Do Americans say "I love you" too much?

In China, younger people are beginning to use wo ai ni (“I love you”)—something largely unheard of among older generations. “We said, Wo xihuan ni (‘I like you’),” the psychology professor Kaiping Peng told the journalist Roseann Lake, recalling his dating days during Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Until recently, “you just showed love through holding hands, kissing, or maybe writing or doing something nice—but you never said it.”

Here’s how distinct America’s situation is: In 2014, four Chinese researchers devoted a study to how the use of “I love you” had become a “daily phenomenon” in the States—directed even at pets and Facebook friends, and deployed for purposes ranging from apologizing to ending phone calls. Their goal was to help teachers in other countries explain the phrase to perplexed students learning English as a foreign language. “In our own experience, as teachers of English in China, we often try to avoid the explanation and practice of the locution I love you even though it appears in the textbook we are teaching,” they wrote. “We do not want to embarrass ourselves or our students.”

Some of the most insightful research on this topic has been conducted by Elisabeth Gareis and Richard Wilkins, both professors of communication at Baruch College. In a 2006 study based on an online survey of American and international students in the United States, Gareis and Wilkins found that relative to American students, international students reported less frequent declarations of “I love you” between romantic partners and from parents to children. Most respondents whose native language was not English said they used the English words ‘‘I love you’’ more often than the equivalent expression in their native language.