He Loves Me. He Loves Me Not.

It was only a few weeks ago when I realized my almost 7-year-old son never says “I love you.” 

At first I thought I must be wrong and that I just hadn’t been paying attention. So I staged a scientific study where the test subject was my son and the control was also my son and I have a liberal arts degree. 

I measured how many times I said “I love you” and how many times he said it back to me. 

The results were telling. 

In a given week, I said “I love you” 202,794,583 times and he said “I love you” exactly zero times. 

I quickly outsourced my worry to an online parent support group for which I pay $30 a month so that I can make one very expensive post every 4 months asking for help from other millennial parents also worried about fucking up their kids. 

My post was simple, stuck to the facts, and said something like:

“My son doesn’t say I love you but like I know he loves me but does he actually, like actually actually love me and is this some indication of deeper emotional turmoil that I need to pay attention to and also is this ‘normal’ but like ‘not normal’ but not that it’s bad to be ‘not normal’ but you know what i mean and why doesn’t he love me?”

I refreshed the screen waiting for replies in between telling my son that I love him and then asking him “You know I love you right??!!” to which he would silently nod and then ask “Can I watch TV” and I’d say yes and I love you! and then refresh my screen. 

Eventually, a few people whose children also don’t say “I love you” chimed in to reassure me that I shouldn’t worry and that my son probably definitely loves me. 

Their advice was to engage him in conversation about how he likes giving and receiving love.

So naturally I distilled the key points of The 5 Love Languages and summarized them for my almost 7-year-old while we were in the car. After my soliloquy during which he barely breathed, I asked him  “So what do you think, how do you like mommy to love you” he paused and said “Yeah all of them I guess?”

After that cleared up nothing at all, I went back to comb through the comments on my [cry for help] until I re-read one that said “Maybe he shows you love in different ways. My kid is very physical” and a lightbulb went off in my elder-millennial liberal arts brain.

My emotionally unavailable almost-7-year old son is very physical. My favorite way to make friends is to warn parents my child will likely wrestle theirs to the ground but haha not to worry it’s just how he shows his affection!

Every morning he comes to sit on my lap and snuggle before he goes off to live his life and not tell me he loves me. 

He’ll walk through the kitchen as I’m making dinner to stop and slip his hand up my back under my sweater and say “Ooh mom you’re always so warm!!!” and I’ll laugh say I love you and he won’t say it back but he’ll stay there pressed to my side absorbing my pre-perimenopausal warmth. 

And when I put him to bed, he’ll ask me to lie with him before he glues the entire length of his body to mine.

He’ll say please rub my back and I will.

He’ll turn towards me and run his hand along my cheek and play with my earring and as he falls asleep I’ll tell him how I could die because of how much I love him. And he won’t say it back, but he will hug me a little tighter.