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My dad is 67 years old. He’s run the same small business for thirty years. And in all that time — through my first startup sale at 27, through my spectacular collapse at 28, through the slow, unglamorous rebuild that followed — he has never once looked me in the eye and said, “I’m proud of you.”
Not once.
For years, that absence sat in my chest like a stone. I built entire narratives around it. I sold a company and thought, maybe now. I failed at another and thought, well, that’s why. I carried that silence into therapy, into my men’s group, into every room where I was trying to figure out why I kept chasing things that never felt like enough once I got them.
Then, about three years ago, I was at my parents’ house for the weekend. My dad was outside in the garage, silently rotating the tires on my car. Nobody asked him to do it. I hadn’t mentioned anything. He’d just noticed the tread was uneven when I pulled in the driveway.
Something in my chest cracked open.
Not because it was some grand gesture. But because I suddenly saw it — really saw it — as one instance in a lifetime pattern of care that I’d been dismissing as ordinary. As baseline. As not enough.
The emotional vocabulary his generation was never given
Here’s the thing: my father grew up in a world where men didn’t talk about feelings because feelings were considered a liability. Not a personal failing — a literal survival risk. His father, my grandfather, came from a generation shaped by scarcity, where emotional restraint wasn’t a personality flaw. It was adaptive. You kept your head down, you worked, you provided. That was the deal.
And the research backs this up. A 2016 meta-analysis published in the Journal of Counseling Psychology examining the relationship between conformity to masculine norms and mental health outcomes found that men who adhered to norms of emotional control and self-reliance reported significantly lower rates of emotional disclosure — but not necessarily lower rates of emotional experience. They felt things. They just had no sanctioned channel for expressing them.
Think about that for a second. The feeling was there. The infrastructure for expressing it wasn’t.
My father didn’t grow up in a household where anyone modeled emotional articulation. His father worked. His mother managed the home. Love was communicated through persistence — through staying, through showing up, through making sure the bills were paid and the roof didn’t leak and the car started in the morning.
That wasn’t a deficit. That was a language.
Instrumental love: the language nobody taught us to hear
Psychologists actually have a term for this. It’s called instrumental support — acts of service, provision, and practical care as a primary mode of relational connection. And it’s distinct from emotional support, which involves verbal affirmation, empathy, and explicit emotional engagement.
Research by Deborah Umberson and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin has shown that men, particularly those from older generations, disproportionately default to instrumental expressions of care — fixing things, managing finances, solving problems — as their primary relational strategy. Not because they lack emotional depth, but because instrumental action was the only form of love their socialization permitted.
My dad didn’t say “I’m proud of you” after I sold my first startup. He drove three hours to help me move into my new apartment. Carried boxes up four flights of stairs without complaining. Checked the locks on every window before he left.
He didn’t say “I’m worried about you” when my second startup imploded and I was drowning in $47,000 of debt. He quietly transferred money into my account for rent. No lecture. No “I told you so.” Just the transfer and a text: Don’t worry about it.
I’ve written before about the period in my life when I was buying $400 sneakers and expensive watches to perform a version of success I didn’t actually have. During that entire spiral, my father never once commented on my spending. But he did call every Sunday. Same time. Same questions. “You eating okay? Car running fine? Need anything?”
That was the language. I just didn’t know how to listen for it.
Why we keep waiting for words that may never come
Here’s what took me about fifteen years of therapy to understand: I was holding my father to an emotional standard he was never equipped to meet — not because he was broken, but because the standard itself was culturally specific to my generation, not his.
We grew up in the era of emotional intelligence, active listening, vulnerability as strength. Brené Brown. Attachment theory popularized. The idea that if someone loves you, they should be able to say it, clearly, in words that match the feeling.
And honestly? That’s a good standard. I want that for my kids. I practice it, imperfectly, every day.
But applying that standard retroactively to a man who came of age in a completely different emotional economy — and then judging him as deficient for not meeting it — that’s not fairness. That’s a setup.
Research by psychologist Ronald Levant on normative male alexithymia — the idea that many men aren’t clinically unable to identify emotions but are socially trained out of articulating them — provides a framework that changed how I understood my father entirely. Levant’s work shows that this isn’t pathology. It’s learned behavior, reinforced over decades by cultural expectations about what it meant to be a reliable man.
My father didn’t withhold “I’m proud of you” to hurt me. He withheld it because in his internal operating system, saying those words might have felt as foreign and uncomfortable as what I feel when someone suggests I share my feelings in a group setting for the first time. Oh wait — I’ve actually done that, and it was terrifying. Which means I should know better than to assume ease from him.
The generational translation problem
I think about this a lot now — especially when I notice the irreplaceable knowledge and ways of being that the generation now in their 70s and 80s carries. We’re so busy cataloging what our parents didn’t give us verbally that we sometimes miss the enormous record of what they gave us physically, practically, materially.
My father woke up at 5:30 AM for thirty years. Same alarm. Same routine. He didn’t love that. He didn’t find it fulfilling in the way a lifestyle influencer might describe “alignment.” He did it because he had a family, and providing for them was the promise he made to himself. That consistency — that relentless, unglamorous, unasked-for dependability — was the loudest declaration of love he knew how to make.
And it said: I’m here. I’m not leaving. You are worth the sacrifice of my comfort.
Sound familiar? Yeah, me too.
I see echoes of this pattern everywhere once I started looking. The way certain people express care through small, habitual acts of conscientiousness that started in childhood. The way some men I know in my men’s group will rearrange their entire schedule to help you move but can’t say “I love you, man” without looking at the floor.
This isn’t about excusing emotional neglect
I want to be careful here. I’m not saying that every silent father was secretly a saint. Some fathers were absent. Some were cruel. Some used “providing” as a shield to avoid intimacy altogether, and that avoidance caused real damage.
What I am saying is that for a significant number of men from that generation, the silence wasn’t absence of love. It was a mistranslation of love — filtered through a cultural system that told them the best thing they could do for their children was ensure stability, not emotional narration.
A 2004 study in the Journal of Family Issues found that fathers who scored high on provider role identification often reported deep emotional investment in their children’s well-being — they simply channeled that investment through financial and practical contributions rather than verbal or physical affection.
The love was there. The delivery method just didn’t match the recipient’s expectations.
And as someone who has spent years quietly rebuilding after a major failure, I’ve learned something about how easy it is to misjudge someone’s interior life based on their visible behavior. My father’s emotional interior was richer than his exterior performance ever let on. I just had to stop judging the performance long enough to see it.
What I’m learning to do differently
I tell my kids I’m proud of them. Out loud. Regularly. Sometimes too much, probably. But I also notice that when something in the house breaks, I fix it immediately — and I feel something when I do. Something that isn’t just about the broken thing. It’s about protection. About proving, to myself and to them, that I’m here and things will hold together.
That’s my dad in me. That’s the language I inherited. I’m just trying to be bilingual now — to keep the instrumental care he modeled while adding the verbal affirmation he couldn’t.
Last month, I called my father on a Sunday. Same time he’s been calling me for years. When he picked up, I said, “I just wanted you to know I’m doing good, Dad. And I appreciate everything.”
There was a long pause.
Then: “Good. Glad to hear it. Hey — have you checked your tire pressure lately? Cold weather’s coming.”
I smiled.
Because I finally speak the language.
