i don't know how to be loved without earning it

the transactional nature of love

tell me i’m useful.

i don’t know how to be loved unless i’m useful. unless i’ve done something that really truly makes me worthy of someone’s love. unless i’ve made their life easier, carried something heavy for them on my shoulders, fixed something in them that they deemed broken. love, to me, has always felt transactional.

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author’s note: a second part to this post is now published. you can read it here:

learning to trust love when you have it

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i learnt this from a young age. love always seemed to come after the praise, the good grades, after being quiet after i was told to be “seen and not heard”, after putting every single fucking person before myself. it came in the form of “i’m so proud of you” when i accomplished something, not in the form of “i love you” just because i existed. it was something that took time to earn, but could easily be snatched away from me the second i stepped out of line.

growing up, guys would claim to ‘love’ you if you submitted yourself to them, did what they said, said what they wanted, sent what they needed. love felt like a drug i had to pay for using myself as currency. with friends, they tell you they love you once you’ve helped them solve some sort of problem, or listened to them endlessly drone on about all their life problems. love has always been transactional for me in any type of relationship.

so i’ve learned to perform. to be perfect. to anticipate people’s needs before they even said them. i’ve always been seen as a person who has all the answers- the therapist friend. i have taught myself to always know what to say and how to say it. i always know how to fix things, and when i can’t fix things- when someone is upset and i truly do not know how to make it better- i feel like i’ve failed. i am now unworthy.

as a child, love was a reward, a privilege, a thing i had to work for. if i got good grades it was a good day, my father would be an actual loving father. but the second i slipped up, that love was snatched away from me. i spent years chasing love, thinking that if i could finally be enough, be perfect enough, i would finally get the love i craved. the love i admire in movies and fawn over in books. i always wondered why the prince’s in disney movies loved the princesses so much.

i have spent my whole life being useful. but i do not know how to be loved.

i don’t know how to bathe in someone’s affection without feeling like i owe them something in return. i do not know how to accept kindness without scrambling to try and find some way to repay it. when someone does something nice for me, my first instinct isn’t gratitude- it’s discomfort. a voice in my head whispering: you don’t deserve this. you have done absolutely nothing to earn it.

my first ex didn’t tell me he loved me until i unwillingly performed sexually for him. but to me, even though the situation was shitty and i felt disgusted with myself after, in a weird way, i earned the love. or, twisted, fucked up version of love. he left after i chose self respect over feeling ‘loved’. but that’s the problem with conditional love. no matter how hard you try, the goalpost always moves. the love you earn is never enough to sustain you, and the second you stop performing, it vanishes. like it never even existed in the first place.

so i kept performing. i became the person people can rely on. the one who drops everything to help. the one who answers the late night phone calls and listen for hours, spilling out advice life my own life wasn’t falling apart. and in return, i felt worthy. i felt needed. and for a very long time, i mistook being needed for being loved.

but now i see the difference. kind of. being needed is a job. being loved is something else entirely.

i know people say that love should be unconditional, but i have never truly believed it applies to me. deep down, there is a part of me that is terrified—because if i stop being useful, will i still be wanted?

i want to believe that i deserve love even on the days i’m not useful. even when i’m tired, messy, unproductive and quiet. even when i’m just a person standing in stillness, with nothing but my own existence. i don’t mean to be the way i am, i just don’t know how to let myself be held. because what if i become a burden? what if they stop seeing me as the strong one? what if, when i finally let someone take care of me, they decide i’m too much?

but right now, i do not know how.

as a child, i used to pick dandelions from my school field and blow on them, watching the seeds scatter into the wind. i thought if i made a wish as i did it, the wind would carry it away to a genie who would make it come true. i wished for love. for warmth. for someone to take care of me the way i took- and still take, care of everyone else.

i know now that wishes don’t always come true the way we expect them to. but sometimes, i still find myself closing my eyes and blowing on dandelions. hoping that maybe, one day, i’ll finally understand that i don’t have to earn love like a prize. that i don’t have to be needed to be wanted.

that i am deserving of love simply because i exist.