“I love you, Suzy. Oh — kids — I love you all too. Oh hey, speaking of love, have you all tried that new breakfast burrito?”
Same word. Three jobs. No wonder “I love you” can feel weird when you aim it at your brother.
I’ve been circling this for years. Yesterday was Valentine’s Day, and something about it got me thinking again — not just about romance, but about all the other kinds of love we feel and never say.
I do happen to say “I love you” to my family fairly often. Sometimes it lands right — natural, easy, no weight to it. But other times it just feels awkward. Not because there isn’t love — there is — but because the word isn’t quite conveying what I mean. A little heavy-handed, maybe. A little imprecise.
Like shouting in all caps when you wanted to scribble a quiet note.
Depending on your language and culture, maybe you know what I mean.
If telling your siblings or your dad you love them comes easy, maybe this doesn’t apply to you. But for a lot of people, “I love you” aimed at family lands somewhere between too much and not quite right. Too heavy for a Tuesday. Too romantic. Too something. So it stays inside. Not because the feeling isn’t there — because the word doesn’t fit.
That’s not a ‘you problem.’ That’s a broken tool.
A few years ago I stumbled onto a Danish word — hygge — and it changed how I live. How I light a room. How we have friends over. How I think about an evening. My life.
But it wasn’t the word itself — a cheap translation doesn’t get you very far. It was trying to discover the meaning behind it — the images, the experiences, the practices of the people who actually live it. The word was just a door. What was behind it — an entire way of living I’d been unaware of — that’s what changed everything for me.
So I started wondering: if the Scandinavians carry that much wisdom about how to live — what do they know about how to love?
What I found didn’t disappoint.
In Norwegian, I understand there are at least two ways to say “I love you.” Jeg elsker deg is the intense one — romantic, serious, reserved. But there’s another: glad i deg (roughly “glah ee die”).
Like hygge, it doesn’t translate cleanly — it’s doing work that no English word quite does. It’s deep love, but without the weight. Intimate, but not romantic. One Norwegian writer described it as a lovely connection rather than a declaration of love — and said it actually means more to her than the English “I love you” normally does.
It’s the love you feel for the people woven into your life — your parents, your kids, your siblings, your closest friends. Not lesser love. Different love. The kind that’s steady and daily instead of dramatic and rare.
Something like: you matter to me. I’m grateful you’re here.
And because it exists separately from romantic love, Norwegians can say it freely — to people English speakers would never say “I love you” to. Not because we don’t feel it, but because our one word doesn’t fit. Glad i deg gives them permission to say the quiet thing on a Tuesday, not just in a crisis — often enough that it stops feeling strange and starts feeling like genuine connection.
But glad i deg was just the beginning. Because these words don’t just help you express the love — they help you feel it.
People who have more words for their emotions actually experience those emotions more distinctly — the language gives the brain a concept to notice. And once you notice something, you can nurture it. The Scandinavians didn’t just name feelings — the ways to experience and nurture them are woven into the words too. Language and meaning and practice, all inherited together.
Kos is Norwegian for warmth and closeness — but it’s not a thing you have, it’s a thing you build. You make the room warm on purpose. You light something. You pull people close. Love isn’t something you wait to feel. It’s something you create deliberately, on a regular night.
Fika is Swedish for the coffee break you take twice a day — but it’s not about the coffee. It’s about stopping what you’re doing and being present with someone. No agenda. No screens. Just sitting together and letting the day breathe. I’d love to start doing that more with my people. Maybe you and someone you love can find ten minutes for it today.
Dugnad is Norwegian for community volunteer work, dating back to the 1200s. Neighbors show up, do the hard work together, then share a meal. From Old Norse dugnaðr — “to be useful.” Love expressed as labor. The togetherness isn’t the reward after the work. The work is the togetherness.
I first noticed how much culture shapes all of us in Puerto Rico. I lived there when I was young, and the difference was mind-blowing — not any single moment, but the realization that what I thought of as special moments back home were just daily life there. The expressiveness, life on the front porch with neighbors, dominos out in the street, the music, the community — it wasn’t something they turned on. It was how they lived.
That’s when I first started to learn that language, culture, norms, and traditions shape how we express ourselves, how we connect, how we experience life — more than we can ever fully appreciate. It’s a gift we receive, live through, and pass along to the next generation.
I’ve seen it everywhere since. One culture huddles together in a sauna, bare and completely unbothered. Another sits in a living room in stiff clothes, stiff conversation — everyone knows they love each other, you can see it — but it’s like they’re hiding from each other. Not because the love isn’t there, but because they didn’t inherit the language or customs that carry the permission and the practice. They just didn’t get the same memo from their ancestors — or it got lost somewhere along the way.
All humans. Real love. Different permissions, ways to express and practice it.
I think about the people these words came from — the ones who first put language to their feelings and practices of love. They sat around fires. They broke bread. They held each other through winters that lasted longer than seemed fair. And they learned some things — maybe not by thinking about it, but by just living in a way that was true to their nature.
Then they died, like we all do. But how they loved didn’t die with them. It survived — compressed into words, passed along like a baton from one generation to the next. The individuals come and go. The beauty of what they learned keeps traveling. Their descendants may never know that their words and practices — the ways they connect — came in part from those who came before.
Not what they built. Not what they achieved. How they loved. That’s what survived.
Scandinavia is just one window. Every culture has its own wisdom about love that it passes along — ancient wisdom still alive in their words and the messages they carry. I’d bet every culture has beautiful things to teach.
The Portuguese have cafuné — gently running your fingers through someone’s hair. The Filipinos have kilig — that giddy feeling when love is new, given its own word so they’d never confuse the spark with the fire. In Arabic, tuqburni — “you bury me” — is a term of endearment, meaning you’d rather die first than live without someone.
My grandparents didn’t have any of these Scandinavian words. Neither did my parents. But they had their own ways — they did a beautiful job carrying the wisdom they inherited from those who loved before them, adding to it and passing it on. I learned most of what I know about love from watching them.
Still, we can never have too much love, or too many ways to express it. Maybe it’s okay to want more — and to borrow the wisdom that all cultures have to share. We live in a time when it’s never been more accessible — we just need to be curious enough to go searching.
Some words are easier to bring into your life than others. Hygge is one we can say and explore together — we’ll probably never totally get it, but it doesn’t feel awkward to try. Glad i deg is harder. It’s this feeling we have — this steady, daily love for the people closest to us — but our language fails to give us the words. We can borrow glad i deg, but the meaning lives in the culture, not just the syllables. Not out of the gate, at least.
Maybe the point isn’t finding the perfect word. But I can notice. I can keep looking. I can learn from others — their words, their practices, the wisdom they carry. Maybe I’ll find better language someday. Or maybe those who come after me will.
And if you do — if you say the quiet thing, build warmth on purpose, sit with someone without an agenda, share the work — maybe something survives. Maybe your grandkids do something one day — pause for coffee with a friend, light a candle on a dark evening, tell someone “you matter to me” — never knowing where it started.
But it’ll have come from you. That’s the echo. That’s what lasts.
I’ve been meaning to text my family about this. Tell them about glad i deg — how it means something like “you matter to me.” How it exists because someone, a long time ago, understood that without a word for it, the feeling would go unsaid.
I haven’t sent it yet. I’m still figuring out how to say it without it feeling like a thing. Which is kind of the whole challenge, isn’t it? The feeling is right there. The word just doesn’t fit.
Maybe I’ll just say it plainly. Not in Norwegian. Not perfectly. Just the slightly awkward, one-word-fits-all English version — which probably works fine when you actually say it.
Glad i deg.