In a great many families, love is not a thing that gets announced. It is a plate kept aside because you were late. It is a phone call that pretends to be about something else. It is someone waiting up without admitting they were waiting. It is a recharge done for you without being asked, a bag packed with things you did not request, a father who will not say the sentence but will drive forty kilometres at midnight without being asked twice.
Everyone in the house is expected to be fluent in this language. Nobody is ever taught it directly.
The language that was never taught
Part of the difficulty is simply that the words feel foreign in the mouth.
For many of us the phrase arrives in English, and in English it can feel imported — something people say in films, or on television, or in the kind of family that hugs at airports. Reaching for it in your own language does not always help either. The most direct translation often carries a romantic weight that makes it strange to say to a parent or a sibling. So there is genuinely no neutral, everyday register available. The feeling is ordinary; the vocabulary for it is not.
There is also a generational chain to consider. A parent who was never told it as a child has no template for saying it to their own. They were shown love through provision, through sacrifice, through education paid for and worry absorbed silently — and so that is the dialect they became fluent in and passed on.
And there is exposure. Saying it out loud makes a claim, and a claim can go unanswered. In a household where nothing tender has ever been named, being the first person to name it can feel less like affection and more like a small act of disruption.
What the silence protects, and what it costs
It would be easy to conclude that the unspoken version is simply inferior — that these are emotionally repressed families who should learn to talk. That reading is too quick, and it is a little condescending.
Provision, presence, and reliability are not a lesser substitute for love. For a great many people they are love, delivered in the only currency that felt safe and real. A generation that had very little to give and gave it anyway may reasonably feel that the sentence was never the point.
But it is equally true that actions do not reach everyone, and pretending otherwise is its own kind of dismissal. Plenty of people grew up with every material need met and still, well into adulthood, find themselves needing to hear it — not because they doubt the love, but because being provided for and being told are two genuinely different experiences. Telling such a person that the food was the love does not settle anything for them.
There is a practical cost too. A language nobody speaks out loud can only be interpreted, and interpretation goes wrong. Silence that means I am worried about you can be received as I am disappointed in you. Nobody in the exchange finds out.
What might actually be available
Perhaps the question worth sitting with is not whether your family should start saying it. That framing turns a whole relationship into a test that somebody is failing.
The smaller and more useful question might be this: is there something true that you have never said out loud, to someone who is still here to hear it? It does not have to be that exact sentence. I'm glad you're my brother. I think about that thing you did for me. I don't say this, but I notice.
Families are usually more capable of change than we assume — though it may take a year of being the only one saying it, and the other person may never say it back in words at all. They may just start asking, more often than before, whether you have eaten.