You may have known someone like this. Possibly very well. Possibly your father, your mother, your spouse, or the person you became without quite realizing.
They are not unloving. The opposite, in most cases. They love specifically and intensely, and they show it through what they do. They fix the dripping tap. They keep the car running. They show up at the airport at 4am. They drive the grandkids to football practice without complaint. The doing is the love.
But they don’t, in most cases, reach across the gap. They don’t pull you in for an unprompted hug. They don’t say I love you without a reason. They don’t put a hand on your shoulder when you’re upset. The closeness other families’ love seems to involve is, in their version, expressed almost entirely through what gets done, and the touch and the words and the open emotional gestures the rest of the world treats as the markers of love are mostly absent.
And the people who love them back, who are loved by them, often grow up or grow older still quietly wondering whether they were loved at all. Not because the love isn’t there. Because the form it takes doesn’t fully register in the registers the rest of the culture has trained them to recognize.
What the doing actually carried
To grow up without much affection is, in most cases, not to grow up unloved. The parents loved the child. They simply didn’t express the love through the channels the wider culture has identified as the channels.
There were no hugs, or very few. There were no I love yous, or very few. There was the working, the providing, the room being warm and the food being cooked and the things being kept running. The love was carried by these things, and the child registered, somewhere, that the love must be in them, because there wasn’t anywhere else for it to be.
The child built a working theory of love out of what they had access to. Love is what gets done for you. When someone fixes the broken thing, or makes sure you have what you need, that is the love. The theory wasn’t, on the evidence the child had, wrong. It was just incomplete.
When the child grew up and became someone who loved other people, they expressed the love in the form they had learned to recognize. They did things. They provided. They showed up. The doing wasn’t, for them, a substitute for affection. The doing was affection. The category of affection-separate-from-doing was one their childhood hadn’t given them coordinates for.
What the research says about this
Kory Floyd, a professor of human communication at the University of Arizona, has spent two decades developing what he calls affection exchange theory and the construct of affection deprivation: the chronic state of receiving less affectionate communication than a person wants. In a 2014 paper in the Western Journal of Communication, Floyd found that affection deprivation was associated with higher loneliness, depression, stress, alexithymia (the inability to identify and describe one’s own emotions), preoccupied and fearful-avoidant attachment styles, and a range of physical health outcomes. The link between not getting enough affection and experiencing measurable consequences in adulthood is not, in the research, a subtle one.
Tiffany Field’s 2010 review in Developmental Review does parallel work on touch specifically. Field, who directs the Touch Research Institute at the University of Miami School of Medicine, summarizes decades of evidence that touch is one of the primary channels through which infants develop attachment, that touch deprivation has measurable effects on growth, immune function, and emotional regulation, and that the absence of physical affection across the lifespan continues to predict worse mental and physical health outcomes. Touch, in her account, is not a luxury on top of love. It is one of the primary biological channels through which love is communicated and received.
The research is mostly correlational, and the mechanisms are not always cleanly causal. But the picture is consistent. People who grow up without much physical or expressive affection tend, on average, to carry forward a set of patterns that include difficulty receiving affection, difficulty offering it in the form their partners and children expect, and a higher likelihood of expressing love through whatever alternative channels their childhoods made available.
What the partners and children experience
The receiving end of this pattern is one of the harder things to articulate, partly because it’s so easy to feel ungrateful for naming it.
The partner knows they’re loved. The bills get paid. The car gets fixed. The household runs. And the partner often spends years not understanding why something feels missing, because everything that should be there appears to be there. What’s missing is what the doing was carrying. For the partner, who grew up with a different theory of love, doing-without-touching-and-saying doesn’t quite read as the full thing. They find themselves, in private, asking the question they don’t know how to ask out loud. Do they actually love me, or do they just love what they do for me?
The question is, in most cases, deeply unfair. The doing was the love. The person doing it had no other vocabulary for it. But the partner’s question is also, on its own terms, real. Something was missing. Not the love. The form of the love the partner had been trained to recognize.
The children live the same pattern. Their needs are met to a remarkable degree. The lunches are made. The rides are given. The activities are paid for. But the parent doesn’t sit on the bed at night and ask how their day was. The parent doesn’t hug them when they’re sad. The parent doesn’t say I love you unprompted. The child registers that their parent is doing a great deal for them. The child also wonders, somewhere quieter, whether their parent loves them in the way the other children’s parents seem to.
The mirror
This is what makes this pattern more poignant than most parenting inheritances.
The person who grew up without much affection, and now expresses love through tasks instead of touch, spent the early years of their own life quietly wondering whether they were loved. The parent’s love was real. The form was hard to feel. The wondering happened anyway. They were five years old, and they were wondering.
Their own children and partner are now doing what they did. Quietly wondering. The love is real. The form is hard to feel. The wondering happens anyway.
The wound has traveled forward, intact, through the medium of the person doing their best to express love in the only form they were ever shown. The previous generation showed their love through doing. The current person learned that love was the doing. They now show their love through doing. The next generation registers the doing and quietly wonders whether they’re loved. The wondering becomes their own working theory of love. They will, in their own turn, transmit some version of the same pattern, unless something intervenes.
A note about the person who does this
It would be easy to read this and conclude that the person who expresses love through tasks is emotionally damaged, or unwilling, or somehow not committed to closeness. That’s not what’s happening, in most cases.
The person is doing exactly what they were trained to do. They are loving the way they were loved. They are using the channel that was available to them. They are, by their own internal lights, expressing love at considerable volume and considerable cost. The cost is often not visible from the outside. They are tired in ways their partners don’t always see. The doing is their love letter. The fact that the recipient can’t fully read it, in the form the love letter is written in, is one of the quieter griefs of these relationships.
What can shift
The pattern is sticky. It does not respond to a single conversation. But there are small things that, in the literature, seem to help.
For the person who expresses love through tasks, the work is to add, not to replace. The doing is real and the partner and child rely on it. The work is to learn, slowly, to add small physical and verbal markers on top of it. A hand on the back as you pass them in the kitchen. An unprompted I love you on the way out the door. The acknowledgment, said out loud, that you love them not for what they do for you, but for the simpler reason that they are them. The additions feel awkward at first. They are also, in many accounts, what the people on the receiving end have been quietly waiting for.
For the partner or child on the receiving end, the work is closer to translation. To register, in the moments the doing happens, that the doing is the love. To say thank you for what they did and let them see that the doing was received as the affection it was meant to be. To not punish them for the form of their love by treating it as a lesser version of love than it actually is.
Both pieces of work are hard. Both are also, in most accounts, the slow but real path through which the inherited pattern gradually stops travelling forward. The wondering can stop. Not all at once. Not cleanly. But it can stop.
