There is a certain economy that doesn’t deal in cash, but in something far more intimate… mentally, emotionally and physically… the invisible exchanges that make up the human condition. The currency of the heart is love, empathy, and genuine human connection through acts of affection. It is the medium through which relationships are built, maintained and sustained.
Ongoing acts of kindness, generosity, honesty, and vulnerability are what we “spend” as the building blocks for relationships. Forgiveness, gratitude, and compassion are what we invest to sustain them. Unlike money, this currency can’t be hoarded. It multiplies only when reciprocated. When giving and receiving happen in good faith.
I’ve learned that even the heart weakens when the currency is withheld or when investments in mutual agreements is not returned. In the workplace, in families, and in love… I’ve seen what happens when people default on their agreements while unresolved issues accumulate without acknowledgment.
Over time, I began to notice how this same imbalance shows up in other parts of life. Between siblings who avoid hard conversations in the name of peace; between lovers who claim honesty but hide behind politeness or distraction; between colleagues who protect their image instead of the relationship; and between colleagues who depend on each other for success.
The richest people, I think, aren’t the ones who love the most, but the ones whose love is steady and consistent over time — who admit when they are at fault, and their actions match their words. Because every heart keeps a tally. Some debts are repaid through apology, some through forgiveness, and some through the quiet individual work of growing up emotionally. The currency of the heart, like any true wealth, depends not on abundance, but on authenticity… on whether what we offer others is real.
Work Life: The Cost of Withholding
In professional life, the currency of the heart reveals itself through communication — the willingness to openly share information, to collaborate, and to act with a mutual respect. In kitchens and classrooms, I’ve always believed that service is not simply about quality or performance; it’s an act of respect. Respect for each other, for the food, the equipment, and for the space.
When we provide something of value, such as a particular service, a meal or food product, a workshop, or an experience… we acknowledge the contract between seller and buyer: both sides have dignity, and both depend on the other to communicate with kindness and act in good faith. To me, it means, I care enough to give my best, no matter what side you are on. It’s not transactional in the shallow sense, but relational. A way of honoring the underlying trust another person has placed in you.
I once worked with a man whose job directly affected my own success. I relied on him to communicate when ingredients or products couldn’t be procured — to let me know early enough so I could adjust menus, find alternatives, and adjust curriculum. But he didn’t. Repeatedly, he stayed silent until the last minute. Always leaning on the “everything is a learning experience” in the academic environment. And when I asked him to communicate sooner, he smiled, nodded, and returned to his silence.
What I came to understand was that this wasn’t forgetfulness. It was a form of passive aggression and a way to control. He derived his power from my dependence — from knowing that withholding information would unsettle me. His silence was a kind of emotional currency, used to remind me of who held the leverage. Until I started ordering myself, the divide between us deepened. Trust was completely broken.
This unsettling event taught me something about the workplace: that sabotage doesn’t always appear as obvious aggression. Sometimes it looks like calmness or silence. It sounds like “no problem.” Politeness can hide deep avoidance, quietly eroding trust. And once trust begins to dissolve, so does the spirit of service that is being provided to the purchaser.
You can’t serve the customer — or the larger purpose of an organization— when those within the system are busy glorifying and protecting their own territory. I’ve come to believe that true and honorable service isn’t just about the raw honesty about the product or service we provide or pretending to be meeting the customer’s needs. Being of service is about how we traverse the relationships of all people involved throughout the entire process. Beginning with honesty in what is promised, and continuing through complete transparency, humility, and openness.
Good communication becomes the basis of the ethical infrastructure of doing business and workplace dynamics. Without it, people stop communicating openly. They start managing impressions instead of relationships, and what looks like teamwork is really just quiet self-preservation.
In this kind of environment, even the idea of success and excellence loses its implication. Because the real value of what is being offered — to clients, students, or diners — isn’t only in the product itself, but in the integrity of how we collaborate to deliver it. That’s the currency that customers feel, even if they can’t name it — the unspoken, trustworthiness of people working together in good faith. Some of the best products and services, I’ve found, come from people who work this way.
