What 'I want to be with you' means

I've been wanting to write a post about this phrase for a while because while it sounds cute in dialogue, it gets soooooo much better if you get down to the nitty-gritty of the individual definitions of the words.

Am I probably reading too much into this phrase? Am I an overthinker and overanalyzer? Oh yeah. But I'm not going to let that stop me.

First, let's look at the phrase itself.

I want to be with you.

I

Want to be

With

You.

Here's the thing: one can interpret this sentence in two different ways.

This is what I love about English. Depending on where you put the inflection, the sentence can take very different forms. The first is this:

I want to be with you.

To be with. To go along with, to accompany, to walk alongside. Like Avril Levine, to say 'I'm with you' as in I am a couple with you, I arrive at a place and say 'I'm with him' because I have arrived with you, I am in a party with you, a group of two. I am with you. I am with you.

And while that is beautiful itself, the other interpretation of the phrase is my favorite.

I want to be with you.

To be. To have being. To live. To take up space in the world. To happen. To draw breath.  To exist.

Have you ever heard the phrase 'just be'? To take a moment to close your eyes and just exist, to stop running around and feel the fact that this group of atoms is a person and that person is you and that you are.

This is why I like this version of the sentence best.

I want to be. With you.

I want to exist with you, be by your side, and have both of us happen together. This person is saying that they want to live simultaneously with the other person and not to exist otherwise. They want their own existence to be entwined with the person they love.

The sentence is simple on the surface, and in all its intent it is a simple, simple thing. To desire to be with someone else, to go as a pair, and be happy, because their happiness is derived from one another. To work as a couple should. It's cute. It's simple. But looking at the meaning makes it all the more special for me whenever I see it.

I want to be with you.

How simple and how perfect.