He Never Asked Me to Earn His Love

I grew up believing love was something you worked for.

Not something you received freely.

Love, to me, was a reward. It came after you behaved, after you achieved, after you proved you were worth the effort. It was something adults gave in measured doses, like sugar—only when you were good, only when you didn’t ask for too much.

So I learned early:

Don’t be difficult.

Don’t be needy.

Don’t take up space.

I became excellent at earning.

I earned praise with silence.

I earned attention with accomplishments.

I earned affection by being useful.

And somewhere along the way, I started believing that was what love was supposed to feel like—a constant audition.

Even in relationships, I carried that mindset like a second skin.

I thought love meant always performing at your best.

If I was happy, I had to be easy.

If I was sad, I had to be quick about it.

If I was struggling, I had to hide it until it looked manageable.

Because what if they saw the messy parts?

What if they decided I wasn’t worth it anymore?

Then I met him.

And the strange thing was… he never asked me to earn his love.

The first time I made a mistake around him, I braced myself. I waited for disappointment to harden his voice, for distance to creep into his body language.

Instead, he just said, “It’s okay. You’re human.”

I didn’t know what to do with that.

I was so used to love being conditional that unconditional kindness felt suspicious.

I kept waiting for the moment the rules would appear.

But they didn’t.

When I cried, he didn’t ask me to justify it.

When I was quiet, he didn’t demand explanations.

When I was overwhelmed, he didn’t call me dramatic.

He didn’t love me like I was a project.

He loved me like I was a person.

And that kind of love is terrifying at first.

Because when you’ve spent your whole life earning affection, being given it freely feels like standing on unfamiliar ground. You keep expecting it to collapse.

I tested it without meaning to.

I apologized too much.

I tried to fix myself too quickly.

I offered pieces of myself like payment.

And every time, he gently refused.

“You don’t have to do that,” he’d say.

Do what?

Earn.

Prove.

Perform.

One night, I told him something I had never admitted out loud.

“I’m scared that one day you’ll realize I’m not enough.”

He looked at me like the answer was obvious.

“You’ve always been enough. You just weren’t loved that way before.”

That sentence hit me harder than any romantic confession ever could.

Because it wasn’t poetic.

It was true.

Real love doesn’t keep score.

Real love doesn’t hold affection hostage.

Real love doesn’t say, “Be better, then you can be loved.”

It says, “You are loved. Now you can breathe.”

For the first time, I stopped trying to deserve someone.

I started learning how to simply be.

And in that space, I realized something healing:

The right person will never make you feel like love is a prize you must win.

They will never ask you to earn what should have been freely given.

They will meet you—exactly where you are—

And remind you that you were worthy long before you proved anything at all.