Share on bsky
Here’s the deal about this whole “love harder” myth:
If love and empathy worked, your relationship would have changed by now.
I know that sounds curt, but sometimes we need to examine whether what we’re doing is actually working. And we need to consider if what echoes in our culture, and certainly in a lot of spiritual communities, is actually good advice.
This vibe of “love and light,” the intense looming pressure we put on ourselves of “if I just say the right words,” or hoping that our empathic heart will be recognized when we lament things like: “He has a hurt inner child, and if I simply get him to connect with that, I am sure he will shift,” doesn’t work.
Even though we don’t want to admit it, these types of beliefs are buried inside us all.
It kind of shook me when I got still and could hear my inner workings, and boom, there it was. I didn’t even remember actually selecting this belief at any time in my life. It kind of just floated around, finally landing somewhere deep and dark inside me.
Darling, I know about your outstanding effort. I know your giving nature. I know your heart is as big as Texas.
But sometimes we need to be reminded when to stop.
Stopping doesn’t mean we lose our hope and belief in love. It means love as a strategy, the monolithic myth that giving love will get us love, doesn’t work on everybody.
So please, for the love of god, let’s call it.
No more “I will love him to goodness.” No more “My love will save him.”
I know it will break your heart. It will mess with your sense of hope and goodness, with your romantic soul, but you will make it through. And then it will eat through your ego. And it should.
If you reverse engineer it while staying courageously honest, you may come to see that you being so utterly compassionate is actually you feeding your sense of entitlement too.
There is something seductive about being the one who loves hardest. The one who stays. The one who sees his potential when no one else does. There is an identity in that—the woman who doesn’t give up, who loves without condition, who has enough heart for both of them.
And if you get really still and honest, you might find something uncomfortable underneath it. An inkling of belief that your love is powerful enough to change another person. That if you just do it right, give enough, soften enough, understand enough—you can be the exception. (Anyone ever watch “He Just Not That Into You?”)
You wanted to be the one who fixed him. The one who finally got through. And that wanting—however loving it felt—is its own kind of entitlement.
Ultimately, you believe your goodness should produce a particular outcome. It won’t.
And sitting with that is some of the most ego-dissolving work there is.
But let me be clear: the ego doesn’t disappear overnight. And it shouldn’t. That identity—the one who loves hardest, the one who stays, the one who sees what nobody else sees in him—was built over time. It got reinforced every time you tried again. Every time you dug deeper. Every time you chose to believe in him over your own exhaustion.
So when you start to loosen your grip, it fights back. It will tell you that letting go means you failed. That walking away means you didn’t love enough. That a better, more evolved version of you would have cracked the code by now.
That is not wisdom. That is the identity protecting itself.
Because here is what that ego identity is actually built on: the belief that your worth is proven through your ability to transform someone else. That love is something you earn by being useful enough, selfless enough, skilled enough at managing another person’s inner world.
And that belief, right there, is the thing worth dissolving. Not your empathy. Not your hope. Not your capacity for love.
Just the part that decided your value depended on him changing and the relationship blooming.
I recently was pointed toward a powerful book: Why Does He Do That by Lundy Bancroft.
He challenges this narrative that underneath controlling, dominating, or difficult men there is pain. And their need to diminish, monitor, or manage you is a symptom of this deep hurt inside.
While I do believe there is some truth to that, based on decades of therapeutic research and counseling, Lundy found that this type of behavior isn’t because of emotional wounds. It’s actually a deep belief system that revolves around having power over someone else’s decisions, information, autonomy, and plans.
Now here is where it gets a bit nuanced, so stay with me.
A belief system is a worldview. It was handed to him. It lives in the mind as a form of reality. It might not have been examined or self-selected but it pays off to believe this way. He doesn’t directly analyze his behavior to see it as entitled to you. It’s a bit camouflaged, yet rewarding. Not many people challenge it. The world says it is the correct way to operate in life, so it sticks with him.
It is “just how things are.”
Now an emotional wound is different. It lives in the body and nervous system. It produces fear, disruption, dysregulation—the kind of reactions that feel uncontrollable and constant. It is something that happened to him, which shows consistently across all of his situations.
If he is genuinely wounded, he is in pain. You would see it in private moments, in vulnerability, in times when the armor drops.
If it’s primarily a belief system, he is largely fine. Comfortable, even. The friction only appears when his entitlement is challenged.
One responds to empathy because empathy meets pain. The other doesn’t because there’s no pain in him to meet—the pain is all on your side of the equation.
They can coexist, and often do. But Bancroft’s point is that the belief system is the operating system. The wound, if there is one, is not what’s driving the behavior. And treating the wound while the belief system runs untouched changes nothing.
And what I’ve learned from all this is that empathy can’t dismantle entitlement.
Yes, empathy is magic. Real, actual magic. It is one of the most powerful things a human being can offer— step inside someone else’s reality and feel it alongside them. In relationships where both people are showing up, where there is genuine care and goodwill running in both directions, empathy can crack things open in the most beautiful way. I’ve witnessed that. I’ve lived that. It works…in those situations.
