Think about the last time you did something kind for someone and felt disappointed when they didn’t seem to appreciate it. Perhaps you expected a thank you, some recognition or for them to notice. You may not even have realised you expected anything until it wasn’t there.
This is one way we can see how easily love becomes transactional. I will give you this, but I expect something in return.
We do something similar when deciding whether another person deserves our love. We find it easier to love people who are kind to us, agree with us, appreciate us and behave in ways we approve of. When they don’t, we may withdraw our warmth, approval or affection.
That does not mean the love was never real. It means we have mixed our own needs and expectations with love.
We want to be loved in return. We want to feel appreciated, chosen, understood and valued. These are natural human needs, but when meeting them becomes a condition of our love, the relationship begins to operate like an exchange.
I will love you while you give me what I need from you.
That is very different from saying we should accept poor behaviour or stay in unhealthy relationships. We can decide what behaviour we will accept, set boundaries and even walk away without deciding that another person has stopped deserving love.
How We Learn That Love Can Be Lost
We learn about love very early, and we also learn that it can feel uncertain. People and relationships change, and sometimes people leave. If we believe love comes mainly from other people, it can feel as though something important is always at risk of being lost.
We also learn from everyday experience that love and approval can seem to depend on what we do. We may receive more attention when we achieve, more warmth when we behave in approved ways, and less when we disappoint the people around us.
None of this has to be dramatic. Over time, we can simply come to believe that love can increase, decrease or be withdrawn, depending on how we behave.
Looking for Love Without Realising It
If love is something we get from other people, it makes sense to spend a good deal of our lives looking for it.
We look in the obvious places, through romantic relationships, friendships and family. But we also look by being attractive, successful, helpful, popular or needed. We say yes when we mean no. We worry about what other people think of us. We make sure the right person notices what we have achieved.
Most of the time, we don’t think of any of this as looking for love. We think we are getting on with our lives, pursuing our goals and trying to belong. And often that is exactly what we are doing. But sometimes, underneath it, is a need to be liked, valued, approved of or chosen.
What surprised me, when I began to recognise this in myself, was how much of my life I had spent looking for love outside myself without ever realising it.
When Someone Cannot Meet Our Needs
We naturally enter relationships wanting things from them: companionship, affection, security, shared interests, and someone who wants a similar kind of life. There is nothing wrong with that, and relationship counselling often begins exactly there, by asking each person what they need and whether the couple can meet those needs better. I looked at what we go to our relationships for in the articles on Transformational Relationships. But what happens to our love when they cannot supply what we need?
The difficulty arises when we confuse whether someone meets our needs with their value as a person.
Different Values, Not Wrong Values
I once worked with someone who was very critical of his former wife. As he saw it, he had not earned enough money to provide the lifestyle she wanted, and she had eventually chosen a relationship with someone wealthier. As I listened to him, I saw it differently. He wasn’t particularly interested in money or the things it could buy, while she placed much more importance on them. Neither was necessarily wrong. They wanted different things from life and had different values around money.
We are free to choose the kind of life and relationships we want, and to decide that a relationship no longer works for us. But there is a difference between deciding that a relationship doesn’t work and deciding that the other person is wrong, selfish, inadequate or somehow less worthy. A major proviso: if the relationship is verbally or physically harmful, there is no dilemma; everyone must keep themselves safe.
So it is worth separating two things: what I need from this relationship, and what I believe about you when you don’t give it to me. The first helps us make choices about our lives. The second tells us something about the conditions we have attached to our love.
When Love Becomes a Bargain
There is nothing wrong with needing other people. We need affection, companionship, support and connection. The problem arises when we start relying on a relationship to tell us something about ourselves.
Instead of simply enjoying somebody’s love, I may need it to reassure me that I am lovable. Instead of appreciating their approval, I may need it to tell me I am good enough. Being important to someone can start to feel like proof that I matter.
There is also a difference between loving to help you and needing you to need me. From the outside, they can look exactly the same.
This is where relationships can become transactional without us realising it. I love you, care for you and support you, but somewhere beneath the surface I may also expect something in return: loyalty, appreciation, affection, attention, security or reassurance.
