“I Think I Love You” The Partridge Family

My secret random system for radio shows (involving playing cards and a calendar) was yesterday employed with the “What You Need” radio program on WRUW Cleveland, and landed on the 1970 hit single, “I Think I Love You” by The Partridge Family. This was the first song I ever associated directly with a crush (or possibly second—as Tommy Roe's “Dizzy” came out a year earlier) (but either way, they both were associated with a mad crush on someone that even to this day, I won't admit publicly, out of respect). As a ten-year-old, though, I remember putting this record on and marveling how the lyrics so closely matched my feelings. It's a super catchy song, by one of my favorite songwriters, Tony Romeo (and also contains the dreaded “brain/insane” rhyme). The song may have actually given my feelings their first words: “I love you.” The “think” part, for me, was not questioning the intensity of the feeling, but rather: was this what love was? The Partridge Family TV show came on the air at almost the exact time the record came out—I'm not sure where I heard the song first—and my feelings of romantic love for this girl my age were then mixed with a crush on Shirley Jones—kind of weird, since she was the mother—but then the show only barely toned down the incestuous mother/son subtext, played for as much heat as they could get by the censors. I was the same age as Danny, the bass playing hobbit, but I related much more to the heartthrob Keith (David Cassidy) whose romantic adventures (am I remembering this correctly?) were constantly derailed because none of the young ladies could hold a candle to his mom. It wasn't until several years later that I realized that I could actually have a crush on Susan Dey, and I did, but by that time, beer was my new mistress.