People can care deeply while imagining different ways to show it.

Affection has dialects. One person shows it by fixing things, another by ringing every Sunday, another by remembering what you said in March, and each assumes their own version is what caring looks like. Missing someone’s dialect feels like being unloved, and it usually means being loved in a shape you were not watching for.

Ask yourself how a person actually spends effort on you, rather than what they have failed to say. Tell people plainly what registers with you, since nobody guesses this reliably. Then try offering your own care in the form the other person can hear.