Irigaray says:
“I love to you means I maintain a relation of indirection to you. I do not subjugate or consume you. I respect you (as irreducible). I hail you: in you I hail. I praise you: in you I praise. I give you thanks: in you I give thanks for...i bless you. for...I speak to you, not just about something; rather i speak to you. I tell you, not so much this or that, but rather I tell to you.”
The "to" is the guarantor of indirection. The "to" prevents the relation of transitivity, bereft of the other's irreducibility and potential reciprocity. The "to" maintains intransitivity between persons, between the interpersonal question, speech or gift: I speak to you, I ask of you, I give to you (and not: I give you to another).
The "to" is the sign of non-immediacy, of meditation between us. Thus, it is not: I order you or command you to do some particular thing, which could mean or imply: I prescribe this for you, I subject you to these truths, to this order--whether these amount to a form of labor or to a form of human or divine pleasure. Nor is it: I seduce you to me, the you becoming (what belongs) to me; the "I love to you" becoming "I love (what belongs) to me."Any more than it is: I marry you, in the sense that I am making you my wife or my husband, that is: I take you, I am making you mine. Rather, it is: I hope to be attentive to you now and in the future, I ask you if I may stay with you, and I am faithful to you.
The "to" is the site of non-reduction of the person to the object I love you, I desire you, I take you, I seduce you, I order you, I instruct you, and so on, always risking annihilating the alterity of the other, of transforming him/her into my property, my object, of reducing him/her to what is mine, into mine, meaning what is already a part of my field of existential or material properties.
The "to" is also a barrier against alienating the other's freedom in my subjectivity, my world, my language.
I love to you thus means: I do not take you for a direct object, nor for an indirect object by revolving around you. It is, rather, around myself that I have to revolve in order to maintain the to you thanks to the return to me. Not with my prey--you become mine--but with the intention of respecting my nature, my history, my intentionality, while also respecting yours. Hence, I do not return to me by way of: I wonder if I am loved. That would result from an introverted intentionality, going toward the other so as to return ruminating, sadly and endlessly, over solipsistic questions in a sort of cultural cannibalism.
The "to" is the guarantor of two intentionalities: mine and yours. In you I love that which can correspond to my own intentionality and to yours.
i found this beautiful and completely relevant.