The relationship counselor Gary Chapman, in his much-quoted framework on the five love languages, draws a distinction that I think explains more family dynamics than people give it credit for.
Some people say love in words. Some people say love in time. Some people say love in physical presence, or in service, or in gifts. The framework is widely cited, sometimes uncritically, because it captures something most of us recognize: the same emotional content gets encoded in wildly different surface behavior, depending on who is doing the encoding.
This is most acute, in my experience, with parents. Specifically with the parents who could not, or would not, say I love you out loud, but who would drive eight hours through the night to pick you up from a broken-down car when you were twenty. Two kinds of love, in roughly the same family. The adult child often spends years working out which one to trust.
What the words version looks like
The parent who can say I love you easily is, in many families, the more popular parent. They are the one in the photos with the kid on their lap. They are the one everyone hugs at the airport. They are warmer in the way warmth gets defined by Hallmark cards. The verbal love parent is real. They are not performing. The words mean something to them, and they assume, often correctly, that the words mean something to the child too.
The risk of being raised mostly by the verbal love parent is that you grow up associating love with announcement. You learn to look for the word as the proof. If somebody you love does not say the word, you assume the feeling is not there. This is a kind of literacy. It is also, in some ways, a narrow one.
What the actions version looks like
The parent who shows up but cannot say it operates in a different register. The signs are quieter and they require more attention to read. They drove you to every basketball game for six years. They built the bookshelf in your bedroom. They paid the dentist bill they could not really afford. They took an unpaid afternoon off work the day you had the school recital. None of it came with a hug. None of it came with the sentence the verbal-love parent could produce on a normal Wednesday. All of it was, in a real and load-bearing way, love.
The risk of being raised mostly by the actions parent is the inverse of the first risk. You grow up assuming you have to figure out love by inference. You learn to read the small logistics. You become the child, and later the adult, who knows that the silent ride home was the love, and who doesn’t need the announcement to feel it. This too is a kind of literacy. It is also, in some ways, a lonely one.
The translation problem
What I have noticed in my own thirties, talking to friends about their fathers in particular, is that the adult children of action-parents often spend their twenties angry, their thirties confused, and their forties slowly translating. Research on parent-child attachment suggests that a secure adult attachment can be built from either kind of caregiving, provided the caregiver was responsive in some meaningful way. Words are a fast track to felt security. Actions are a slower one. Both can get there. The slower one just leaves the child with more work to do, decades later, to recognize what they were given.
This is the work I keep watching friends do. A friend in her late thirties tells me, slowly, over wine, that her father has never said the words to her, not once that she can remember. She used to find this unbearable. In recent years she has been able to list, instead, what he did. He drove four hours to her college every Friday for a year when she was depressed. He paid off a debt she did not know he knew about. He flew out the week she had her baby and cooked dinner every night for a week without ever once saying anything heavier than this stew came out well. She has stopped trying to extract the sentence from him. She has, instead, started keeping a private record of the things he has done, and she has started reading the record the way another daughter would read a letter.
Why the words still matter, though
I want to be honest about the part of this that doesn’t resolve. The translation is a useful skill. The adult child of the action-parent gets better at reading love by middle age. They will still, on certain quiet evenings, wish the words had been said anyway. The translation isn’t redundant. The wish is real. Showing up is the deeper proof, but the small inexpensive sentence still costs almost nothing to say, and not saying it, over forty years, accumulates into a particular kind of soreness that even a well-read adult child carries around quietly.
If you are a parent reading this who has been more of an actions person than a words person, and your adult child is in the middle of slowly translating you, I want to gently tell you that the words are still available to you. They are still nearly free. They will still land. You do not have to become a different person to say I love you once on the phone before you hang up. The actions have already done the heaviest part of the work. The words are the small inexpensive seal on the envelope.
If you are the adult child doing the translating, I would say this. Whatever you find when you look at the list of actions is the love your parent had. It is fair to still wish for the words. It is also worth letting yourself fully receive what they did manage to give you. Both can be true. The translation is not a consolation prize. It is, for many families, simply the form love arrived in, and the adult version of you gets to decide whether it counts.
I’m not a family therapist, and there are situations where the absence of verbal warmth was part of something harder than this article describes. If your relationship with a parent has gaps that go past style and into real harm, please talk to someone trained for that. The version this piece is naming is gentler. It is just the household where the love was real, the showing up was real, and the words simply never quite made it across the kitchen table. The translation, for most adult children, is worth doing. What you find on the other side of it tends to be more love than you thought you had.
