There are a thousand expressions you could use to say the same thing, but they'll never have the power of these three words. "I love you": a magic spell capable of transforming reality. Linguists call it a "performative" utterance: a phrase, as much as an action, that produces an effect (for example, "the meeting is open" or "I now pronounce you husband and wife"). But what kind of effect? How many phrases can provoke such diametrically opposed reactions in the other person?

In life, as in film, this declaration is a moment of enlightenment. The silence that follows it is terrible, both for the one who said it and for the one who doesn't know how to respond. In principle, lying and saying "me too" is as amoral as it is stupid. "Lying in love is a violent kidnapping of the shared, common space of the truth of things," wrote Véronique Nahoum-Grappe in a text entitled "Je t'aime!" Faut-il y croire? ("'I love you!' Should one believe it?").

If this moment can be a dilemma, it's because other urges can complicate the obvious principle that "one mustn't lie," least of all in love. We sometimes say "me too" because we don't want to hurt the other person, or because we'd like it to be true. Out of gratitude, because you're happy to be loved. For the beauty of it, because we're swept along by the declaration. Or because we refuse to accept the break with reality that would imply saying, "I don't." We lie because "the most senseless, the most inescapable, affliction that can befall a man to be loved against his will – torment of torments, and a burden of guilt where no guilt is," wrote Stefan Zweig in Beware of Pity (1939).

The novel pushes this dilemma to its most painful point: The protagonist is loved by a disabled young woman, who inspires neither desire nor love in him. Out of pity, he tells himself: "Let her love you, I said to myself, conceal your feelings, dissimulate for this one week, to spare her pride." The story, of course, doesn't end well. For "it is characteristic of those who love to have an uncanny insight into the true feelings of the beloved," writes Zweig. Worse than silence, worse than the truth, is what we know to be a lie. "To free someone, there's nothing more beautiful than to say 'I don't love you.' It's braver than saying 'I love you,'" wrote a 43-year-old woman, waiting in vain for a declaration of non-love from the man she loves, to Le Monde.

But it's not just the person on the receiving end of a declaration of love who can lie. It's not just "me too" that can be deceptive. There are also suspicious cases of "I love you": those that come too quickly, those we sense are mostly meant to seduce us, to be loved in return. Those of Don Juan, an immoral figure if ever there was one, who declares his love for every woman he meets: his "I love yous" are used to subjugate the other person (and they always work).

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