I was nine years old, on a sleepover at my best friend Sarah’s house, when her parents walked into the kitchen at the same time. Her dad put his hand on her mum’s lower back as he reached past her for a mug. He kissed the top of her head. She didn’t look up from what she was doing. It took maybe five seconds. Then he was making tea, and she was making toast, and life went on. I remember standing in the doorway, holding my sleepover bag, trying to work out what I had just seen. The thing I was actually trying to work out, I realised years later, was not what they had done. It was the fact that neither of them had registered doing it as unusual.
My parents are Pakistani, and they have been married for what is now most of my life. I have never, in all of it, seen them touch each other in any way I could describe as affectionate. They weren’t cold to each other. The household I grew up in was loving in its way, and stable, and full of food, and dependable in the things that mattered. What was not in it was the visible language of physical affection between adults. My parents loved each other, as far as I can tell. They simply did not, in front of me, express the love through touch.
The same pattern extended to the children. My brothers and I were hugged on specific occasions: when we left for school trips, when we came home from university for the holidays, at Eid. The hugs were brief and slightly formal. Love in our household arrived through different channels. My mother cooked. My father drove me to job interviews and waited outside in the car for two hours without complaint. Love arrived as a plate of peeled mango or a clean shirt ironed and hung on my bedroom door the night before an exam.
I have spent the last few years talking to other people who grew up in households like mine. The conversations started by accident, usually over dinner with somebody I had recently become close to, when family came up. What I expected was a particular kind of recognition from people raised in South Asian or East Asian or Middle Eastern households. What I found, in practice, was that the pattern shows up across a much wider range of backgrounds than I had assumed. The white British woman in her forties whose parents had grown up in working-class Yorkshire. The American whose Midwestern Lutheran upbringing involved almost no physical contact between family members. The man whose parents had divorced when he was eight, and who couldn’t, after that, remember either of them touching him without an errand attached. The pattern is not the property of any one culture. It is the property of a particular kind of household.
The households I am describing are not, in most cases, the cold or neglectful ones the popular conversation tends to focus on. They are warm in their own way. Love is present. The expression of love simply runs through different channels than the ones the broader culture would recognise. Practical care. Reliable presence. Food. Patience. The work of running a household that does not fall apart. What is missing, in most of the accounts I’ve collected, is what I noticed in Sarah’s kitchen at nine: the casual unselfconscious physical contact between adults, and between adults and children, that doesn’t have a destination.
What the research says
The work most useful for thinking about this comes from the American developmental psychologist Mary Main. Starting in the 1980s, Main and her colleagues developed what they called the Adult Attachment Interview, a way of studying how adults talk about their own childhood attachment experiences. What Main’s research showed, replicated many times since, is that what she called “a parent’s state of mind with respect to attachment” strongly predicts how their children attach to them. The patterns transmit across generations. They do not, however, transmit perfectly. Adults who grew up with little physical affection often manage, with sustained effort, to develop what the later attachment literature calls earned secure attachment.
Main’s work, and the substantial body of research that has built on it, suggests that what children learn about how love is expressed tends to follow them into adulthood. Not as a script the adult consciously remembers, but as a set of physical assumptions about what bodies do with each other. The child who never saw their parents touch each other casually develops a body that does not, later in life, quite know that casual touch is allowed to be undirected. The hand on the shoulder needs a reason. The kiss needs an occasion. The hug needs a beginning, middle, and end. The thing the casual lifelong affection in someone like Sarah’s family produces, which is a body that assumes touch is the default state of close relationships, has to be learned later, often awkwardly.
A note on what this is
I am writing this from my own experience and from what the research suggests is a common pattern, not from a clinical chair. The patterns I am describing show up across the attachment research, but how they appear in any specific household, or any one adult, varies enormously. What follows is not a diagnosis. It is an attempt to name something that, in my experience, has often been carried alone.
What people in this position tend to carry
The adults I have spoken to, and the ones the research has documented, tend to carry a few specific things into their adult relationships. The first is a particular kind of awkwardness with casual physical affection. Not an aversion. Not a flinching. Just a small unfamiliarity. The hand resting on the shoulder while watching a film takes a few months to stop registering as new information. The second is a tendency to express love through practical action rather than through verbal or physical declaration. The casserole. The lift to the airport. The ironed shirt before the exam. Love goes out through the same channels it came in through. The third is a particular kind of difficulty being on the receiving end of care directly. The body knows what to do with practical help. It is less sure what to do with a casual undirected hug.
This is mostly drawn from clinical and qualitative work rather than experimental studies, so what it points at is a recurring pattern rather than a measurable outcome for any one person. The pattern itself has been documented across four decades of attachment research and across multiple cultural settings.
What I’m working on
What I am working on at 34 is not anger at my parents. They did what they knew how to do. The household I grew up in was the one they had been raised inside, with whatever modifications they had managed to make. What I am working on is the specific slow process of learning in adulthood what I did not learn as a child. How to let a hand rest on my shoulder without flinching. How to hug somebody for longer than two seconds without my body deciding it has done enough. How to say “I love you” out loud without hearing my own voice as slightly performative. How to be the kind of friend who shows up with affection, not just casseroles.
Last year my mother put her hand on my arm. We were sitting next to each other on her sofa. The first time she did it, I went very still. I didn’t know what to do with my arm. A hand on my arm from my own mother was, in any sustained way, a new experience for me. I didn’t say anything about it. She didn’t either. We sat like that for maybe a minute. It has happened, since then, three or four more times. I think it might be the closest she has come, in my lifetime, to a small late-life acknowledgment of a gap she may have spent the last decade thinking about herself. I haven’t asked her. I don’t think I will. What I do, when her hand is on my arm now, is try to let it be there. The aftermath of a childhood without visible affection is, I think, mostly this: the slow adult practice of learning to be on the receiving end of love that has, in its own quiet way, been there all along.
