A plate of cut fruit appears outside your door. Nobody says anything. It’s the apology, or the affection, or the acknowledgement that you’re working late and they noticed.
It has become a shorthand online, which risks making it cute. It isn’t cute; it’s a whole grammar. Love arriving as food, as tuition, as a mortgage paid off, as a jacket bought because they thought you looked cold, as a fridge stocked before you visit, as the best piece of fish put on your plate without comment.
Why it took that form
Several reasons, and they’re worth knowing because they change how the absence of words reads.
Scarcity. For parents who grew up without enough, providing materially isn’t a substitute for affection — it’s the highest expression of it. Feeding someone well isn’t a small gesture to a person who remembers not eating.
Explicit affection wasn’t modelled. Their parents didn’t say it either. You can’t easily produce a register you never heard.
Verbal praise was withheld deliberately in many households, in the belief that it produces complacency. That was a parenting philosophy rather than an absence of feeling.
And the language itself. Some things are simply not said aloud in some cultures, by anyone, to anyone.
Where it stops being enough
It’s a real language and it has limits, and the limits are worth naming.
It can’t do repair. Food after a fight is an olive branch, and it isn’t an acknowledgement that something happened — so the thing that happened stays permanently unaddressed, and accumulates.
It can’t say the specific thing. A jacket doesn’t tell you they’re proud of you, or that they were wrong, or that they love you as you’re rather than as they hoped.
And it’s asymmetric in a way that becomes painful in adulthood. As a child you received it. As an adult you frequently want a conversation, and the fruit keeps arriving instead.
What tends to help
Learn to read it as what it is. A great many people spend years experiencing their childhood as loveless and then recognise, later, that it was full of a love they hadn’t been taught to see. That recognition changes things, and it isn’t a consolation prize.
Speak it back. This is the underused move. Parents who can’t receive “I love you” without discomfort will receive food, a fixed thing in the house, a bill paid, a visit. Reciprocating in the language they use frequently reaches them where words don’t.
Introduce words gradually and in low-stakes moments. Not a set-piece conversation. A brief “I appreciate you” at the end of an ordinary call. Many parents can’t answer it and are visibly affected by it, and over a couple of years some of them start saying it back.
And grieve the version you didn’t get. Understanding why the words were absent doesn’t mean their absence cost nothing. Both are allowed.