I heard the word again last week — loverboy — in a conversation that wasn't even about me. Someone said it about someone else, laughing, the way people do when they're identifying a pattern they recognize but don't quite respect. And something in me tensed.
Because I know what they meant by it.
They meant soft. They meant too eager. They meant the kind of man who gives too much too fast and doesn't know when to pull back. The kind who gets hurt and keeps coming back anyway. The kind who makes loving him feel easy because he's already doing all the work.
That's the version most people know.
But that's not what the word means to me.
To me, loverboy is older than that. Deeper than that. It's not a romance term. It's a survival term. It's what happens when a boy grows up in a house where love came through structure instead of softness — where being loved meant being fed, clothed, monitored, but not held. Not in the way that makes you feel like you matter just by existing.
So he learns to reach for warmth everywhere else.
He learns to read women before he reads himself. He learns to give what he didn't get and hope it comes back. He learns that love is something you earn by being easy, by being present, by never asking for too much. And because he's good at it — because he actually is soft in ways that make people feel safe — it works. For a while.
Until it doesn't.
Until he realizes he's been performing care to avoid abandonment. Until he's standing in the middle of a relationship he poured himself into and discovering he can't remember the last time someone asked him what he needed. Until he understands that the skill he built to survive his childhood is the same skill that's costing him his adulthood.
That's the loverboy I know.
Not the rom-com version. The Black male literature version. The one who shows up in Gayl Jones and John Edgar Wideman and ZZ Packer — the men who love in ways that hurt them, who can't stop giving even when it's clear no one's giving back. The ones who mistake endurance for strength and call it loyalty when really it's just fear of being alone with themselves.
I've been sitting with the Vacuum lately — that's the framework from the work I built into Dig Deep that names the space inside you that wasn't filled when it should have been. The place where reassurance or tenderness or validation was supposed to land and didn't. The place that doesn't just sit empty — it pulls. Like a gravitational force. And if you don't know it's there, you spend your whole life trying to fill it with someone else's presence.
That's what makes a loverboy.
Not love itself. The hunger underneath it.
I think about the narrator in Loverboy, Still sometimes — not as a character I created, but as a version of something I've known my whole life. A man who keeps showing up for people who don't show up for him. Who keeps trying to earn something that was supposed to be given freely. Who thinks if he just loves hard enough, consistently enough, the equation will balance.
It never does.
Because the equation was rigged from the start.
This isn't about blaming mothers or romanticizing pain or pretending every man who loves deeply is secretly wounded. Some men are just generous. Some men are just soft. Some men learned how to give without keeping score and that's a gift, not a pathology.
But there's a difference between giving from fullness and giving from emptiness.
And the loverboy — the real one, the one that shows up in our stories — is almost always giving from the latter.
Saeed Jones has a line that keeps coming back to me lately, something about how the body remembers what the mind tries to forget. That's what the loverboy carries. The memory of not being enough just as he was. The instinct to compensate. The certainty that love has to be earned and re-earned and the moment he stops performing it, it'll disappear.
I'm not that person anymore.
Or maybe I am, but I'm aware of it now in ways I wasn't before. I know where the hunger comes from. I know what it's trying to do. I know that wanting to be chosen doesn't mean I have to shrink to fit someone else's idea of what's easy.
That's the work.
Not stopping the love — stopping the performance of it. Not closing off — opening more carefully. Not giving less — giving from a place that isn't trying to prove something.
That's what I mean when I say loverboy, still.
Still soft. Still open. Still romantic.
But not still hungry.
Not anymore.
If you're sitting with something similar — if you recognize the hunger underneath the giving — the work that built this clarity in me is at the Gregory Mitchell Experience.