Growing up, my dad could fix anything.
A leaky tap, a broken cabinet hinge, the fence panel that blew down every winter without fail — he handled all of it, quietly and without fanfare. He’d come home after a long day, eat dinner with us at the kitchen table, and then disappear into the garage or basement to work on whatever had been waiting.
He was never absent in the practical sense. But the space between us — the one that needed a different kind of fixing — stayed broken for years.
It took me a long time to understand that wasn’t indifference. It was vocabulary. He simply didn’t have the words for love because no one had ever given them to him.
And psychology, it turns out, has a lot to say about that.
1) How “doing” becomes a dialect of love
There’s a well-known framework in relationship psychology built around the idea that people give and receive love in fundamentally different ways. Gary Chapman’s The 5 Love Languages describes “acts of service” as one of the primary ways people express deep care — fixing things, handling logistics, showing up in practical ways. For many men of older generations, this wasn’t just one love language among five. It was the only one they’d ever been taught.
My father never sat me down and said “I love you” in so many words. But he made sure the car was serviced before long trips. He built the bookshelves I’d asked for. He fixed the broken lock on my bedroom door the day I mentioned it.
That was love. Real love, in his way.
The problem isn’t that love expressed through action is insufficient — it’s that when it exists in complete isolation, without words, without emotional presence, without anything else to surround it, the people on the receiving end are left doing an awful lot of guessing.
And guessing, over years, is exhausting.
2) Where this pattern comes from
This isn’t an accident or a personality flaw. It’s a learned pattern — one handed down through generations with quiet consistency.
Boys in traditional households learn, both implicitly and explicitly, that emotional expression is either dangerous or unnecessary. They absorb the message that strength means containing feelings, that asking for support is weakness, and that a man’s value — to his family, to the world — is measured by what he does and provides.
Nobody models anything different. So nothing different gets passed on.
As noted by therapist and author Terry Real in his landmark book I Don’t Want to Talk About It, men in Western culture are systematically trained to disconnect from their emotional lives — not because they don’t feel deeply, but because they were never given permission or tools to express it. The result is a generation of fathers who loved their children profoundly but had no road map for showing it in ways those children could clearly receive.
My dad grew up in a home not unlike mine. His father was the same way. And his father before that, almost certainly.
You don’t break a cycle like that simply by wanting to.
3) What it feels like to grow up inside it
I grew up in a small Midwest town. We ate dinner together every single night — and I genuinely value that now as a parent myself. But the conversations at that table stayed firmly on the surface. How was school. What’s the weather doing. Pass the bread.
There was warmth there. There was safety. There was always enough.
What there wasn’t much room for was the emotional mess of being a kid. The confusion, the longing for reassurance, the need to just be *seen* — those things didn’t really have a place at the table.
And I think that’s what so many of us carry from childhood: not the wound of being unloved, but the quieter, harder-to-name confusion of being loved in ways we couldn’t always feel.
What does a child do with that? They adapt. They learn to read every practical gesture — every fixed bicycle, every packed lunch, every long quiet drive to a school event — as proof of something they can’t quite name. They become fluent in a language that never fully satisfies the hunger it’s trying to answer.
That’s a strange and lonely fluency to have.
4) The cost that hides in plain sight
I won’t pretend I came through childhood without any of this woven into my own patterns. I didn’t.
The people-pleasing. The perfectionism. The tendency to show love through doing — cooking, making, *handling* things — rather than simply sitting with someone and saying what I actually feel. Those habits have my dad’s fingerprints all over them. I’ve spent a good chunk of my adult life slowly recognizing them, naming them, and trying to do things differently.
This is something Brené Brown speaks to directly. In Daring Greatly, she writes: “Vulnerability is the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, courage, empathy, and creativity.” Not action. Not provision. Vulnerability. The willingness to be emotionally present and honest — which is precisely what most men of my father’s generation were never given permission to offer.
The cost of growing up without that being modeled for you doesn’t always look like obvious brokenness. Sometimes it looks like high-functioning. Like someone who is incredibly capable, incredibly reliable, and quietly starving for something they don’t even know they’re allowed to want.
And sometimes it looks like a child who grows into an adult still waiting, without knowing it, to be told something out loud.
5) The moment things start to shift
Recognition is, I think, where everything begins. Not blame — I want to be clear about that. My father did the best he could with what he had. Most parents do.
But there’s something that happens when you can look at a pattern and actually name it — when you can say, “this is where this comes from, this is what it cost us, and this is what I want to do differently” — that genuinely changes things.
My dad and I have grown closer as I’ve gotten older. Not dramatically, not overnight. But as I’ve learned to initiate the emotional conversations — to call and ask how he’s really doing, to say “I love you” before he redirects to something he fixed around the house — I’ve watched him soften around the edges. It turns out the vocabulary was always somewhere in there. It just needed someone to model it first.
Which is a strange thing to sit with: the idea that sometimes the next generation has to model for the previous one what should have gone the other way.
6) What we’re building instead
One of the things I love most about Matt is that he does both.
He is practical in the way my father was. He’s the first to notice what’s creaking in the house and quietly fix it before anyone asks. But he also does bedtime stories every night without prompting. He asks both Ellie and Milo “how are you really feeling today?” in the same easy tone he asks me every evening once the kids are down. He models — without fanfare, without making a production of it — what it looks like to show up emotionally and practically at the same time.
That combination is what I want our kids to carry.
At home, my default when one of them brings me a feeling is “tell me more.” Not fixing it. Not redirecting. Just — tell me more. I want Ellie and Milo to grow up knowing their inner life has a place at the table, that feelings are worth naming, that love is something you say out loud and not only something you demonstrate through action.
Not because doing is wrong. But because doing alone was never the whole story.
A final thought
If your father fixed everything in the house and nothing between you — or if you recognize yourself as the parent who expresses love primarily through doing — please hear this: the pattern makes complete sense. It wasn’t invented from nothing. It was inherited, layer by layer, from people who also didn’t know how to do it differently.
But patterns do end somewhere. They end with the person who finally sees them clearly enough to choose something else.
That might be you. It might be your child. It might be a conversation you haven’t had yet — the one where you say the thing out loud instead of going to fix something.
The tools were always there. We just needed to learn which ones to pick up.
