the language of love

How philosophy, language, and culture shape the way we love and how we say it

I didn’t grow up in one language, or one culture, or one idea of what love is supposed to look like.

In a group chat this morning, a few friends debated whether their religious tradition truly made space for romantic love. The question wasn’t just theological, it touched something deeper: how different traditions choose to frame, permit, or even deny certain feelings. And how that framing shapes what we believe love is allowed to be.

Growing up, experiencing and thinking about love came in English, Urdu, and Gujarati. Later, Portuguese, Chinese, and German entered the mix. Sometimes love was spoken. Sometimes it was cooked. Sometimes it sounded like advice disguised as criticism, or silence thick with expectation. In some languages, love was declared. In others, it was implied. In a few, it was something you did—not something you said.

What I didn’t realize until much later is that these weren’t just linguistic differences. They were civilizational differences. Behind each expression of love was a deeper structure: a moral system, a metaphysics, a set of inherited beliefs about what love is allowed to do.

English carries the psychology of affirmation. Urdu bears the scars of poetry and divine longing. Chinese encodes Confucian duty; Gujarati love comes with ritual and pragmatism. Even the Portuguese in my extended family whispers with saudade—that particular ache for something you’re not sure you ever had.

None of these systems are wrong. But none of them fully align, either. Moving between them means constantly shifting what love means—not just how to express it, but whether it should be expressed at all. Love, in this context, isn’t one feeling—it is a set of contradictory instructions.

This essay is my attempt to trace those instructions. Not to resolve them, but to understand how each language, each philosophical tradition, each inherited code teaches a different mode of loving: some loud, some silent, some dutiful, some devotional, some enduring.

What follows are not case studies in culture. They’re meditations on how emotion is framed by worldview, and what it means to carry multiple frames at once. They are also, inevitably, a portrait of what love becomes when no single grammar can hold it.

The Love That Is Never Declared

Some loves announce themselves. Others just carry your groceries.

This mode is not expressive. It does not say “I love you,” and it does not particularly care whether you say it back. This love moves through small rituals, recurring questions, food wrapped in foil. It is pragmatic, unsentimental, and constant. It doesn’t ask for gratitude, though it may expect compliance.

I see this form most clearly in Gujarati-speaking relatives and Chinese friends. In both contexts, love is less an emotion than a form of maintenance. A parent checks your temperature, and tells you to eat more. A grandparent criticizes your haircut or your aunt offers to pay for reversing your ear piercing, as an act of concern (she didn’t realize it was fake). In this world, care is embedded in obligation. Feeling is irrelevant. Continuity is everything.

There’s no need to invoke scripture here—philosophy covers it. In Confucian thought, love (ren) is not an interior state but a relationship enacted through proper roles. The parent is loving by being a parent. The child is loving by being obedient. Emotion may follow, but it isn’t the starting point. The harmony of the social order takes precedence over the heat of individual feeling.

There are echoes of this in Carol Dweck’s writing on growth mindset. Love here is longitudinal. It’s not something dramatic. It is something you build over time, through repetition and fidelity to process. You keep showing up. You improve in the direction of care.

It’s what Tibetan Buddhism describes as compassion practiced as daily habit. Not grand acts of self-sacrifice, but the ordinary choice to treat another’s suffering as your own. That the most stable forms of love are the least showy. Not fireworks, but furnace heat.

But none of this feels philosophical when you're growing up inside it. It just feels like someone handing you a cold glass of water when you’ve just come in from school, red-faced, on a hot Karachi Summer day. Or asking if you’ve eaten. Or saying nothing at all.

In English, love tends to demand expression. In these traditions, love demands continuation. And it is very easy to miss, or to misread, if you’ve been trained to expect tenderness to sound like praise or vulnerability.

It takes years to understand that the silence isn’t absence. It’s fluency.

The Love That Is Expected

Some loves are chosen. Others are assigned.

This is the kind of love you don’t fall into. You inherit it. It’s preloaded. You love your parents. You love your dog. You love your siblings. Not because you feel a rush of affection every time they walk into the room, but because you’re supposed to.

Growing up, I saw this most clearly in the implicit codes and social frameworks that come with South Asian family structures. The child who questions their parents is seen not as curious, but as ungrateful (though thankfully, not in my home). The spouse who demands to be chosen again each day is seen as immature. You don’t need to say “I love you” if you’re doing the thing love requires. You don’t get extra credit for proclaiming your love while you’re doing what’s required from that love.

This isn’t cold. It’s a form of moral clarity. The Islamic tradition speaks often of mercy, compassion, and tenderness between people, but these are often paired with duty: Lower the wing of humility. Honor your parents. Show mercy to those who raised you. There is no romantic language in these verses, no idealization. Justice. Structure.

In Confucian thought, the idea goes even further: to love someone means to fulfill the role you have toward them. A son is loving when he is filial. A ruler is loving when he is just. Emotion may be present, but it is not required. Harmony is the moral end. Love is the instrument.

And this mode of love isn’t just ancient. In modern frameworks, you see echoes of it in essentialism: Greg McKeown’s insistence that life must be pruned of distraction to make space for what truly matters. Love here becomes a kind of radical prioritization. You do not spread yourself thin. You commit. Even when you don’t feel like it.

This kind of love asks very little of language. It asks for consistency. For sacrifice. For showing up when it’s inconvenient. It doesn’t need to be dramatic. In fact, it’s suspicious of drama.

But there’s a shadow to this too. Expected love can become love that’s never examined. You’re told who to love, how to love, when to love. But not whether that love is reciprocal, or safe, or real. Love becomes conflated with obedience. And obedience can breed resentment.

