I grew up in an Asian family where “I love you” was not something we said. Ever.
Love was a verb. Love had verbs.
Have you eaten?
Take this with you.
Be safe. Call when you get there.
I made extra.
My mother worked hard. She still does. Her love for her children is among the deepest and most unconditional loves I have ever known. I have never had to wonder whether she would show up for me. She loved through labor, sacrifice, food, worry, responsibility, endurance, and a thousand ordinary acts that would never announce themselves as affection.
So I learned early that love does not require beautiful language to be real. But I think I have learned something else, too.
Love can be real without being spoken.
Love can be real without being spoken.
But sometimes, speaking it is the gift.
Maybe I needed to learn both.
For a long time, I thought there was something especially meaningful about people who did not say "I love you" easily. If someone rarely said it, surely the words carried more weight when they finally arrived. Scarcity made them significant.
I have men in my life I’ve known for more than a decade who I know love me deeply and still cannot seem to say the words. I’ll say, “Love you,” and get a joke in return. A deflection. Some ridiculous substitute we both understand. Over time, I learned not to mistake their difficulty saying love for an absence of it. I became fluent in translation.
I have also known people for whom “I love you” seems to come without hesitation. Especially women. They say it to friends, to family, to the people they collect and keep close. Sometimes they say it to people they barely know.
And I noticed something less generous in myself: I trusted the scarcity more.
If someone almost never said “I love you,” the words seemed consequential when they finally did. But if someone said them freely, some part of me wondered whether mine could possibly mean as much.
If you say it to everyone, what distinguishes mine?
I don't think that anymore.
Abundance does not necessarily cheapen affection.
Scarcity does not necessarily make it precious.
There is a particular kind of emotional generosity in letting people know the good things you already feel about them.
If you love someone, tell them. If you miss them, tell them. If you're proud of them, tell them. If they looked beautiful across the table tonight, tell them. If two hours disappeared because talking to them was that good, tell them. If their presence has changed your life, tell them. Use the affectionate name. Say the tender thing. Don't edit warmth out of your language simply because it feels vulnerable to let someone hear it.
We are strangely willing to make people infer the best things we think about them.
They know.
My children know I'm proud of them. My partner knows I love her. My friend knows how important he is to me. My employee knows I value her.
And they might.
But knowing and hearing are not the same experience.
This is true beyond our closest relationships, too.
I have watched leaders assume their people know how highly they are regarded. They know I trust them. They know they're doing good work. They know I see their potential. They know I would fight to keep them.
Sometimes they do. Sometimes they don't.
A leader can spend years privately admiring someone who spends those same years wondering whether their work is noticed. An employee can be deeply valued and still experience the absence of recognition as information. People make decisions with what is available to them, not with what we meant for them to somehow know.
This is one of the quieter failures of leadership: allowing appreciation to remain private while expecting its effects to be public.
Recognition does not have to be constant or inflated to matter. In fact, specificity makes it more credible. You handled that conversation with extraordinary judgment. I trust you with difficult things. The way you think has changed how this team operates. I'm glad you're here.
These are not decorative sentences. They are information.
What we make explicit becomes part of the environment another person is making decisions inside.
This seems to become harder, not easier, the closer we become. There is very little risk in telling someone at the edges of our lives that they are wonderful. Intimacy raises the stakes. I love you. I miss you. I need you. I'm still crazy about you. I'm so glad I chose you. Those words spoken inside a relationship with history expose something. The person receiving them has the power not to return them.
So sometimes we protect ourselves. Other times, familiarity simply takes over. Affection migrates quietly from expression into assumption. The relationship becomes established. Surely they know. Surely we don't have to keep saying all of this after years together.
But closeness shouldn't turn love into something we are expected to already know.
There is a spiritual question underneath this for me.
Most spiritual traditions eventually confront us with impermanence. People leave. Bodies fail. Relationships change. Parents die. Friends move away. Children grow up. Lives that once seemed inseparable take different roads.
Whatever we believe about what comes afterward, this particular configuration of people, in these particular bodies, sitting around this particular table, on this completely ordinary Tuesday, is temporary.
We know this.
And then we behave as though there will always be another opportunity to express what is loving and true.
What exactly are we protecting by leaving it unsaid?
There may be time.
Until there isn't.
I think about a moment with someone I loved. She was going through something hard and handling it with her whole capable self — trying to figure out what came next, problem-solving, holding it together. I sat with her and helped her strategize. I wanted to say: I love you. I'm so glad you're here. Instead, I stayed in the language I knew best — helping, solving, doing. I got her a drink. I showed love the way I had learned to, through service. I don't regret the service. I just wish I had also said the words more.
Maybe being fully alive means letting the people we love experience what we feel for them.
Not indiscriminate intimacy. Not saying things we don't mean. And certainly not using beautiful words to compensate for unreliable behavior. Words without behavior can become their own kind of emptiness.
I want congruence. The words and the life should agree. "I love you" means more when your behavior has built somewhere for those words to stand. Dependability matters. Consideration matters. Showing up matters. Remembering matters. Making room for another person in your actual life matters.
But none of those things make tenderness linguistically obsolete.
My mother's life taught me that. She taught me that love can exist without being constantly named. I know how to recognize it in food placed in front of me, sacrifices nobody discusses, worry disguised as practical questions, and someone working harder than I understood at the time so her children could have more.
But something changed as we got older. My mother learned another language, too.
Now she occasionally says “I love you” to my sister and me. With her grandchildren, my niece and nephew, she says it freely and often. The woman who raised us in a home where those words were never spoken eventually learned to speak them herself.
She learned, too. Just three decades later.
There is something deeply moving to me about that. We are not sentenced to the emotional vocabulary we inherited. We can keep the ways we already know how to love and learn new ways of making that love known.
I will always understand the bowl of rice.
Now I want the words, too.
I will always know how to speak that language.
But fluency in unspoken love does not require me to choose it as the emotional climate of my closest relationships.
I think I have learned to want both.
Show me. And tell me.
As life gets stranger and I get older, I have become unwilling to ration love, affection, or reassurance. I don't want to build a life around people whose tenderness has to be decoded, extracted, or assumed. I want to live and love alongside people who are generous with it. People who say the sweet thing, and say it often. Who reassure without making reassurance feel like a burden. Who make sure the people they love know they are loved, wanted, valued, and chosen.
I love you. I missed you. I'm proud of you. I want you here. I'm glad I chose you. I'm glad you chose me.
Not constantly. Not performatively. Not because anyone should require an endless stream of reassurance in order to believe they are loved. Simply because when something loving is true, there is generosity in allowing another person to receive it.
I don't believe people who struggle to say these things love less. My own life gives me too much evidence to ever believe that. But understanding why someone is restrained and choosing restraint as the emotional climate of my closest relationships are two different things.
I can recognize love in a thousand languages. I just no longer want the people closest to me to make me translate it all the time.
I want to live among people who make the good explicit.
Life will give us enough things to wonder about. I don't want love to be one of them.
