There are some things my family just does not do together. We do not watch TV on weeknights. We do not eat pig. We don’t “let things go.” And for some reason, we do not say “I love you.”

It’s not that we don’t love each other. We do, and very much so. If you were to ask any of us what we consider to be the most important thing in the world, I guarantee we’d all say “family.” But we have our own particular way of showing it, and it just doesn’t happen to include regularly articulating our affection for one another.

I first noticed this phenomenon my freshman year at Northwestern. When my parents dropped me off at school in the fall, they helped me move into my dorm, said their “goodbyes” and left, but no “I love you.” To be fair, I hadn’t said “I love you” either, but I had an excuse: I was an teenage boy, and therefore callous and immature. What was theirs – that I was a teenage boy and therefore callous and immature? Come on, that was my excuse! Get your own!

I quickly realized this lack of “love you’s” was part of a larger pattern. In the Larrison household, there were a lot of things that went unsaid. My parents never talked to me about drugs and alcohol. I never had a curfew. And we never had “the talk,” although they did give me a book with some delightful cartoons describing the wonders of puberty.

Now these might seem like a plethora of bad ideas, or come across as horrible parenting. But they weren’t, and it wasn’t. My parents were showing their trust in us, and part of that was not feeling the need to tell us things they thought were obvious. “Don’t do drugs, don’t stay out too late, don’t have unwanted children.” Simple enough, right? It might not work for everyone, but it worked for us. And at the heart of it all was “I love you,” even if they didn’t say it.

Sometimes, in recent years, I would be with friends when they were on the phone with their folks and at the end of the call, I’d hear them say, “Love you too, bye!” with such ease that I’d wonder why we didn’t say it in my family. So I tried it once with my mom last spring. I worked up the courage while we chatted for a few minutes, and when we reached our goodbyes I said, “OK, Mom, talk to you later. Love y-.” Click.

Huh.

Well, so much for that, I thought.

So the next time I call my folks, I’m sure the conversation will be brief. We’ll fill each other in on the essentials, compare the weather in our parts of the world (it’s always worse here) and be on our way. I might think about saying “I love you,” but in the end I’ll probably just hang up with the words unsaid. I know they know, and they know I know, and that’s enough for us.

But with Valentine’s Day on the horizon, and just in case there was any doubt: Mom, Dad, I love you.