Love Is Not a Reward for Good Behavior

I have learned something painfully obvious about love:

You cannot fucking con someone into loving you.

I do not mean “con” in the cold, calculated sense. I was not sitting somewhere developing a master plan to deceive anyone. Most of the time, I believed I was being caring, loyal, generous, and patient.

But underneath that care was often an unspoken bargain.

If I remained loyal enough, perhaps she would choose me.

If I helped enough, perhaps she would need me.

If I understood her pain better than everyone else did, perhaps she would finally recognize that I was the person who belonged beside her.

I confused being valuable to someone with being wanted by them. I treated love as though it might eventually become the reward for good behavior.

It does not work that way.

Care Can Become Currency

I have written before about my tendency to become a rescuer. When I care about someone who is struggling, I immediately begin seeing possibilities. I want to solve problems, provide safety, and help create a better future.

That instinct is not entirely bad. I do care deeply about people.

But good intentions do not guarantee good results.

My care has sometimes carried expectations that I did not fully acknowledge—even to myself. I could tell myself that I was giving freely while quietly hoping my generosity would change how someone felt about me.

Care became currency.

Service became courtship.

Friendship became an extended audition for a position the other person had already told me was unavailable.

When someone said she was not interested, I could accept the words intellectually while emotionally treating them as an early report rather than a final answer. There was always the possibility that circumstances might change. There was always some future version of me who finally got everything right and became impossible not to love.

That possibility gave me permission to keep hoping, helping, waiting, and pursuing.

I understand now that “maybe someday” can become a loophole that prevents us from respecting what someone is saying today.

A person’s feelings can change. But that possibility is not mine to cultivate, negotiate, or engineer. If her feelings ever change, it is her responsibility to communicate that freely and clearly.

My responsibility is to believe the answer she has already given me.

Waiting Is Not Always Romantic

We tell beautiful stories about waiting for love. Persistence is often treated as proof that the feeling is real. The person who refuses to give up is rewarded because the other person finally recognizes what was there all along.

That makes a wonderful movie.

It can make a terrible relationship.

Waiting can look passive while remaining a form of pursuit. I can stop openly asking and still arrange my life around the possibility that someone will eventually choose me. I can remain available, monitor her life, interpret every moment of warmth as evidence, and call that patience.

But sometimes waiting is only pursuit that has learned how to sit quietly.

That does not mean every lingering feeling is manipulative. We cannot command ourselves to stop loving or missing someone. Some relationships leave real holes in our lives. The absence hurts because the connection mattered.

But a hole is evidence of attachment. It is not an instruction to pursue.

I can love someone without positioning myself near her. I can miss her without making that longing her responsibility. I can value what she taught me without requiring her to continue teaching me.

Sometimes letting go is the most compassionate thing I can do.

Fast in Fantasy, Slow in Trust

There is another contradiction I have had to recognize.

I can become emotionally intense very quickly, but I take a long time to develop actual trust.

I can imagine an entire future with someone before I know how we would manage an ordinary disagreement. I can disclose deeply personal information while still protecting the parts of myself that would allow another person to truly affect me.

I try to be open and honest. In many ways, I am.

But I also lie to myself.

I can describe my history truthfully while misunderstanding what I am doing in the present. I can offer someone the facts of my life while still controlling the meaning of those facts. I can reveal enormous amounts about myself without surrendering the story I want those revelations to tell.

Disclosure is not always vulnerability.

Sometimes unavailable people have felt safer to me precisely because the relationship could remain largely imaginary. I could feel everything without having to live inside an ordinary, reciprocal partnership.

If she never chose me, I could remain the good man whose value she failed to recognize.

If she chose me, I would have to risk being known.

I would have to let her see the contradictions, the neediness, the fear, the sexuality, the body shame, the bipolar disorder, and the parts of my personality that cannot be organized into a moving essay.

I would also have to accept that being fully known does not guarantee being permanently loved.

That is much more frightening than longing for someone unavailable.

The People Who Might Actually Like Me

I also have an aversion to people who directly express interest in me—or who I suspect might be interested.

That sounds ridiculous when placed beside all the energy I have spent wanting to be chosen. But wanting love and being prepared to receive it are not the same thing.

When someone is unavailable, I can pursue.

When someone is available, I have to respond.

Mutual interest removes the fantasy’s protective glass. Suddenly there are choices, expectations, bodies, needs, negotiations, and the possibility of succeeding at the very thing I claim to want.

My fear of failure is real. My fear of success may be even stronger.

That does not mean I should date anyone who expresses interest. Nobody owes me attraction, and I do not owe attraction to anyone else. The change is learning to pause before automatically retreating.

Am I genuinely uninterested?

Or am I uncomfortable because she sees me?

Am I identifying an actual incompatibility?

Or am I finding a reason to reject her before she has the opportunity to reject the person she discovers beneath my presentation?

