I Spent Years Trying To Earn Love From Someone Incapable Of Giving It
I tried everything. I was the perfect partner—supportive, patient, endlessly accommodating. I anticipated needs before they were spoken. I swallowed my own feelings to avoid conflict. I made myself smaller, quieter, easier. I thought if I could just figure out the right combination, the right gesture, the right version of myself, they would finally love me the way I needed to be loved.
They didn’t. They couldn’t. And it took me years to understand that the problem was never my effort—it was their capacity. I was trying to draw water from an empty well, then blaming myself for being thirsty.
This is the story of how I wasted years of my life performing for someone who couldn’t see me, and what I finally learned about the difference between earning love and deserving it.
The audition that never ended
Looking back, I can see that our entire relationship was an audition I never passed. Every interaction felt like a test. Every good day felt provisional, like I’d temporarily earned their approval but could lose it at any moment.
I was always on. Always monitoring their mood, adjusting my behavior, trying to be whatever they seemed to need in that moment. If they wanted space, I disappeared. If they wanted attention, I was there instantly. I became a mirror, reflecting back whatever would make them happy.
Codependency research describes this pattern clearly: the compulsive need to earn love through caretaking and self-abandonment. I didn’t know the word then. I just knew I was exhausted all the time and couldn’t figure out why my best efforts weren’t working.
The cruelest part was the intermittent reinforcement. Just when I was ready to give up, they’d give me just enough—a moment of tenderness, a glimpse of the connection I craved—to keep me hooked. Then they’d withdraw again, and I’d scramble to figure out what I’d done wrong.
The impossible math of emotional scarcity
Here’s what I couldn’t see at the time: some people don’t have love to give. Not because they’re evil or cruel, but because they’re empty. You can’t withdraw from an account that has no balance.
My partner had their own wounds, their own trauma, their own reasons for being emotionally unavailable. Understanding this now doesn’t excuse their behavior, but it explains something important. They weren’t withholding love to punish me. They simply didn’t have it. I was trying to earn something that didn’t exist.
Attachment theory helped me understand this later. People with avoidant attachment styles often genuinely want connection but find intimacy threatening. They pull away not because you’re not enough, but because closeness itself feels dangerous to them. No amount of your effort can fix their internal wiring.
I wasted years believing that if I loved hard enough, consistently enough, perfectly enough, I could fill their emptiness. I couldn’t. That’s not how emptiness works.
The self-abandonment I thought was love
What I called love was actually self-abandonment. I gave up my preferences, my needs, my voice. I stopped seeing friends they didn’t like. I stopped pursuing interests they found boring. I stopped having opinions that might create conflict.
I thought this was compromise. I thought this was maturity. I thought this was what relationships required. I was wrong.
Healthy love doesn’t ask you to disappear. It doesn’t require you to contort yourself into someone unrecognizable. Healthy relationships involve two whole people who maintain their identities while building something together. What I had was one whole person slowly erasing herself while the other person barely noticed.
The worst part is that the self-abandonment didn’t even work. They didn’t love me more for being less. If anything, they respected me less. I’d given up everything that made me interesting in an attempt to be acceptable, and it made me neither.
The day I finally did the math
The turning point came during a fight about something trivial. I can’t even remember what started it. But in the middle of arguing, I suddenly saw the relationship from above—like watching a movie of my own life.
I saw how much I was giving. I saw how little was coming back. I saw the permanent imbalance, the constant negotiation, the endless effort to secure scraps of affection. And I thought: I’ve been doing this for years. What exactly am I waiting for?
The math didn’t work. It had never worked. I was investing everything and getting almost nothing, and I’d somehow convinced myself this was sustainable. That someday the returns would come. That my patience would be rewarded.
But patience isn’t a strategy when you’re waiting for someone to become a different person. People can change, but not because you want them to. They change when they want to, if they want to. I was gambling my life on someone else’s potential transformation.
I stopped betting that day.
The withdrawal that felt like dying
Leaving wasn’t a clean break. I didn’t have an empowering movie moment where I delivered a speech and walked away. It was messy, slow, and painful. I kept second-guessing myself. Maybe I hadn’t tried hard enough. Maybe I was being selfish. Maybe they’d change if I stayed a little longer.
The withdrawal from the relationship felt physical. I’d structured my entire nervous system around this person—anticipating their moods, regulating their emotions, orbiting their existence. Without them, I didn’t know who I was or how to operate.
Trauma bonding explains why leaving felt so hard even though the relationship was making me miserable. The intermittent reinforcement had created a chemical attachment that had nothing to do with love and everything to do with addiction. My brain had learned to crave the relief that came after anxiety, and the relationship provided both in endless cycles.
Recovery meant sitting with the discomfort instead of running back to soothe it. It meant feeling terrible and choosing not to act on the feeling. It meant trusting that the pain was temporary even when it felt permanent.
What I learned about my own patterns
The hardest part of this whole experience wasn’t accepting that they couldn’t love me. It was asking why I’d chosen them in the first place.
Because here’s the uncomfortable truth: I was drawn to emotional unavailability. It felt familiar. Growing up, love was something I had to earn—through achievement, through good behavior, through being useful. The idea that someone would just love me, unconditionally, without me having to work for it? That felt foreign. Suspicious. Wrong.
So I chose partners who confirmed my belief that love required effort. Every emotionally unavailable person felt like home because the dynamic was one I understood. The exhausting work of trying to earn love was what I thought relationships were.
Understanding your attachment patterns doesn’t magically fix them, but it helps. Recognizing that I was drawn to unavailable people because of my own wounds, not because unavailable people are somehow superior, was the first step toward choosing differently.
The difference between earning and deserving
Here’s what I wish someone had told me earlier: you cannot earn love. That’s not how love works.
Earning implies that love is payment for services rendered. That if you perform well enough, you’ll be compensated with affection. This framing turns relationships into transactions and people into vending machines—put in the right amount of effort, get love out.
But real love isn’t earned. It’s recognized. Someone sees you—actually sees you, the real you, not a performance—and loves what they see. You don’t have to be perfect or endlessly accommodating. You just have to be yourself, and the right person will respond to that.
This distinction changed everything for me. I stopped trying to be lovable and started trying to be visible. I stopped performing and started showing up as myself, with all my flaws and preferences and inconvenient opinions. Some people didn’t like it. The right people did.
What love actually feels like
I’m in a different relationship now. It’s so different that I sometimes struggle to trust it.
This person loves me without me having to work for it. They’re not going to leave if I have a bad day or express a need or disagree with them. Their love isn’t conditional on my performance. It’s just there, steady, like gravity.
At first, this felt boring. My nervous system was so used to chaos and uncertainty that stability seemed bland. I had to retrain myself to recognize that peace isn’t the same as boredom, and that a relationship without constant anxiety isn’t a relationship without passion.
Secure attachment feels different than anxious attachment. Quieter. Less exciting in the cortisol-spike sense. But also deeper, more sustainable, more real. I’m not performing anymore. I’m just here, being loved for who I am, which turns out to be enough.
I’ll never get those years back. The time I spent trying to earn love from someone incapable of giving it is time I can’t recover. But I can use what I learned.
Now I know that exhaustion isn’t love. That constant effort without reciprocation isn’t commitment—it’s self-destruction. That staying doesn’t make you loyal; sometimes it just makes you stuck.
If you’re reading this and it sounds familiar, I want you to know: it’s not your fault that they can’t love you. It’s not a reflection of your worth. It’s a reflection of their capacity, and no amount of your effort will change it.
You deserve love that doesn’t require you to disappear. It exists, I promise. But you’ll never find it while you’re still auditioning for someone who was never going to cast you.