Lilly Singh Instagram – I’m crying 🥹 Comment below with a ✋🏽 if your immigrant parents aren’t super affectionate. Because #relatable but also, listen to this story… I’m part of a generation who speaks often about love languages. We do quizzes online, go to therapy and read articles about all the different ways to give and receive love. And we value this idea of loving people the way THEY need to be loved, so we try our best to do that. Cut to: immigrants parents. In so many of my sketches, I’ve joked about my parents not being super affectionate. It’s a common joke amongst Desis that hearing your parents say “I love you” is basically like winning the lottery. My parents love language is service. They may not say sweet things, or give many hugs, but they’ll pick me up from the airport or cut up fruit for me at literally ANY time. I know this. Especially my dad. But I had a moment of insight this past week. I flew back to Toronto to surprise my parents, meaning they did not know I was coming. I walked into the house and saw my dads laptop, two windows open, auto playing my YouTube videos. I’ve mentioned this in interviews before, but when I started making YouTube videos, my dad would play them on every computer he owned, just in the background, to help me get views. It’s been 13 years now and I don’t even upload YouTube videos anymore. I don’t even rely on views for work or income, but even still, he does this, everyday. My dad has never been really great at vocalizing he’s proud in much depth. And I’m sure that’s because his dad wasn’t great at it either. But seeing this laptop lit up my heart and told me everything I needed to know. It helped me realize that sometimes it’s okay to make the decision to accept love from people in the only way they know how to express it. Or at the very least, it was a reminder to pay attention to all the little ways my parents say “I love you” without words. Sure, maybe it’s not MY love language, but that doesn’t mean there is an absence of love. After all, maybe I don’t always love them in their love language either. And maybe it’s all a work in progress and in the interim, we should accept all the love we’ve been ignoring.