Stay. Listen. Praise.
Love languages my family never named.
I remember seeing a question once: How does your family say “I love you” without saying “I love you”?
For us, the answer was clear—stay, listen, and praise.
I’m struggling right now because it feels foggy. Love itself is foggy. I don’t want to get into romantic love; I want to look at love in a broader sense—its language, its habits, its quiet codes.
Staying is an act of love.
Listening is an act of love.
Praising is an act of love.
And yet, those same gestures have shaped my relationships in ways that aren’t always healthy. It’s a gamble. A dialect of love can be beautiful in one context and destructive in the next.
I’ve stayed too long. I’ve listened to too much. I’ve been praised for things that had nothing to do with my worth as a person.
It’s changed how I communicate—especially when it comes to what I take in.
For me, touch is a privilege. I’m guarded, defensive even, about who can access my space. I receive affection with inquiry: Why are you here? What do you want? What’s hidden underneath this? How long will this last?
My mind races with questions. It’s hard. Because deep down I still believe staying is love, listening is love. So I stay even when I don’t want to. I listen even when it hurts to listen—because that’s what love looked like.
When I think about my experience with people, I realize we’re all just trying to feel safe. Imagine us as molecules bouncing around, none of us sure how we got here, just searching for conditions that let us exist without threat.
My family, my culture, taught me: find the familiar.
If you’re a Black girl, find other Black girls.
If you’re an Asian man, find other Asian men.
If you’re short, hang with the short folks.
If you’re Christian, find your church family.
Similar feels safe—or at least, that’s what we’re told.
But I’ve learned that similar is not always safe.
Some of my deepest wounds came from people who looked just like me. I’ve experienced more pain, manipulation, and narcissism from the familiar than from the unfamiliar.
Still, I stay. Longer than I should.
In friendships.
In relationships.
In jobs.
In groups—especially religious ones.
How do I know I stayed too long? Because the pain always crescendoed at the end.
Take a random friendship. Let’s call it Pathway A. Maybe it was meant to last three years, but I dragged it out to five. Those last two years were torment—pure emotional exhaustion.
Every extra year, every extra day I stayed in that friendship, that job, that church—I sent my nervous system through hell.
Because to me: staying is love, listening is love, and praise is love.
My family runs high on expressive love—loud love. We shout, we cheer, we celebrate each other at full volume.
I don’t understand quiet families—parents who don’t scream at graduations, fathers who don’t yell from the sidelines. In my family, we yell for no reason. We praise for no reason. And I love that about us—how expressive we are in love.
But that praise is usually tied to achievement. To doing. To winning. To producing.
I can count on one hand the number of times I was praised just for breathing—for being.
In our communities, we praise action. We praise doing. We praise achievement.
But I don’t think that should be our only love language.
I don’t think you’re always supposed to stay.
I don’t think you’re always supposed to listen.
There are paragraphs that run through my mind I wish weren’t there—the things I didn’t say. The moments I didn’t leave. The times I didn’t let the phone ring because I thought answering was love.
And the hardest part? In so many of those relationships, the love I gave—through staying and listening—was never reciprocated. Or if it was, it came with strings.
The twist on top of the twist is that my capacity to stay and listen for others has long outweighed my ability to stay and listen for myself.
If those were the only love languages I knew, I’d never be able to love myself.
Because loving myself sometimes means leaving. Sometimes it means silence. Sometimes it means putting on my headphones and tuning the world out, or sitting on a beach in quiet just to hear what my spirit is saying.
I take ownership of how I’ve allowed my love languages to be shaped by conditioning.
And I’m learning to love differently now.
I stay because I want to.
I listen—to myself, and to others.
I’m learning.
