Let me tell you about my dog.

 

Wait… didn’t I just say I was going to tell you about my cat?

 

I am, but I have to set the stage with my dog first. Anyway, my dog loves me. It’s very, very obvious. She follows me around the house, she pretty much falls out of her skin because she’s so excited when I come home, and you can feel and see the love in her eyes whenever she’s around me. She’s my best friend, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

 

My cat, on the other hand… well, she doesn’t do any of that. She’ll come see what I’m doing if I’m upstairs – sometimes. She’ll maybe mosey over to say hi when I get home. I honestly thought she didn’t love me anymore, and I didn’t know what to do about it.

 

Here’s what else Maggie does, though. She sits next to me (or on me) while I’m working. She spends most of the night snuggled up to my shins. She rubs between my legs while I’m making breakfast. And I love every single second of it.

 

 

See, Maggie’s signs of affection aren’t as overt or dramatic as Phoebe’s, but they’re absolutely there if you know to watch for them. She loves me just as much as Phoebe does, she just expresses it in a different way. How does this apply to relationships? Well, let me tell you another story.

 

One of the biggest struggles in my last relationship regarded physical intimacy and affection. In short, I really didn’t want any of it. It wasn’t that I thought my partner was unattractive or that I didn’t love him; physical affection simply made me feel trapped and used. He, though, felt the most emotionally intimate when we were physically intimate, and he saw my lack of interest in physical affection as a lack of interest in him.

 

I could have sat there and told him six ways from Sunday how physical intimacy did not equal emotional intimacy for me, but he wouldn’t have gotten the message. He simply hadn’t learned the lesson that people show affection in different ways. 

 

(Cue the ohhhhhhh moment now that you see the connection between my cat and human relationships)

 

I showed him affection by helping him out with his tasks, by being there to listen to him when he was having struggles, and by going out and doing things with him, like going to the amusement park or going out to a movie. I could definitely get into the whole Love Languages thing here, but that would take a whole book to fully explain, and I won’t claim to be an expert. The basic concept of the Love Languages is pretty much exactly what Maggie reminded me of the other day: people (and other beings) give and receive love in different ways.

 

If you’re in a relationship with someone – and when I say relationship, I mean any human interaction with another human, whether that be your family, your friends, or your romantic partner – that you feel is fading, take some time to channel your inner Maggie and really look at the situation. Are the signs of affection more subtle? Are they not the way you receive love, but are in fact the way that the other person expresses it?

 

At the end of the day, relationships don’t require overt and over-the-top signs of affection. Sure, they’re great, and I wouldn’t trade Phoebe’s literal screaming when I get home for anything in the world – but I also wouldn’t trade Maggie’s leg rubs for anything, either. A relationship isn’t built on the size of the signs of affection; they’re built on the presence of them, so I encourage you to not give up on a relationship because the signs aren’t as obvious as you’d like them to be. Maybe they’re just a bit smaller, but still just as meaningful.