Family Life: The Quiet Betrayals
In families, the currency of the heart is often spoken through actions rather than words. The rhythm of ongoing displays of care, and seeing who shows up during times of stress and who disappears when it matters the most. Unlike colleagues or friends, family members carry a longer history of shared moments, experiences and expectations. Built over many years of shared meals, shared grief, and shared silence. That silence, I’ve learned, can wound as deeply as any act of cruelty.
In my own family, betrayal rarely began as an open conflict attempting to be resolved. The betrayal arrived being masked through avoidance, indifference, or the careful withholding of feelings and truth telling. There were times when a family member chose not to say what probably should be said, preferring silence over discomfort. When I reached out, wanting to repair something strained between us, the response was an empty politeness. As if I was the one creating the problem just by asking. The effort to repair became the offence. Most conversations would end with a “it’s fine,” which of course meant nothing was fine at all.
At first, I misunderstood that restraint for maturity. The kind that tries to keep the peace and avoids the drama. But over time, I saw it for what it was: the fear of vulnerability disguised as harmony. We all learned in our own ways that keeping things “pleasant” was safer than being honest. Yet what we saved in short-term peace, we lost in long-term connection. The emotional trust account kept being drained and hardly replenished.
The silence in the unresolved issues in families can feel civil, even loving, but it corrodes trust the same way deceit does, just more slowly. When people withhold speaking their truth, they also withhold the truth of themselves. You start to sense the absence in the room long before you can name it. It’s not that love disappears; it just stops its reciprocity. You still want to care, but something invisible blocks its movement. An unspoken hurt, pride, exhaustion, and it keeps affection from getting through.
I sometimes wonder if all families carry a kind of unspoken debt for the sake of keeping the family together. What happens to all the things we never felt comfortable to say, the apologies we never offered, the forgiveness we withheld, and our truths we decided the other couldn’t handle? We don’t escape those costs, we pay for them in different ways — through our distancing when we feel over obligated, tension, or the exhaustion by pretending nothing is wrong. If we are unlucky, we pay later through regret, realizing too late that silence never protected us from the heartbreak of love.
I used to think love alone could keep people close, but I’ve come to see that love without openness, honesty and the risk of vulnerability slowly loses its value. You can still share a life, but the feeling of being known dissolves. What’s left looks like love from the outside, but inside it’s the illusion of love displayed by habit and dependency.
That same pattern — withholding, preferring appearance over truth telling, and the slow removal of affection — becomes even more dangerous in romantic relationships, where the stakes for intimacy are higher.
Love Relationships: When the Currency Shifts
In romantic life, the currency of the heart is depleted the fastest and is the hardest to accumulate. In the beginning of a love relationship, love feels limitless — giving and receiving freely, speaking openly, and offer our best selves without hesitation. But love has its own economics. What begins as emotional abundance can slowly turn into imbalance when communication stops and expectations of outcomes are held tightly.
In the West and what we label a “love” relationship, begins with attraction and chemistry. That first spark carries everything for a while. But eventually, the early energy wears off. What once felt like love spontaneously sparking between two people, now begins to require attention and effort. We have to learn about each other, beyond the illusions of love we created during the infatuation phase. Understanding, patience, and emotional literacy now becomes the currency. We must learn how to love, not just run with the current impulse of feelings. Many couples struggle here, mistaking the decline of excitement for the loss of love itself. In truth, it’s where emotion and chemistry aren’t enough. It’s the stage when love asks us to mature. To discern between our impulses and to replace them with patience, empathy and attention to feed the relationship.