Still, there’s something in this frame that stays with me. The idea that love isn’t just a feeling, but a kind of ethical stance. A choice you make even before the feelings arrive.

The Love That Must Be Said

In this version, love is only real if it is named. If it is spoken often. If it is confirmed.

In English-speaking America (and I believe it’s different in the UK), silence doesn't mean stability. It means absence. If you don’t say “I love you,” people wonder if it’s still true. The phrase becomes a kind of password: an emotional credential that must be renewed. The failure to say it becomes suspect. I remember my hesitation in reciprocating the phrasing, not the sentiment, as my now-wife and I said goodbye at the airport, early in our courtship. My response: “I’ll be here when you get back.” Luckily, she understood.

Here, you cannot assume that love is implied. Or inherited. Or managed through action. In this modern, Western frame, love is something to declare, post, perform, and prove. If you love someone, you must tell them. If you don’t, what are you hiding? Popular culture is full of rom-coms written in this key.

Contemporary psychology encourages this. Brené Brown teaches that vulnerability is the key to connection, and that saying the hard thing—especially when it feels risky—is the truest act of love. There’s wisdom in that. But there’s also exposure. In a world that equates openness with honesty, silence begins to feel like betrayal.

And then there’s the hyper-modern twist: love in the age of brand, platform, and audience. On Instagram, people quote Rumi (badly), post long captions about soulmates, and confuse sentimentality for sincerity. A certain kind of love becomes a public performance: less about intimacy than about confirmation. If no one sees it, does it still count?

You even see it reflected in business self-help books. James Clear in Atomic Habits, says repetition becomes identity. We are what we do consistently. Does this apply to love? Say it often enough, and it will become true? If you say it less, or stop saying it, is it less real?

Here, love is verbalized before it needs to be verified. You say it, then figure out if you mean it. The performance often precedes the feeling. And the result is a strange kind of fragility: love that’s fluent, but insecure. It needs to be mirrored back constantly.

Young adults feel they must say “I love you” even if they don’t feel ready to. And they learn to hear it with suspicion. Because the phrase does not necessarily indicate presence.

The Love That Remains

This is the quietest kind of love. It doesn’t declare, obey, or perform. It just stays.

Perhaps you don't even recognize it as love at first. It doesn’t match the drama of poetry, or the rituals of duty, or the affirmations. It doesn’t make itself obvious. It doesn’t have an agenda. It’s just there—unchanged by time, boredom, or convenience.

You begin to notice it in the people who keep showing up. Friends who don’t ask for updates, just sit with you. Family members who may not say much, but remember the smallest things. Mentors who never check in with fanfare, but never stop believing in your future. Partners who let the silence stretch and don’t need to fill it. The warm embrace of lying together in the morning light, her head on your shoulder, not needing to speak.

This is not the love that demands interpretation. It’s the one that asks nothing, but holds everything.

Marcus Aurelius points toward it without naming it. In Meditations, love is never romantic, and rarely warm. It’s bound up with justice, humility, and persistence. You are here to serve, to endure, to act in accordance with nature. If love exists, it’s indistinguishable from virtue. It’s what remains when your preferences burn away.

It’s compassion without attachment. Not intensity. Not craving. But presence: deep, non-possessive presence. The kind of love that isn’t about you at all.

This mode of love doesn’t need a label. It has no climax. It isn’t trying to be noticed. It survives not because it’s strong, but because it is undemanding. It doesn’t need to be fed to stay alive.

Perhaps it’s about your stage of life. No longer the romance of longing and devoid of the righteousness of obligation. No echo chamber of affirmation. Just the person who stays. The friend who doesn’t need context. The version of love that is not declared, not debated, not proven. Simply given.

Love Without a Native Tongue

I speak and understand many languages, imperfectly. And I don’t speak love perfectly in any of them either. As a multiple-times-immigrant, I’ve never stayed put long enough in one place to fully absorb the actual local language let alone the love language of that place. My style of loving is some kind of unique, probably weird, hybrid.

But each language, each tradition, each philosophical frame gives me a partial map. A glimpse of what love can look like, when expressed, withheld, expected, or endured. Perhaps none of them hold the whole truth. Perhaps, together they form something closer to an understanding.

These differences aren’t just theoretical. They can be sharp. Especially in relationships, when two people bring different grammars to love. If one expects it to be said, the other proves it in silence. If one reaches through gifts, the other waits for words. Mismatched expectations are missed signals. Not because love isn’t present, but because it’s being spoken in a dialect the other doesn’t recognize.

It’s not that one version is more authentic than another. It’s that love behaves differently depending on the grammar it’s given. And like all translation, something is always lost, but something else is often found.

If you ask me what love means, I’ll hesitate. I’ve observed it, and imperfectly learned it, in too many languages to give a single answer. I’ve been shaped through the unique contradictions of my life’s journey so far.

Perhaps that’s the real work of adulthood: to stop looking for one definition, and instead learn to listen carefully, across registers, for the version being offered. To hear the dialect. To understand the gesture. To respond not in the language you were taught, but in the one they’re speaking. Love isn’t just how we feel. It’s how well we learn to listen.

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Adil Husain is a strategist, founder, and observer of global complexity. He has spent over two decades advising Fortune 1000 firms on market intelligence and international growth, with long stints living and working in the U.S. and China and shorter stints in other places. He is the Managing Director of Emerging Strategy, a strategic intelligence firm that helps enterprises navigate volatile markets, and the publisher of a rapidly growing B2B media platform with ~200,000 subscribers in its first 90 days.

On The Husain Signal, he writes about business, borders, belief systems, and the things we’re taught to feel but not always to say.

You can contact Adil here, or connect with him on LinkedIn.

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