{"id":21239,"date":"2021-04-19T09:19:44","date_gmt":"2021-04-19T03:49:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/?p=21239"},"modified":"2021-04-20T17:05:40","modified_gmt":"2021-04-20T11:35:40","slug":"why-dont-indian-families-say-i-love-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/why-dont-indian-families-say-i-love-you\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Don\u2019t Indian Families Say \u201cI Love You\u201d?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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This article was originally published here<\/a>.<\/div>\n

Illustration: Shruti Yatam<\/small><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n

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BY\u00a0SHALAKA PRADHAN<\/a>\u00a0AUG. 21, 2018<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Indian families are diverse in every way, especially in how they choose to express affection. There are the boisterous, pappi-jhappi ones \u2013 and then there are the quiet, awkward-hug kind of families who pass on a strained emotional inheritance to their confused millennial children.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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A<\/span>t home, my family never said \u201cI love you\u201d to each other. But growing up, I easily understood the sentiment outside. I realised I found it easy to say the three words to people whom I had a certain emotional distance with. But to those I truly, madly, deeply cared about, the words didn\u2019t come easy.<\/p>\n

For a long time, I didn\u2019t make much of my family\u2019s inability to express themselves until I attended a friend\u2019s wedding a few weeks back. She has the quintessential\u00a0Indian family<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 loud and affectionate uncles and aunts, a horde of cousins who clearly love each other, and old relatives who sang, danced, laughed, and remembered my friend\u2019s younger days with a touching fondness. What I was witnessing in front of my eyes was a group of people who didn\u2019t just love each other, but also expressed it in physical, verbal, and emotional gestures. I don\u2019t know if it was the wedding air that was making me vulnerable, but I felt so overwhelmed that these moments of\u00a0affection<\/a>\u00a0left me choked.<\/p>\n

This feeling lasted for weeks after the wedding. It took me a while before I realised that what I was ruing was the absence of a family like hers, one that didn\u2019t think twice before engaging in physical and verbal declarations of affection. This longing became so intense that I resented my own family. But the tougher part was admitting that my parents weren\u2019t alone. It was exactly the kind of emotionally distant\u00a0environment<\/a>\u00a0I\u2019d also fostered my entire adult life.<\/p>\n

For instance, I\u2019ve been lucky to have grown up with friends I made back in school. It\u2019s resulted in close-knit\u00a0friendships<\/a>\u00a0where we\u2019re closely involved in each other\u2019s\u2019 life\u2026 except mine. I\u2019ve never truly let them in, despite having known them for years. Neither have I openly asked them for help, nor have I completely shared a personal tragedy with them down to the last detail.\u00a0Even though, all of us live in different cities, I\u2019m more bothered about this self-created\u00a0emotional\u00a0<\/a>distance than the physical distance among us. I\u2019ve also grown up\u00a0witnessing a strained relationship between my\u00a0mother<\/a>\u00a0and paternal grandmother, and had always consoled myself with the promise that I\u2019d build a great equation with my partner\u2019s mother. And yet, three years after being a part of their family, I still don\u2019t feel the kind of emotional intimacy that I\u2019ve always desired. And I haven\u2019t even consciously tried to correct it because I see myself holding back.<\/p>\n

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Today, I realise that the hesitation in expressing my feelings is my family\u2019s legacy. And I am not the only one.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

You see, the little things that make\u00a0relationships<\/a>\u00a0stronger don\u2019t come to me easily, try as I might.<\/p>\n

That changed only at the age of 28. In a vulnerable moment at 12 am, I sent my first ever \u201cI love you, Baba\u201d to my\u00a0father<\/a>. I wish I could tell you that it was a result of a life-changing epiphany, but it was only because I was crying my eyes out while watching the song \u201cBaba\u201d from the Marathi movie\u00a0Ventilator<\/i>. I\u2019m not sure what came over me. To my surprise, my father instantly responded with \u201cI love you too, beta.\u201d It was uncharacteristic of him and a landmark moment for me, even though we were never a cold family. Like any\u00a0daughter<\/a>, I know I am my father\u2019s weakness but I have seldom heard him say so.<\/p>\n

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Today, I realise that the hesitation in expressing my feelings is my\u00a0family\u2019s<\/a>\u00a0legacy. And I am not the only one. Indian families rarely say \u201cI love you\u201d to each other. Maybe it is an extension of the fact that parents are awkward while displaying any sign of affection to each other around their kids or elders. The children learn this limiting of words and gestures, and continue to repeat that cycle. Obviously, it doesn\u2019t mean that Indian families don\u2019t love each other \u2013 only that we are not taught the physical or verbal vocabulary to communicate that love.<\/p>\n

So, like me, we build walls between ourselves and the world, where we should be building doors and windows. I find myself confiding less and listening more, shying away from putting myself out there. In a way, I have very little idea of how to \u201ccorrectly\u201d emotionally invest in relationships.<\/p>\n

For as long as I remember, my friendships have always been shaky, driven by a little\u00a0insecurity<\/a>, clinginess, and too many expectations. I often wonder if these are a product of the environment I\u2019ve grown up in: Do I seek an emotional intimacy with my friends which I did not share with my family? Is it why I crave verbal validation of their feelings at frequent intervals?<\/p>\n

It\u2019s baffling and complicated, like peeling the layers of an onion over a span of several years. Biology might decide who we are \u2013 but who we eventually become depends upon the bonds we share with our\u00a0siblings<\/a>, the emotions we feel towards our parents, and the gestures and actions we learn to exhibit from them.<\/p>\n

Much of my\u00a0adulthood<\/a>\u00a0has been defined by this legacy. But that night, when I revelled in having written proof of my father\u2019s affection, I realised another thing: You don\u2019t always need to accept what you inherit.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Modern Family<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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\"#\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Shalaka Pradhan<\/a><\/p>\n

Shalaka loves her adrak wali chai with a good dose of Coldplay in the background. When not obsessing over cute puppy videos, stalking celebrities on Instagram or squeezing in a nap here and there, she likes to scribble about life and relationships<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Indian families rarely say \u201cI love you\u201d to each other. Maybe it is an extension of the fact that parents are awkward while displaying any sign of affection to each other around their kids or elders.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":21240,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[85,1,2715],"tags":[2348,1426,2685,391,2732,683,616,71,2783,99,2716],"class_list":{"0":"post-21239","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-blog-roll","8":"category-categories","9":"category-vulnerability-and-sexuality","10":"tag-adulthood","11":"tag-affection","12":"tag-emotions","13":"tag-family","14":"tag-feelings","15":"tag-friendships","16":"tag-intimacy","17":"tag-love","18":"tag-millennials","19":"tag-relationships","20":"tag-vulnerability-and-sexuality"},"menu_order":168,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21239","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21239"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21239\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21319,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21239\/revisions\/21319"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21240"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21239"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21239"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21239"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}