"Easy" is a man telling his lover that letting her go will not destroy him. The Commodores recorded it in 1977 as a breakup song that refuses to beg. Lionel Richie wrote a narrator who insists he will be fine, that the separation will slide off him like water. The song works because the confidence is fragile. Nobody who is actually fine spends a whole song insisting they are. The repeated claim starts to sound less like certainty and more like a man convincing himself.