY makeup tutorials like moths to a perfectly contoured flame, and he quickly parlayed that success into branded partnerships, Met gala invitations, and even a CoverGirl contract.

Before the feud, Charles won fans not only with his impeccable makeup skills, but also his taxonomy of catchphrases. In a March video titled “Learn the sister dictionary with James Charles,” Charles broke down the bon mots he’d become famous for on YouTube in alphabetical order: H was for “Hi, sisters” (used to open up every vlog); N was for “Not with that attitude”; and L, of course, was for “Love that.”

“‘Love that’ can be expanded to ‘Love that for you’ or ‘Love that for me,’” Charles explains in his always-upbeat tone. The shortened version of the phrase has made its way onto official James Charles merchandise, and like any good neologism, it even commands its own UrbanDictionary page. “Kind of like ‘love that,’ but generally means that you don’t actually care,” one user reports, making sure to hashtag #JamesCharles.

“I love that for [X]” has spread from Charles throughout the YouTuber community; it can be sincere praise of a friend’s outfit choice, or it can be used as a heightened form of “LOL” to express bemusement at the uncanny, like Tana Mongeau tweeting “I love that for us” when she and one of her followers tweeted the same joke about Donald Trump and Kim Kardashian’s May 2018 meeting. It’s a pet phrase of Mongeau’s; in fact, if you’re so inclined, you can even watch her saying it for two minutes on a loop.

Just as Charles has moved from star to scandal-maker, the phrase “love that for you” has curdled from earnest to sarcastic; this shift is evidenced by an October Reductress headline reading, “Knock Your Proud Friend Down a Peg or Two by Declaring, ‘I Love That for You!’” In its sarcastic form, “I love that for you” is a prime example of what writer Myriam Gurba calls “the queer art of being mean,” but it’s an inherently versatile phrase, one that’s as easy to employ sincerely as it is to toss off as an insult.

At its heart, “I love that for you” is a queer internet catchphrase with with real-world legs; like other online slang that has made its way IRL, it’s a signifier of someone who “gets it.” That is, for now, anyway; the chances are good that the phrase could go mainstream, emblazoned across water bottles and workout tanks the world over. Dommu notes how quickly the phrase has spread beyond Charles: “I hear people saying it now who would never watch his videos.” These days, when she catches herself saying “I love that for you” on the podcast she hosts, Out’s Outcast, she edits it out. “I can see some very non-gay brand marketing with it,” she predicts. “In five years, someone will be using ‘I love that for you’ to sell a sandwich.”

The thing that makes “I love that for you” great, though, is not its mainstream potential, but its versatility. How often can a phrase go from a genuine expression of loving support (as in, “The thing you’re doing will benefit you, friend”) to a subtle act of shade (“The thing you’re doing is tragically misguided, but I’m not going to say so”) with a simple change of intonation? “I love that for you” functions as a cultural bridge between millennial irony and Gen-Z sincerity—allowing everyone to take what they need and leave the rest.

Won’t You Be My Neighbor? Is 90 Minutes of Pure Delight

Confession: I was more nervous about watching Won’t You Be My Neighbor? than Hereditary. I can take a horror film about a family turned inside out—but a documentary about the host of a children’s TV show I grew up with? Who dedicated his life to making kids feel loved? Just the trailer was overwhelming. The gentle set of Mr. Rogers’s gaze and the calming timbre of his voice brought nostalgic tears to my eyes. A guy can only take so much.

But Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, which has already drawn solid box office numbers in select theaters and begins rolling out across the country this weekend—just in time for Father’s Day—is the most soothing, joyful, and hope-inducing 90 minutes I’ve spent in recent memory. It’s like sitting in a warm bath of positivity. Add it to your wellness regimen: Here is a film that vanquishes cynicism.

It’s also quietly radical—not a biographical documentary, nor a manipulative tear-jerker, but an intelligent exploration of the late Fred Rogers’s ideas about self-worth, about facing (not running from) reality, and his profound notions of what very young children can handle. The definition of assassination, for instance. Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, the landmark public television program he hosted for more than 30 years, began in 1968, a few months before Robert F. Kennedy was gunned down in Los Angeles. Rogers, who populated his show with adorably ragtag puppets, used one of them, Daniel Tiger, to explain what had happened. “That man killed that other man,” Daniel says, startlingly direct. And then, mournfully: “I’d rather talk about it some other day.”

There was more bravery. In ’69, amid racial tension across the country, Rogers showed the character Officer Clemmons—a black policeman played by François Clemmons—sharing an outdoor foot bath with him on a hot day. (The documentary juxtaposes this with contemporaneous footage of a white man pouring cleaning products into a pool where African Americans were swimming.) Tolerance, kindness, empathy: These were the guiding principles of Rogers’s homespun program, which eschewed the kinetic high jinks of so much of kids’ television (Rogers apparently hated superheroes). He was an ordained Christian minister who wasn’t publicly religious but clearly believed in the power of rituals—coming home with a song, trading his leather shoes for sneakers, his blazer for one of those brightly colored cardigans. And he wasn’t afraid of silence. The interview subjects in the film—family, friends, and colleagues—recall how Rogers once filmed an egg timer just to teach the children watching how long a minute was.

Does that sound boring? Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood never was (in my memory). A warning: Won’t You Be My Neighbor? reveals no hidden demons, no salacious secrets (perhaps Rogers had none), but I was glued to it all the way through. There are glimpses that he had a steely will (he obsessively controlled his weight) and was perhaps a bit inflexible on set toward the end of his show’s run (it stopped filming in 2001). But the film doesn’t reveal much in the way of personal history. What it does do is remind you of the profound effects of kindness—and makes you lament how little of it we have in public life at the moment. The ending is especially moving: an extraordinary sequence in which several of his friends and colleagues, heeding advice Rogers often gave, think silently about someone who loved them. Have tissues close at hand.