When I was travelling through India, I got educated about arranged relationships. They begin in the opposing direction. The commitment to loving well comes first, and affection must be earned through shared responsibility for trust building over time. The emotional account starts at zero, and the couple must deposit daily acts of care, communication, and respect until trust begins to grow intimacy. In arranged relationships, the erotic charge matures through familiarity and the intimacy of daily life, and through the safety that allows desire to be expressed. In both kinds of relationships, love thrives only when the currency of the heart continues to circulate — when both partners contribute effort towards vulnerability in expression, displays of compassion, and emotional generosity.
But when the willingness to be vulnerable and shared honesty is withheld, when needs go unspoken and unmet, resentment accumulates, and the system begins to fail. One partner may start making withdrawals the other can’t sustain. Trust and safety erode and connection becomes harder to repair.
This emotional bankruptcy doesn’t arrive suddenly; it builds slowly… through small acts of abandonment, avoidance, refusing to see from the other’s perspective, and the distancing that accumulates over time. Some respond by denying anything is wrong, throwing themselves into other interests, or numbing themselves. Others look outside the relationship for new erotic opportunities to feel alive again and to fulfill needs and desires. The betrayal, when it happens, is often less about the depleted passion between two people. It is the lack of attention to the relationship and each other that has accrued over time —a desperate attempt to feel alive again.
What I’ve come to understand is that love is not a renewable resource on its own. It depends on deliberate reciprocity — the continual shared exchange of truth, attention, affection and spoken vulnerability. Whether a relationship is chosen through chemistry or arranged through family, its value isn’t measured by how it begins but by how faithfully intentions maintain the flow and exchange. When love stops being cultivated, the currency of the heart loses its value.
That loss of value extends beyond romance. Whether in family, work, or culture, when honesty stops circulating, relationships lose their vitality and what remains is form without substance.
Reevaluating the Heart
I’ve come to see that the currency of the heart runs on trust across all relationships… in work, in family and in love. Trust is built by honesty, commitment, action, open communication, and consistency over time. When relationships are missing these things, the structure may remain intact, but they are hollowed out from substance and begin to feel empty. Trust eventually collapses, no matter how talented, polite, or affectionate people appear to be. In the end, what we give and what we hold back always reveal themselves.
In professional life, the withholding of communication stops people from working towards a common purpose. In families, the choice to be silent becomes the convenient way to hide. In love, emotional avoidance depletes intimacy until the relationship runs on habit rather than connection. Each environment looks different, but the same principle runs through them all: relationships fail when trust is built and then broken between people.
We live in a time that values productivity over the gift of time we offer to each other, self-image over sincerity, and convenience over depth. It’s easy to forget how quickly emotion loses weight when words and gestures aren’t matched by action. We often use grand language instead of the small consistent actions that actually sustain connection. But the heart keeps its own accounting. We all know when the exchange we are making with each other is authentic and real.
There is an ongoing appraisal in every relationship. An invitation to bring sincerity and honesty back into our interactions when we may have drifted off course. It means speaking our truth even when it risks disrupting the peace. The repairing before resentment accrues. Practicing our listening and communication skills as a generous act of care. The return isn’t about creating comfort, so much as trust — the quiet wealth that allows people to stay open even when life gets difficult.
I have felt the conflicting dualities contributing to social harmony, both the beauty and uneasiness. Thailand has taught me the grace of kreng jai and save-face, and also the cost. The unspoken feelings and the polite distance that sometimes stands in for truth. Yet beneath the formality, we all desire for the same thing: exchanges that are genuine and feel real.
The currency of the heart is not a win or lose proposition, nor is it about seeking to profit. It wants reciprocity. We grow our relationships when we are generous with our attention and presence, we are not graded by performance. Whether in a workplace, a family, or a marriage, the same principle holds. What we give from our heart sustains connection. What’s genuine lasts; what’s performed falls apart.
I no longer see growing our emotional intelligence or the expression of emotional honesty as a luxury. It’s the foundation that sets in motion every trustworthy exchange — the backbone of all true service to humanity, all exchanges of love, and all true belonging. Because in the end, we each know whether we acted out of selfishness or out of true care, truth, and compassion.
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