On presence, loyalty, and what emotions do when they can’t say their own name
I’m autistic, and I know that I don’t express emotions the way others expect. Take affection as an example. I miss hints to emotional states. I ignore key moments. I don’t buy flowers. I’m not good at the performance of affection, spontaneously or on a schedule.
For a long time, I took other people’s confusion about this as evidence of what they seemed to be implying: that I didn’t feel enough, or in the right way, or with enough visible effort. That the absence of the expected signals meant an absence of the feeling behind them.
I don’t believe that anymore.
Structural loyalty
Here’s what I do instead.
I am loyal in a way that has no obvious upper limit.
The people in my inner circle are built into the architecture of how I live – not as an afterthought, not as one consideration among many, but as a structural feature. The essentials of managing day-to-day life: I’ve got it. Creating memorable life moments: consider it done. Something I can help with: I’ll be on it as soon as I notice it.
My loyalty comes across in small things, some of which probably go unnoticed. That’s partly the nature of my emotions – they don’t announce themselves, they just operate. They are there in the preparation, the follow-through, the sustained attention to what actually matters rather than what’s conventionally expected.
There’s a concept in autism research called monotropism – the tendency toward deep, narrow attentional focus rather than attention distributed across many things at once. The important people in my life receive a version of the focus I bring to everything that matters to me: total, sustained, organized. When I’m in, I’m completely in.
Emotion through action
Back to affection. My behavior doesn’t reflect the language of affection that neurotypical culture taught people to look for. It doesn’t come with the right words at the right moment.
It comes with presence. Attention. Specific, precise acts that make a difference.
A real difference, rather than a performed one. The care is in the doing, not in the declaring of it.
In a previous post I wrote about one of the reasons for me to express emotion through action: words for emotions are, for me, approximate at best. If I were to say “I’m so happy for you”, I’d be borrowing labels I was never fully calibrated to. They feel loose to me. An action doesn’t have that problem. If someone says they need something and I have the power to address the need immediately, the meaning of my care is obvious in the action itself. No words are required.
Timing is the other part. The right word at the right moment depends on reading the moment – the shift in someone’s voice, the pause that invites a response, the occasion that calls for a gesture. Those are exactly the cues I tend to miss in real time. Action is far more forgiving. It doesn’t need to land in a particular second. It can be planned, checked, and done properly, which is how I prefer to do most things that matter.
Words describe the feeling. Action is the feeling, put to work.
There’s also a question of honesty. Gestures performed on a schedule – the card because it’s the date, the flowers because it’s expected – feel fake to me. I’d rather do the thing I know will actually help, even if many people won’t recognize it as an affectionate act, than perform a gesture whose only purpose is to be recognized.
Popular psychology has a version of this idea. Gary Chapman’s five “love languages” include “acts of service” as one way in which people give and receive affection. While the framework feels intuitive, a 2024 review by relationship scientist Emily Impett and colleagues found little evidence for its core assumptions – that each person has one preferred language, or that couples do better when they match. Their alternative suits my experience better: affection is less like a language you speak and more like a balanced diet that needs a range of nutrients. I supply some of those nutrients in large quantities and others barely at all. That’s worth being honest about – and it’s also worth recognizing that the nutrients I supply are real.
Looking past the silence
I know I sometimes behave in ways that, while feeling entirely natural to me, appear odd to others. There’s always a driver – always something behind the behavior that is, in its own logic, an expression of care. The problem is not the care. The problem is that its expression doesn’t match the expected form, and the gap between form and content is where the misreading happens. The question is how to make sure other people understand it.
What I’ve learned is that the people who understand this best are the ones who stopped waiting for me to express affection verbally and started noticing what I was doing. Not because I asked them to adjust – for a long time I didn’t know how to ask. But because they were curious enough to look past the silence, past the missed moment, past the absent declaration, and pay attention to what was actually there.
Noticing shouldn’t be a one-way job, though. The simplest change has been to name the driver out loud, at least some of the time. Not a declaration of feelings – those still don’t come easily – but a plain explanation: “I sorted this because you seemed worried about it.” “I remembered because it mattered to you.” A single sentence like that does what the action alone can’t. It hands the other person the map to interpret it.
I also ask more directly. Instead of guessing which gestures matter to someone, or assuming that what I do is enough, I try to ask what makes them feel I care. I take the answer as information rather than criticism. And I try to explain how I express emotion through communication, such as these posts.
None of this turns me into someone who performs emotions fluently. But it narrows the gap.
With the ‘right people’, my emotions get received as what they actually are, rather than what they failed to be.
If you recognize yourself in this – on either side of it – I’d like to hear how it plays out for you.
Sources
[1] Murray, D., Lesser, M., & Lawson, W. (2005). “Attention, monotropism and the diagnostic criteria for autism”. Autism, 9(2), 139–156.
[2] Impett, E. A., Park, H. G., & Muise, A. (2024). “Popular psychology through a scientific lens: Evaluating love languages from a relationship science perspective”. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 33(2), 87–93.
