'I Love You' 100, 1000 & 10,000 Times — What Happens When Emotion Outgrows Language

Rahul Goswami — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 12:10:11 +0000

Nobody puts "accidental relationship researcher" on their resume.
But after building a text repeater tool and watching how real people actually use it — that's more or less what I became.
I'm a 25-year-old developer. I built the tool as a side project. The use case I had in mind was technical: bulk text generation, QA testing, filling UI components with realistic-length content. Practical stuff.
Then I started noticing what people were actually typing into the input field.
"I love you."
Over and over. Hundreds of times. Sometimes ten thousand.
And I realized — I'd accidentally built something that sits at the exact intersection of technology and one of the oldest human problems: how do you say something when the words you have aren't big enough for what you feel?

The Inflation Problem Nobody Talks About
"I love you" is three words that have carried more emotional weight than almost any other phrase in human history. Literature, music, wars — entire civilizations have pivoted on those three words.
And we've also said them so many times that sometimes they just... bounce off.
Not because they're not meant. Not because the love isn't real. But because familiarity is the quiet enemy of impact. The brain is wired to filter out the expected. A phrase said daily, in the same tone, in the same context, starts to register as ambient noise — even when the feeling behind it is anything but ordinary.
This is the inflation problem: the more you use something, the more of it you need to create the same effect.
So people scale up.

Why 1,000 "I Love You"s Hits Different
There's a counterintuitive thing that happens when you receive a message that's clearly excessive.
Your rational brain immediately clocks the absurdity — okay, they used a tool for this, this took fifteen seconds. That part is quick and unbothered. But something else kicks in right after it: the recognition that this person chose to do something deliberately over-the-top, specifically for you.
That choice carries information. It says: you're the kind of person I'm willing to look silly for. You're worth the extra.
In behavioral psychology, this maps to what's called a costly signal — a gesture that only holds meaning because of the effort or vulnerability it represents. The digital version of standing in the rain outside someone's window. Objectively unnecessary. Emotionally, exactly right.

The Range of People Actually Doing This
When I dug into how people were using the tool, the pattern was far more interesting than I expected.
It wasn't just new couples in the dizzy early stages. It was people in long-term relationships trying to puncture routine. It was someone in a different timezone trying to make their partner feel less far away. It was a person saying it to a parent who'd never heard it enough, trying to retroactively fill a gap. It was friends — people who don't say "I love you" in person but wanted to say it anyway, at scale, where the volume made it feel safer somehow.
Love doesn't have a demographic. And neither does the need to find a bigger container for it.

A Confession About Building Without Empathy First
I want to be transparent about something, because I think it's relevant to anyone building products — even small ones.
When I built this tool, I thought about the user as a functional actor. Someone who needs text repeated. I optimized for speed, copy-paste ease, clean output. I thought about edge cases like max character limits and mobile responsiveness.
I did not think about the person who would type "I love you" into an input box at midnight and wonder if a thousand copies of it could say what a single one couldn't.
That's an empathy gap. And I think it's one of the most common blind spots in how we build — we model the user as a task-doer, and forget they're a feeling-haver first.
The best thing that could happen to any developer, early in their career, is to have their assumptions about their own tool completely dismantled by the people using it.
That happened to me. It made me a better builder.

What "I Love You × 10,000" Is Really About
Strip away the novelty of it, and what you have is someone refusing to let a feeling go unacknowledged.
In an era of ghosting, dry texts, and three-second attention spans — that refusal is quietly radical. It's someone saying: I know we communicate through screens now. I know this is a little ridiculous. But I'm not going to let the medium shrink what I'm trying to say.
Every generation finds new grammar for the same human need. Love letters became telegrams became voicemails became texts became voice notes became, apparently, ten thousand identical lines of the same sentence.
The format keeps changing. The feeling doesn't.

If you've built something that got used in ways you never planned for — I'd genuinely love to hear about it. Leave it in the comments. Those stories are usually the most interesting ones.

Sorry 100, 1000 & 10,000 Times — The Weird Trend That's Actually Changing How We Apologize

Rahul Goswami — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 12:08:52 +0000

I built a text repeater tool expecting developers to test form inputs with it.
What I got instead was a front-row seat to how people apologize in 2025.
Thousands of people were running phrases through my tool — not dummy data, not placeholder text. They were typing "I'm sorry" and hitting repeat. A hundred times. Five hundred. Ten thousand. Then copying that wall of text and sending it to someone they'd hurt.
I'm 25, I've been writing code for a few years now, and I've debugged some strange things — but this? This made me close my laptop and just think for a bit.

Something Broke in How We Say Sorry
Here's a problem nobody writes Stack Overflow answers for: how do you apologize when words feel too small?
We've all been there — done something that a simple "hey, sorry about that" just doesn't cover. The kind of situation where you're staring at a blank message box knowing that whatever you type is going to land short of what you actually feel.
Historically, people solved this with time and presence. You showed up. You made a meal. You wrote three pages in a card. The effort was the message.
Now presence is a FaceTime call and effort lives inside a chat window. The container changed — but the human need didn't.
Sending "sorry" a thousand times is a workaround born from that gap. It's not laziness. It's someone asking: if I can't show you how much I mean this, can I at least show you the scale of it?

What Developers Often Miss About Their Own Tools
I want to be honest here — when I was building the repeater, I was thinking purely in terms of utility. Repetition count. Character limits. Copy-to-clipboard UX. The usual.
I wasn't thinking about the person at 1 AM who'd just had a fight with someone they love, who'd run out of original things to say and needed something that looked like the weight of what they were feeling.
This is a pattern I've noticed in how we build: we design for the use case we imagine, then ship to the use case that actually exists.
The gap between those two is where the most interesting things happen.

The Psychology Behind Sending It
Repair attempts — any action made to de-escalate conflict in a relationship — are one of the most studied predictors of long-term relationship health. Dr. John Gottman's research frames them as emotional bids: one person reaching across the tension, saying I don't want this distance between us.
A wall of repeated apologies is, stripped of its quirk, exactly that. A bid. An uncomfortable, slightly unhinged, entirely sincere bid.
And here's the thing about bids — they work not because they're polished, but because they're visible. The person receiving a thousand sorries knows, somewhere underneath the eye-roll, that you didn't have to do that. You chose to look a little ridiculous in service of being understood.
That choice is the point.

When It Doesn't Work (Let's Be Real)
I'd be doing you a disservice if I made this sound like a relationship hack.
Repetition amplifies intention — it doesn't manufacture it. If the apology isn't backed by an actual conversation, a change in behavior, some real acknowledgment of what went wrong — the text is just noise. Loud noise, but noise.
The tool gets the door open. Walking through it is still entirely on you.
What I've seen work: the repeated text as an opener, a signal, a "please don't close off yet" — followed by an actual conversation. The message isn't the apology. It's the invitation to have one.

What This Made Me Think About as a Dev
We talk a lot in this community about building things that matter. About solving real problems. And we usually mean that in a technical sense — performance, scale, efficiency.
But sometimes the problem you're solving is just: someone needs to feel something, and they don't know how to make that happen.
That's not in any product spec. But it might be the most important thing your tool ever does.
Build the utility. But stay curious about who's actually on the other end of it — because they'll almost always surprise you.

What's the most unexpected use case you've ever seen for something you built? Drop it in the comments — I'm genuinely curious.

DEV Community: Rahul Goswami

'I Love You' 100, 1000 & 10,000 Times — What Happens When Emotion Outgrows Language

Sorry 100, 1000 & 10,000 Times — The Weird Trend That's Actually Changing How We Apologize