Sometimes calm mutual interest may feel less powerful because it lacks the anxiety I have learned to associate with love. Obsession is intense. Safety may initially feel almost boring by comparison.

I need to stop confusing emotional activation with proof of connection.

The Invisible Committee

I also evaluate potential partners through other people’s eyes.

Would my parents approve?

Would my friends understand?

Would this person fit comfortably into the life everyone expects me to have?

Some of that is normal. The people around us can see dangers that attraction makes us miss. Compatibility matters, and relationships do not exist entirely outside a community.

But compatibility asks, “Can we build something healthy together?”

Social acceptability asks, “Will everyone else validate my choice?”

Those are not the same question.

If I choose through an invisible committee, I may reject someone who fits me because she does not fit the story other people have about me. I may also become more interested in someone whose approval value makes her feel like evidence that I have finally succeeded.

I need to know the difference between wanting a person and wanting what being chosen by that person would prove.

Bisexuality and the Future I Imagine

There is another part of this that I rarely discuss openly: I am bisexual.

That statement is true, but it does not make every aspect of my attraction simple or symmetrical.

My capacity for attraction is broader than the future I most naturally imagine. I tend to fall for women more quickly, and I can more readily imagine building a shared life with a woman. That is not simply about anatomy. It is also about the presence, emotional energy, and forms of connection I have generally experienced with women.

A relationship with a man can feel beyond my capacity in ways I do not completely understand.

Sometimes I wonder what comes from bisexuality, what comes from trauma, what comes from loneliness, and what comes from fear. My sexual and romantic patterns do not always align neatly. Low-stakes connection has sometimes felt safer than meaningful intimacy because it offers an exit. Then the escape ends, and shame arrives afterward.

But I do not have to invalidate my bisexuality because my attractions are uneven. Attraction, sexual behavior, romantic attachment, and the kind of future I imagine do not have to be divided equally among genders.

I also do not have to completely solve where every desire originates before I can make more honest choices.

The important question is not whether I can construct a perfect explanation for myself.

It is whether my behavior aligns with my values and respects everyone involved.

Nobody Can Fill the Hole

I have sometimes imagined myself as open to anyone who could fill the hole in my heart.

There is beauty in that openness. It means I can recognize connection in unexpected places and do not need every meaningful relationship to arrive in a predetermined package.

It is also dangerous.

When I assign someone the job of filling the hole, I may become attached to the relief she represents before I understand who she is. Her incompatibilities can become obstacles to overcome. Her boundaries can feel like temporary misunderstandings. Her disinterest can become a problem for my persistence to solve.

No person should be recruited as the cure for my emptiness.

A relationship can bring companionship, pleasure, challenge, safety, and extraordinary meaning. But another person cannot be responsible for completing the unfinished construction inside me.

She is not a missing piece.

She is an entire person.

What Accountability Looks Like Now

It would be easy to turn all of this into another performance.

I could condemn my former self so thoroughly that everyone would understand how sorry I am. I could call myself terrible before anyone else has the opportunity. I could make self-punishment look like accountability.

But shame can remain intensely self-centered.

It keeps the focus on whether I am a good or bad person instead of what another person experienced and what I will do differently now.

My intentions tell me who I hoped to be.

My impact tells me what I need to work on.

Accountability is what I do with the difference.

For me, changed behavior means believing someone when she says she is not interested.

It means not using friendship as a long-term audition for romance.

It means not turning help, gifts, emotional availability, or sacrifice into an unspoken contract.

It means allowing another person’s life to develop without treating myself as a missing character in it.

It means recognizing that genuine care does not give me authorship over someone else’s choices.

It also means becoming willing to remain present when somebody does choose me—moving slowly and honestly instead of retreating simply because mutuality makes me vulnerable.

Learning to Hear the Answer

I am not dating right now.

That is not a punishment, and it is not a dramatic vow that I will never love again. I need time to understand these patterns without using another person as the laboratory in which I test whether I have changed.

I do not expect to become perfectly healed before entering another relationship. Nobody reaches that condition.

But I want to become more capable of distinguishing love from obsession, generosity from bargaining, attraction from activation, and compatibility from approval.

I want to be able to say:

I am interested in you, but I move slowly.

I need consistency before I trust.

I will not promise more than I can give.

I will not ask you to heal what happened before you arrived.

And if you tell me no, I will hear you.

The opposite of obsession is not indifference.

It is allowing another person to remain free.

If I eventually return to dating, I do not want to arrive with a better strategy for being chosen. I want to arrive more capable of choosing honestly, receiving love without fleeing from it, and accepting another person’s answer without trying to change it.

Love is not payment for being good.

It is not something I can earn through suffering.

It is not the prize awarded to whoever waits the longest.

And it is not proof that I have finally become worthy.

Love must be freely given, freely received, and free to say no.