Psychology Says People Who Never Heard The Words “i Love You” Growing Up Often Spend Their Adult Lives Expressing Love Through Every Channel Except The Verbal One, And The Channels They Choose Tend To Be Specific Enough That The Pattern Becomes Recognizable.

Drive safe. Get home okay. Text me when you land. Don’t forget your jacket. Have you eaten today? Did you sleep? Make sure you eat. These do not, on the surface, look like expressions of love. In a lot of adult relationships, they are. The people saying them are doing the work of saying “I love you” without using the words, and most of the time, they have no idea they are doing it.

The adults who talk this way usually grew up in a particular kind of household. The phrase “I love you” was rarely said out loud. The household was not necessarily cold. It was often very warm. Love arrived through other channels: the meal that was always ready, the lift that was always offered, the practical help extended before anyone had to ask. What did not arrive, in any sustained way, was the verbal declaration. The children growing up there learned, without anyone having to tell them, that love was something you showed by doing things rather than something you announced.

The communication scholar Kory Floyd at the University of Arizona has been studying this kind of thing for more than twenty years. In his account of how affection actually moves between people, there are three main ways it gets expressed: the words themselves, physical touch like hugging or kissing, and the things one person does for another, like the favors and the small daily acts of care. Families differ in which of these three they use. Some use all of them. Some use two. Some only ever use one. The children from each kind of household carry the same pattern forward into their own adult relationships, and they often do not notice.

The channels people use instead

The one that runs most reliably, for these adults, is the practical one. The casserole that arrives when a friend’s parent is in the hospital. The lift to the airport at six in the morning. The phone call that checks whether somebody has eaten today. The willingness to drive across the city to help with a move. These are real expressions of love. The people doing them are not faking anything. They are using the channel they had reliable access to as children, and they often use it more fluently than people who grew up with all three running at once.

The second is the language that opened this article. Drive safe. Text me when you land. Did you eat today. These are technically words, but they are not the kind of words the title is pointing at. They are calibrated to sound like practical concern. The person saying them is, in most cases, saying “I love you” without using the sentence. The person hearing them, if they grew up in the same kind of household, usually understands what is being said.

A note on what this is

We write about research here, not from a clinical chair. The patterns described come from a body of work on family communication that has been building for thirty years. They are not a diagnosis of any specific family. The research can tell us this is a common pattern. It cannot tell us what is being said, or not, in any particular relationship.

What it costs in adulthood

Adults from these households often find it strangely hard to be on the receiving end of direct verbal affection. A partner who says “I love you” without an occasion attached produces, in many of them, a small involuntary pause. Not because the words are unwelcome. Because the body has not, in its early years, been taught to receive the sentence as an ordinary thing somebody might say. The same adult who can give and receive the practical channel without thinking can find the direct verbal one slightly disorienting, well into midlife.

A 2023 study by Hesse, Floyd, and Mikkelson found that adults raised in low-affection households tend to express less verbal affection in their own romantic relationships, and that the gap shows up in how the relationships actually go over time. The partners in many of these relationships did not understand why. The partner read the silence as distance. The person who grew up without the words read their own practical care as the language of love, and assumed the partner was reading it the same way. The mismatch is behind a lot of the smaller frustrations in long relationships where the two people came from different family languages of affection.

What can shift

The good news, in the research, is that this is something a person can work on. Nobody has to stop bringing the casserole or texting “drive safe.” What they can add, in time, are the words. The adults who do this often describe the first few months as awkward. Saying “I love you” out loud, when the words have not been spoken in your direction for several decades, makes the speaker’s own voice sound slightly off to them. That tinniness fades with practice. The version of “I love you” a person from this kind of household learns to say in midlife is rarely as easy as the version somebody else picked up from their parents at four. It is usually close enough to do the work.

The cultural conversation about love still tends to treat the words as the only thing that really counts. The research keeps pointing at something more complicated. There are at least three ways love gets expressed in a household: the words, the touch, and the things people do for each other. Some families use all three. Some use two. Some use one. The children from each kind of household grow up and carry the pattern forward, often without noticing. The adults who recognize themselves in this article are usually the ones whose love has been arriving, the whole time, in the form of the meal already on the table or the lift already offered. What the recognition can do, when it arrives, is help the people they love see that the casserole has been the sentence all along.

The post Psychology says people who never heard the words “I love you” growing up often spend their adult lives expressing love through every channel except the verbal one, and the channels they choose tend to be specific enough that the pattern becomes recognizable. appeared first on The Artful Parent.