A Danish friend put out an interesting question recently to his Facebook circle. Speculating that there might be a generational difference in parents saying “I Love You” to their children (as in older generations may have said this much less than parents today), and curious about whether some of the differences are cultural, he asked his friends (and he’s lived in lots of places around the world and has an incredibly diverse pool of friends) what their experience was growing up in relation to the phrase “I Love You.” Did they hear it from their parents?

He got a large number of responses with lots of variation but one observation stuck out to me. Quite a few people from outside of the US said they didn’t grow up hearing frequent “I Love You’s” from their parents but that this generation of parents is different and part of that might be due to the influence of pop culture, and in particular American tv and film, where the characters blurt out “I Love You” all the time. Some of them questioned whether habitual “I Love You’ing” dilutes the meaning.

This got me thinking, as someone who grew up with lots of “I Love You’s” from my family, I hear those words as a warm blanket over my shoulders – a deep and satisfying comfort. I’d never thought about the “Americanness” of this gesture. It was just my family’s thing, I assumed. If I were to project more broadly, I might think of Black motherhood in particular, and the work documented by smart people like my friend Dani McClain in her book We Live for the We. Perhaps for my mother and other Black mothers, “I Love You” was also a protection spell, designed to reinforce a sense of being wanted and valued in a world that often feels wired to degrade you.

I am a compulsive “I Love You’er.” I say it not only to family but also to friends who inspire a sense of care, comfort, and belonging in my heart. Being in Denmark for a year has taught me that some of my emotional expressiveness and tendency to be effusive in my affection might be American of me. But I think “I Love You” is a powerful verbal talisman that I encourage us to keep spreading when we feel it, in all the languages.

Med Kærlighed.

With love.

~Sharda