When someone is scared, your empathy can reach them. When someone is grieving, it softens that hurt. When someone is lashing out because they feel invisible, meeting them there can actually interrupt the whole cycle.
But here is where it falls apart.
When someone is operating from a belief that they are simply entitled to your compliance, your information, your deference—-your empathy does not interrupt anything. It confirms everything.
Because when you soften your tone, over-explain your decisions, preemptively manage his feelings about your choices, from his perspective, you are doing exactly what you should be doing. (Cringe.)
You are orienting around him. You are making his comfort the center of your behavior.
You think you are building a bridge.
He experiences it as you knowing your place. (Again, I hope you are cringing alongside me here.)
And this is not a communication problem. It’s not a love problem.
It is a symptom of the patriarchy, clear and simple.
Here’s the diagnostic, and clarifying, question Bancroft offers:
Does the behavior happen everywhere, or only with you?
A person acting from genuine emotional dysregulation—a wound, a fear response, a nervous system that learned chaos—tends to struggle across contexts. Their boss, their friends, strangers in traffic. The pain doesn’t have a target.
But controlling behavior is often selective. He can modulate it in professional settings. He can turn it off when it costs him something socially. The behavior is calibrated, even if unconsciously.
That selectivity tells you something important: this is not an emotion that overwhelms him. It is a posture he maintains—toward you specifically—because he believes he is entitled to it.
And we’ve all been taught that using empathy, love, compassion, and better communication are what solves this.
Nope.
I am going to give it to you straight: there are some people that you can’t love into being better.
And before you ask—because I know you will—yes, change is possible. Bancroft doesn’t close that door entirely. But he is very specific about what actually moves the needle, and I need you to hear this clearly.
It is not your empathy. It is not your patience. It is not you finally saying it the right way.
The only thing with any evidence behind it is sustained external accountability—social consequences, legal consequences, something that actually costs him something. Not your tears. Not your ultimatums. Not another conversation where you explain how his behavior makes you feel.
And even then, Bancroft says genuine change requires years of consistent effort on his part, without the pressure letting up, driven by his own internal reckoning—not by managing your reaction to him.
So if you are sitting there thinking “but what if I just…” I want you to lovingly but firmly redirect that energy.
Because this is another set up women have been handed in this culture.
Why did so many of us—smart, self-aware, doing-the-work women—buy into the idea that our love and empathy were the answer to his behavior?
Because we were taught that relationships are our domain. That emotional labor is our currency. That if something is broken between two people, the one who needs to fix it is the one with the most empathy. And honey, that was always going to be us.
Nobody sat us down and said that explicitly. It just lived everywhere. In how we were praised for being nurturing and patient. In how spiritual communities handed us unconditional love as the path to fulfilling relationships. In how every self-help book aimed at women starts with you—your patterns, your wounds, your communication style—as if his behavior is simply a workaround you need to do in heels.
We were never told to look at the system producing him.
We were told to look at ourselves.
And that is not an accident. That is an old story about who is responsible for the emotional health of everyone in the room.
You absorbed it because it was everywhere. Because it felt like wisdom. Because sometimes, with the right person, it actually worked—and that was just enough to keep you believing it would work here too.
None of this means you become cold. It doesn’t mean you stop being the warm, generous, big-hearted woman you are. Those parts of you are not the problem. They never were.
You keep those amazing parts of yourself but learn discernment.
It means you stop directing your empathy at a problem it cannot solve and start directing it somewhere it can.
Toward yourself. Toward the exhaustion of trying so hard for so long. Toward the part of you that learned—somewhere, sometime—that managing someone else’s comfort was your job. That keeping the peace was your responsibility. That if you were just warm enough, patient enough, loving enough, the room would be okay.
We were taught to be nurturing. We were taught to be the social lubricant, the one who smooths the edges, reads the temperature, makes sure everyone feels seen. And there is beauty in that. There is genuine power in that.
But we were not taught that we also get to protect ourselves. That the world is not one that asked us what we wanted to co-create in it yet. That our empathy has a home address and it is us. That being a loving woman does not mean being an endlessly available resource for someone else’s unexamined beliefs.
That part—the protection part—nobody put in the curriculum. And it is not optional. It is vital.
So when you feel that pull back toward the identity of his savior (and you will feel it, because it is familiar and it once felt like purpose), I want you to ask yourself honestly:
Does your ego actually need this to survive? Does your worth live or die on whether you were the one who finally got through to him?
Or is there a version of you—whole, loving, fiercely empathetic—who doesn’t need to save anyone to know her own value? That woman doesn’t need the identity. She just needs to remember she was never his to fix.
You can be a good person, a deeply empathetic person, and stop expecting your love to save him.
In fact, sometimes that’s exactly what empathy, turned inward, asks you to do.
Your heart is still as big as Texas, baby. Your spirit is still standing. And your ego—the one that built its whole identity around being the most loving and powerful woman in the room—gets to be exceptional in a whole new way now.
~
Read 0 comments and reply