I’ve never seen my parents kiss.

This dawned on me recently while I was reading a trashy celebrity gossip magazine about Brangelina — the celebrity supercouple composed of actors Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt. In the article, it mentioned how the couple would routinely make-out in front of their army of children and how it grossed out their kids. I felt a tinged of sadness as I tried to recall a time when I even saw my parents hug.

Nothing came to mind.

For my South Asian parents there were no pet names or secret handshakes between the two of them. They sat on opposite sides of the couch whenever we watched “60 Minutes” together as a family. They never held hands. My mom would always walk a few steps in front or behind my dad, but never besides him. I distinctly remember my mom calling my dad by his last name whenever she referred to him, and somehow my dad just never seemed to be in a situation where he needed to mention my mom.

I never heard them say “I love you,” to one another.

Although I grew up in a home where my parents never hugged or kissed or said “I love you” to each other, I was surrounded by American idealisms of what love is supposed to be.

As a first generation American who grew up in a South Asian household, affection was taboo and my parents never demonstrated this Western-style love. But growing up in the ‘90s, “Western love” for me translated into hugs and kisses between couples I saw in television shows like “Full House” and “Friends.”

I came to view my parents not as two people who were in love with one another, but as a two individuals who decided to form a life partnership together. Somehow they came to this mutual agreement that the objective of their life was to earn enough money for their kids (me and my brother) so that we could achieve the American Dream: (e.g.) get an education, go to college, get a good job, have a family, then repeat what they did with our own offspring.

To me, their marriage looked a lot like a business. Their source of happiness was not found within each other, but found within their children’s achievements.

As a preteen, I viewed their marriage as something contractual, nothing to aspire to. I wanted the kind of love that I heard in songs on the radio and saw on TV. I wanted to be adored, showered with affection and be with someone who partook in PDA with me in public spaces — that’s what my idea of love was.

After my dad passed away from a brain aneurism, my stoic mom — who never seemed very interested in my dad — became a depressed widow. She mourned in her own way, telling friends and relatives over and over again how he died in front of her. It was like she was engraining the oral history into her memory so she would never forgot him.

Years later, while I was visiting my mom from college, I found her sitting alone, looking through her wedding album, staring at photos of her and my dad together on the beach.

For years, I thought the right way to prove you are “in love” was by showing it, by being the opposite of what my parents were. On a superficial level, the level that you and I experience through words and phrases, my parents didn’t show their love.

For a long time, I resented the sort of relationship my parents had. From my point of view, their marriage was devoid of intimacy and communication. How could they possibly love each other? But it took me an even longer time to realize that my notions of love, like the public displays of affection, the “I love yous,” the courting and dating, can also be interpreted as one-dimensional behaviors.

Now, as a woman in my mid-twenties who is seeing someone seriously, I constantly have to readjust my expectations of what I think love is. The sentiments we have that men and women are supposed to act a certain way when it comes to loving someone else is silly because many of these notions are from things we’ve seen other people do. It doesn’t mean it’s right for every couple.

With all this being said, I confess I don’t know what the right way to love is. I still get upset when my boyfriend doesn’t take the trash out, I cry when I get frustrated in my relationship, I storm off in the middle of an argument because I am afraid to lose it. Those aren’t qualities of someone who has love figured out.

But I don’t think my parents had it wrong. It took graduating college, getting a job, living on my own, failing at multiple relationships to understand that my parents were expressing their love in the only way they knew how, through the societal practices of their Bengali culture. Their love was soft spoken. It wasn’t shown through touch or words, but through actions, like moving to a foreign country for a better life, and working 16 hour days so that they could save enough money to start a family.

It took me a long time to see that the love I have with the man I’m with now isn’t better than the marriage my parents had.

Now that I am older, I see more instances of younger people confusing infatuation for love, especially because of what we are exposed to through pop culture and the media. Admittedly, I confused infatuation for love plenty of times. I mean, how can we not when we are spoon-fed expectations of what our partners should be doing for us, and we are told what type of person we need to be for them? Disney movies and romantic comedies make love out to be something that is attainable for everyone if we just let the right person find us. And after that it’s supposed to be easy and magical and we all live happily ever after.

But for me, love is hard. It’s work and it’s a lot of forgoing expectations and egos and admitting that I can be wrong sometimes. Pop culture didn’t teach me that, my parent’s marriage — the one I deemed loveless and uninspiring — did.

Instead of looking for someone to fit our perceptions of what we think love is, maybe we should be open to finding life partners who can help us craft our own definition of what love means.