Love is not something to earn by doing “the work.” Love is a birthright.

Maybe you don’t need to work harder. Maybe you don’t need to hire another relationship coach or buy another book about being “the one.” Maybe, just maybe, we can relax into ourselves.

I’m going to let you in on a little secret – one that feels pretty big to me: I’m thirty years old and I’ve never had a serious relationship.

I’ve had situationships and shitty sex with strangers and not-so-casual sex with men I would’ve given the moon to, men who wanted everything from me but me. I’ve had dozens of first and second and third dates: some good, some decent, some horribly traumatizing. I’ve dated people I met in real life: the manager of a Hollywood restaurant and the man at the Palm Springs pool and my Lyft driver who asked me out after picking me up from a night out in Santa Monica. I even “dated” my Airbnb host who messaged me because he thought I was the attractive redhead in my profile photo. I’ve dated on the apps, too. Raya and Bumble and Hinge have seen me on and off over the last decade, despite how much I hate them. Hate is a strong word, but it’s my truth. Commodifying people (guised as love) for profit has changed dating entirely, but that’s a story for a different day.

I’ve been set up on dates through friends and once participated in speed dating at a fiction event called Booking For Love. I’ve volunteered and worked to expand my social circle to meet new people IRL. I’ve tried what feels like it all. And still, I'm thirty years old and have never had an official relationship. And still, despite a decade of therapy and working as a therapist myself, I spend more time than I'd like trying to figure out why.

To the primitive part of my brain, the one trying to keep me safe and alive, love is a code to be cracked. I must ruminate endlessly about what I am doing wrong so that I can discover and fix it. Then, I will find love. I’ll assimilate and pro-create and thrive in the resources that love offers.

But it’s not just my brain doing this. It’s Tik Tok and dating coaches and well-meaning people in relationships who reverse engineer their journey to partnership, forgetting what it was like to be single and contorting their newfound relationship into something that was earned. They “did the work,” as many of them say, over-using an elusive catchphrase that keeps many people fixated on what they’re doing or not doing to receive partnership.

The messaging is pervasive and relentless:

• doing the work = finding love

• love = the reward for doing the work

What is “the work” anyways? It means different things to different people: healing childhood trauma and attachment wounds, being “open” to love, loving yourself, being okay on your own, “manifesting” your dream life, going to therapy, changing your attachment style, going on more dates, trying harder. It’s an exhaustive and endless list, and one that many people have moved forward and backwards through to find themselves without a partner, still longing for love (hi, it’s me).

The truth is that I’ve been in therapy for a decade working through attachment trauma, neglect, abuse from childhood, and the unhealthy relationship dynamics that emerged as a result of these early wounds. I’ve learned how to set boundaries and say no and run from red flags instead of toward them. I’ve stopped dating people’s potential and instead open my eyes to what they’re offering now, walking away when it does not align with what I know I deserve.

I’ve taken a six-ish year break from sex to heal what sexual assault and predatory men ravished. I’ve built a rich, meaningful life for myself, full of non-romantic love and a career that makes me excited to wake up in the morning. I’ve worked and still, I’m single. So what now? There’s more work to be done, says the manifestation coach or Instagram influencer or friend who hasn’t been single in years, and the rat race continues.

Except I no longer want to run this race. I’m tired of the hamster wheel, of the seemingly endless work I need to do before love finds me, of wondering what is wrong with me that needs fixing so that love will [find me].

I spent my childhood trying to figure out what was wrong with me, trying to not be bad so that my parents and peers could love me. I needed to be thinner, better at soccer, healthier, cooler, with more friends.

Now, when desiring romantic love, it is ironic that I've become so fixated on what I've spent the last ten years of therapy trying to unlearn: you are not enough as you are, you must change yourself to be loved, you must work harder to earn love.

The premise that you must do “the work” to be loved is faulty and deeply flawed. Firstly, there are plenty of people who have done the work and have not yet found their person. On the other side of that coin, there are very unhealed people in romantic relationships. It takes one look at the high divorce rate in the United States to know this.

Secondly, it confuses correlation with causation. I’m a therapist. Of course I believe in working on oneself. Healing in its many forms can help a person’s journey to and in partnership. Sometimes, this work does coincide with meeting someone. However, it does not mean that it will cause you to meet someone. There is luck in love. Timing is real. You can be doing all of the work on yourself possible and still be beholden to reality: the uncertainty of your timeline and the very real lack of control we often have when finding love.

There’s a reason that the butterfly effect, the idea that one small change in a person’s life can influence many facets of their life and thus change the course of their life entirely, has blown up on Tik Tok. It’s because of luck and chance, not cause and effect (as many who are frustrated by the term’s misuse point out).

An example of the butterfly effect in my own life: if I didn’t send an email to a Los Angeles PR firm inquiring about an internship, I never would have met my colleague Annie who later introduced me to her brother’s therapist so that he could help me find a therapist. I never would have been introduced to my therapist, the one I've seen for 10 years, who has changed my life in indescribable ways and led me to pursue a career as a therapist because of the work we’ve done together. Sending an email to a publicity firm created a series of changes throughout the years that eventually brought me to a career as a therapist.

There is luck and chance involved in love and life. Love can coincide with people working on themselves, but the work is not a definitive cause. In reality, your friend who waxes poetic about “doing the work” happened to be set up with someone through a friend after countless horrible dates and a resigned accepting that they would end up alone forever. Sure, “the work” might have helped your friend stay in the relationship, but the way in which they met the person involved luck and chance, too.

Love is an infinite resource and love can happen in a million and one ways. There is no recipe or set formula that will lead you to it.

Most importantly, there is nothing you have to do to earn love. “The work” is not a condition to be met in order to be loved. If you haven’t received romantic partnership yet, it’s not because you aren't deserving of it. It’s not because you haven’t worked hard enough.

Love is your birthright. Love is not a reward for doing work on yourself. Love is something you always are, and always have been, entitled to.

So maybe you don’t need to work harder. Maybe you don’t need to hire another relationship coach or buy another book about being “the one.” Maybe you don’t need to see that energy healer who will tell you “exactly” what is blocking your ability to be loved. Maybe you don’t need to listen to more podcast episodes about anxious attachment and scroll through Tik Tok for the 100th hour this month trying to figure out if you or the person you are interested in is a red flag.

Maybe, if you’re anything like me, you could benefit from doing less. You could benefit from recognizing that you are whole as you are…that there is nothing about you that disqualifies you from love. Maybe, just maybe, we can relax into ourselves. Our whole, messy, complicated, beautiful selves who have always been entitled to what we want most: love.

Topic inspired by

Emilie Mendham

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