Recently one of my children aggressively grabbed another, and, with much sincerity and enthusiasm, cried, “I love you!” The child on the receiving end, also with sincerity but with less enthusiasm, responded, “I don’t love you.” The loving child repeated the sentiment one more time, in case the unloving child had not really heard correctly, but the response remained adamant. I could relate to both of them—the loving one had ventured into what was for them a rare moment of openness and vulnerability, only to be rejected, while the unloving one had been terrorized by the loving one for the better part of a morning and was only stating what was, in that moment, a truth.

Love has never been simple concept to me. I come from a loving enough family, but not one that likes to express this love verbally. For us, saying “I love you,” is awkward, the words feeling a bit like a new language in our mouths every time. You can almost see the thought bubbles when someone starts throwing the “L” word around in proximity to my immediate family: “Do we say it back? Do we mean it if we say it back? What does it mean, anyway? Do we have to experience this moment at all? Can’t we all just go read books in our own rooms?” I come from introverted and overthinking stock. My husband is a more relaxed and frequent user of the “L” word.  This made me uncomfortable at the outset of our relationship, but I eventually became acclimated, and I can now, after fourteen years of marriage, say “I love you” to those in my household without growing embarrassed, though any professions of affection outside the immediate family are met with some discomfort. As for our three children, their lovingness exists in a continuum, but currently one is joyously full of whatever love is and liberally doles out verbal expressions of it, while the other two take after me—a little suspicious of what they might be promising when they say that ambiguous three-word phrase, “I love you.”

Whatever they’re promising, it can’t be all that serious. My hangup over the “L” word hardly seems universal—many people appear to throw it around with little caution or forethought. A friend recently told me the story of an acquaintance of hers who always ended their (professional) encounters with “I love you!” My friend thought this was a little odd, but being more socially adept than I, she sidestepped gracefully by saying, “You’re so kind!” I would have been made stupid with anxiety in this situation, maybe responding with the dreaded, “Thank you,” or maybe taking a cue from my own little truth hawker: “I don’t love you.” Or most likely, I would have exited silently, head down, mortified and shamed by my inability to receive a freely given expression of love, let alone to return it. Because is there really anything wrong with saying “I love you” whenever you feel like it? The general consensus seems to be to go on and say it if you feel like it, or maybe even if you think you should feel like it. But I don’t think I can get on board with this. I’m not opposed to people spreading words of love about, but spread too liberally they start to feel both flippant and awkward.

So a free-for-all sort of love is a little much for me, and while the infatuation of romantic love is lovely, I also find it, well, embarrassingly overt. But I’m drawn to the more measured approach of the idea that love is really defined by action, not by feelings or words. By caring, not by being cared for. This is what many officiants focus on at weddings—that while romantic love may be a feeling initially, defined by a neediness for the new partner, it’s the action sort of love that will sustain a marriage. They may be right, though I have witnessed several that seemed a little too gleeful in giving the sobering news to the infatuated couple—have fun today, because you’ll be toiling at this for the rest of your lives (if this union makes it that long), their smugly wise smiles seem to say.

A more scientific (and less depressing) purveyor of this idea is psychologist Alison Gopnik, who discusses action love not in the context of adult romantic partnerships, but in parent-child relationships. In her books The Philosophical Baby and The Gardener and the Carpenter she emphasizes that parental love, at least, develops primarily through the constant day-to-day physical caring for children, not through some magical coup de foudre between biological parent and child. Young children, wired to receive love for the sake of survival, mirror the love they are given and thus receive more of it. I have found the love/caring cycle Gopnik describes to be true in life, as I was the kind of mother who fell in love with my children not immediately upon their births, but through weeks and months of feeding, and holding, and cleaning, and comforting. I struggled to say I love you to all of my children during the first months of their lives—not because I didn’t care, but because I didn’t feel worthy. Was I doing enough, was I feeling enough, did I deserve to love them? If I said that weighty phrase would I really mean it? Was it a promise I could even begin to keep? But the feeding and the holding and the cleaning and the comforting had an effect. The change was gradual and imperceptible, but eventually the initial panicked confusion of how to relate to this alien being was replaced by a need to hold, to kiss, to be physically close to my babies. With children, action love leads to infatuation, unlike in romantic relationships, where we hope that the infatuation will lead to action love.

Here is a problem, though: sometimes one is too grumpy to tolerate the free-for-all kind of love, the warm fuzzies of infatuation are nowhere to be found, and one just doesn’t feel like doing the action sort of loving. So where does love stand in those moments? Does it even exist? GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley raised some eyebrows when, while responding to criticism for not being supportive enough of Donald Trump, she said, “I don’t love my husband one hundred percent of the time.” This was described by at least one news source as “baffling.” I guess the context was baffling, but I found the statement itself to be refreshingly honest. If loving is primarily defined by doing, which hopefully leads to feeling, which leads back to doing, and then feeling—well, isn’t that a little exhausting? If sustained love is an action, do we not need a break from it once in a while?

Sometimes I need break from all the love. Sometimes I take a break from all the love, usually unintentionally, since a break from loving seems like something only terrible people should need. When I yell at my elementary kid when all they did was add a bit more irritation to an irritating day, when my preschoolers are sweet and awake but all I do is wish for them to be asleep and out of my hair, when my eyes glaze over as my husband tells me about an idea because I’m all done with external stimulation for the day, when I ghost friends and family members for weeks or months because I just don’t have it in me to communicate—I’m taking a break. I’m not doing the work for action love, and I’m not feeling the feely love either. I’m just being. Without having to worry about love. And I’m not going to lie; sometimes it feels good. To put it all away. To not need or give love. To just be. And it may only feel good for a moment, or maybe a few, but those moments exist. What of them?

My children experience these moments, and they don’t feel guilty about them. They feel free to stop and start their own love like a faucet. There is as little guilt in an “I don’t love you,” or a pointed silence than there is in a heartfelt “I love you!”  Maybe it’s their not very linear conception of time, but they seem completely comfortable accepting that their heartfelt love is as fundamentally truthful as their heartfelt lack of it. Eternal love, love you have to work to sustain,

means nothing to someone who is living in a constant state of now.

I don’t know about eternal love, myself. If love is an action, I don’t really see how it can be eternal—again, how exhausting—but maybe then energy source of love—that is the energy source of everything—might be eternal. So maybe love is more regenerative than anything. Maybe that is why my children are so comfortable throwing love away in statements that most adults (other than Nikki Haley) censor except in their greatest moments of anger and frustration—they feel that energy, and are confident that even when love isn’t there, it still somehow is: I don’t love you one hundred percent of the time, but I always will love you.

What then is the point of saying that phrase that comes too easily to some, and with so much awkward effort to me—“I love you!”? I still can’t quite decide if there’s any point to it at all. When I say it, it’s more a hopeful protective incantation than anything—I never grew out of a tendency towards magical thinking. “I love you!” I exclaim, meaning, “I demand that the world be kind enough, and calm enough, and smart enough, and safe enough, for you.” Often, when I say it, it’s because there is nothing left to say. I’m on my way out the door, I’m on my way off the phone, it’s time to go to bed. So I say, “I love you!” as a last attempt to care for the person it’s directed towards. As action love goes, this seems a little cheap, honestly. Most of the time, when I say, “I love you!” I feel a bit as if I’m attempting to patch up my action love shortcomings with a few trite words. But still, it’s better than nothing. At the least, it is a reminder of the love-creating energy that exists, of its possibilities. A reminder that no matter what truth defines the moment, there is a greater one: love always will be.

– Ashley Cundiff