Reciprocal Love

If you’re healing from divorce, separation, or the collapse of a relationship that left you anxious, confused, or starving for reciprocity, this may be the most important psychological shift you ever make. The problem was never that you were “too loving,” “too loyal,” or “too emotional.” The problem is that you were trained—usually in childhood—to chase connection, to earn affection, and to confuse instability with passion. This article explains why desire becomes a trap, why we fall in love with people who cannot love us back, and why real love feels almost unfamiliar at first. If you’ve ever wondered why you never felt “chosen,” why you tolerated crumbs, or why walking away felt impossible, the answer is here.

Some of us will require the better part of a lifetime to learn a simple lesson that should have been obvious from the start: the only love worthy of the name—the only love we should ever be interested in—is reciprocal love.

A love where another person is just as convinced of us as we are of them.

A love where they are every bit as present in the relationship as we are.

A love where we never need to persuade or beg, where we are not left anxious and agitated by evasions and ambiguities.

A love where we don’t have to wonder where they are or when they will get back to us.

A love where we aren’t awake in the early hours writing long messages explaining what we hope for.

A love where they never stop being fully there for us, as we are for them—and where they are profoundly grateful we are in their lives, just as we are grateful they are in ours.

This isn’t arrogance, entitlement, or neediness. It is a basic law of emotional reciprocity. If it strikes us as strange or excessive, it is only because we haven’t yet learned what we are owed—because we come from deprived emotional places, because somewhere early on we were trained to despise ourselves and accept scraps instead of nourishment.

We may have spent years or even decades mistaking pain for love.

Times when we insisted on imagining that someone loved us back, even though they were simply too shy to say so.

Times when we sat politely with them while they debated whether to be with us or someone else—and we felt their dilemma as if it were ours.

Times when we paid for everything and they repaid us with half-heartedness and forgotten birthdays. We may have endured marriages in which, almost every evening, we had to fight simply to have our basic needs acknowledged: that we needed touch, presence, emotional availability. We may have been in all manner of “complicated” relationships where someone seemed loving for a moment and then not at all in the long run.

But there is no such thing as a legitimately complicated relationship. They either honor us, or they do not. They are either holding the rope with us, firmly, or they do not belong in our lives at all.

There are fundamental rules that should guide us—rules that may have taken decades of inner work to understand because so much went wrong in childhood.

If they are still deciding, we must leave them.

If they take ages to reply to simple messages, we must leave them.

If they flirt elsewhere, we must leave them.

If we have to explain to them why they should want to be with us, we must leave them.

If they are wrestling with psychological issues we sympathize with but which prevent them from being kind or present, we must leave them.

If they are not infinitely proud of us, we must leave them.

And if we have given them several good chances and they still didn’t listen, we must leave them.

And leaving means exactly that: ensuring they are no longer in our lives, not occupying any space in our thoughts or emotional cupboards; removing reminders of them from our consciousness; expelling them like the emotional poison they are. It may complicate things that we are married to them, or have spent years with them, or that the sex is great, or that we find them beautiful or clever. None of this matters. None of this is love.

All of this can escape our notice for one tragic reason: for some of us, our childhoods profoundly damaged our emotional mechanisms. They taught us that to love is to pine, to persuade, to prove ourselves to someone who cannot or will not choose us wholeheartedly. They taught us that we are not truly in love unless we feel ignored, uncomfortable, or judged.

They taught us that the person whose affection matters most is the one who withholds it.

We cannot afford this self-torture and self-abandonment any longer. We must finally come down on our own side. The self-hatred has gone on long enough. Most people will not think we are fabulous—and that is their right. We simply must ensure we never again mistake such people for those we might love. We must grow sane enough to allow ourselves to choose, hold onto, and tolerate a true ally.

This is not entitlement. It is clarity. We deserve to be adored where we adore. Anything less is not romance—it is self-abandonment, a relic of a wound we didn’t deserve then and don’t deserve now.

We will have finally understood love when we know that it is not about one-sided sacrifice, but about two people who feel blessed to have found each other, and who care for one another deeply, consistently, and without hesitation. When this finally seems obvious, we’ll be home.

If this resonates with you—and if you recognize yourself somewhere inside this cycle—your healing has already begun. To go deeper, scroll down and find my blog post “The 7-Year Stitch”, which explains exactly how to break the trauma bond and rebuild the nervous system so you stop craving people who hurt you. You’ll also find several other posts on trauma bonding, emotional addiction, and why heartbreak feels spiritual in its intensity. If you’re ready to heal the wound that keeps choosing your relationships for you, start with those next. Healing is not fast, but it is absolutely possible—and you don’t have to do it alone.

(95% from the brilliant British author Alain de Botton whom you can follow more of his articles on Youtube and the www.theschooloflife.com)