Love Can’t Be Earned

For a long time, I think many of us confuse being loved with being approved of. Approval usually has conditions. Behave properly. Be useful. Become successful. Don’t be too difficult. Don’t ask for too much. Make life easier for everyone around you and perhaps, at some point, you will finally deserve warmth in return.

It’s not surprising that we carry the same logic into adult relationships. We start believing that love will arrive after the next improvement. Once we become more attractive, more successful, calmer, richer, thinner, stronger or simply more convenient, someone will finally look at us and decide that we are worth loving.

The problem is that love doesn’t work like that.

You can earn trust. You can earn respect. You can earn forgiveness, although even that is never guaranteed. You can prove that you are reliable, admit that you were wrong and change the way you behave. All of this matters enormously in a relationship. But love itself is not a salary, a medal or a prize handed to the person who performed best.

That doesn’t mean love is enough on its own, or that relationships require no work. Of course they do. Love doesn’t make cruelty acceptable, repair broken promises automatically or remove responsibility for how we treat each other. The work can protect a connection, deepen it or sometimes save it. It just cannot manufacture love where there is none.

The idea for this illustration came from the old image of someone running after a reward hanging from a stick. In my version, the runner is chasing a heart. He is working as hard as he can, but the heart remains at exactly the same distance because the whole construction is tied to his own body. He could run across the entire world and never get any closer.

That is what trying to earn love often feels like. Every time you reach the condition that was supposed to make you worthy, another one appears. Become more successful. Now become less complicated. Be independent, but not distant. Be vulnerable, but not inconvenient. Be yourself, but preferably the version of yourself that creates the least trouble.

Eventually, the running itself becomes normal. You stop asking whether the person in front of you is capable of loving you and start asking what else you need to fix. Your body becomes a project. Your personality is edited. Your needs are hidden because they might make you harder to keep.

Perhaps you do receive approval in the end. The uncomfortable question is whether the person being approved of is still entirely you.

I think this is one of the reasons love is impossible without inner freedom. To love another person, you have to meet them as they are, rather than as material for a future, improved version. To be loved, you have to remain visible. That is frightening because it removes the illusion of control. If love could be earned, there would at least be a reliable procedure: complete the required tasks and receive the promised result.

But there is no such procedure.

A relationship can end. Feelings can change. People can stop choosing each other. None of that proves that someone failed an exam or wasn’t valuable enough. Sometimes a connection simply cannot continue, and no amount of running can force it to become something it isn’t.

There is also something liberating in this. If love cannot be earned, you don’t have to become perfect before you are allowed to receive it. You don’t have to win it by making yourself smaller, quieter or easier to own.

Maybe mature love begins when two people stop running long enough to actually see each other. Neither is a prize, and neither is trying to qualify. They remain two separate, internally free people who choose to stay connected.

Love can’t be earned.

It can only be given, received and lived.

The absurd part of the drawing is that the heart was never really escaping from the runner. He was carrying it with him the whole time.