Most of us don’t consciously make that bargain. We notice it when the other person doesn’t give us what we expected, and we feel hurt, disappointed or resentful.
When Fear Gets Mixed with Love
Fear can easily become mixed up with love, particularly when we believe we are protecting someone or doing what is best for them.
A friend worried about her teenage daughter constantly. The girl had to account for where she was, and her mother would phone to check. She undoubtedly loved her daughter, but fear was driving it, and her daughter eventually found the protection oppressive. It also began to make her wonder whether the world really was as unsafe as her mother believed.
I saw something similar with a colleague whose son was very relaxed about revising for his exams. She was so worried about his grades that she began imposing sanctions when he didn’t revise. She intended to help him succeed. What he learned was that her approval was connected to his results.
These are ordinary examples of something most of us do. We love someone, become frightened about what might happen to them, and then try to influence the outcome. The love hasn’t disappeared, but fear has started directing how we express it.
A useful question is this: does my love leave this person freer, or smaller?
The Conditions We Attach to Special Relationships
We naturally have people who are special to us. Our partners, children, family and close friends occupy a place in our lives that others do not. Having special relationships isn’t the problem; the conditions we attach to that specialness can be.
We may expect the people we love to put us first, understand us better or prove that we are equally special to them. Being chosen, needed or particularly important to someone becomes evidence that we are loved and that we matter.
Families are particularly good at creating these expectations. You’re my daughter. You’re my mother. You’re my partner. You should understand. You should know me better than that. The closer the relationship, the more we expect from it.
Our Higher Self has an unlimited capacity to love. As human beings, we have a limited capacity for relationships, and we do not have to stop having special ones. The opportunity is to notice when specialness itself has become one of the conditions of our love.
The Conditions We Put on Loving Ourselves
The conditions we set for loving other people are usually the same as those we set for ourselves.
Most of us have a critical voice that is very good at pointing out what we got wrong and where we don’t quite measure up. Even when things are going well, it tells us we were lucky, that somebody else could have done it better, or that sooner or later we will be found out.
We call some of this self-doubt or imposter syndrome, but underneath it lies the ego thought system I wrote about in the articles on Discerning Your Thoughts. Our worth is still conditional. I’ll be good enough when I achieve this, change that or finally become the person I think I should be.
It is the same question we have been asking of other people throughout this article, only now we are asking it of ourselves: What do you have to do before I can love you?
And there is usually another condition waiting. We achieve one thing, and before long the critical voice moves on to something else.
If we rely on other people, achievements or circumstances to prove that we are good enough, they can just as easily make us feel inadequate. So we keep seeking reassurance, but it never provides lasting peace of mind.
There is something useful in recognising this. It means the reassurance was never going to solve the problem in the first place, and we can stop expecting it to.
The Love Underneath the Conditions
None of this means the love we have felt for other people wasn’t real. The ego didn’t create that love; it added its own needs, fears and expectations to it.
Most of us have also known moments when none of those things seemed to matter, and we loved. We weren’t thinking about what we would get back, whether somebody deserved it, or what their behaviour meant about us.
“A useful question is this: does my love leave this person freer, or smaller?”
Try This: What Did You Expect?
Think of a relationship where you feel disappointed, hurt or resentful about something the other person has or hasn’t done.
Write down what you expected from them, not what they did, but what you were hoping for. Perhaps you wanted more appreciation, affection, loyalty or support. Perhaps you wanted to feel needed, chosen or important to them.
Then ask yourself why it mattered. What did you make their response mean about you, them or the relationship?
There may be something you genuinely need to address. But you may also recognise an expectation you didn’t know you had. You don’t need to do anything with it yet. Just notice what you find.
Perhaps unconditional love isn’t something different that we have to learn how to create. Perhaps it is what is already there when we begin to let go of the conditions we have attached to it and that is where we go next.
Articles in Love
Love: The True Nature of Your Higher Self
- Why Love Feels Like Something You Have to Earn
- What Unconditional Love Looks Like in Everyday Life
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