Work At A Relationship, But Don't Work To Earn Love [EXPERT]

When you work to earn a man’s love– doing things for him (his laundry, cooking him meals, calling him to “help him” with problems, driving him around, etc.) or giving him gifts (money for his bills, letting him live with you free of charge, buying him clothes or expensive trinkets) – you will not make him fall in love with you.

Most any couple that has a successful relationship will tell you that KEEPING a relationship takes invested work; however, EARNING the love of a man is not the kind of work you should EVER be invested in.

To elaborate, let me start with a little interactive fable.

Say a little elf showed up on your doorstep one morning, knocking on the door and calling your name to come outside. Imagine you opened the door and looked down, only to find him standing there, adorable as can be, holding a beautiful diamond necklace in his little pudgy hands.

Imagine, then, that he held the necklace out to you, offering it to you. You may be hesitant to take it, wondering why he is giving you such a gift and even thinking that it’s a trick or a manipulation. But, say, he assures you that he is only giving it to you because he thinks you are special and that he wants you to have it. You would probably take it, right? I would.

Now say he comes back the next day—this time dragging, behind him, a mop and a broom. He tells you he wants to come in and clean your house, free of charge. Would you let him? Maybe, if he seems trustworthy and if you have some time to burn so that you can supervise him in your house.

Imagine he comes back EVERY morning for two weeks, bringing different gifts and offering different services. Imagine you begin to really appreciate him, trust him, like having him and his acts of love around you.

Now let’s imagine one morning after he’s been working hard at buffing your dirty floors, he asks for a back rub. You look at his bony back covered in warty elf skin and you decide it’s something you’d rather not do. So you say “no”.

Imagine he looks up at you with his sad, little, beady eyes and begins to cry, telling you that he has worked so hard for you for weeks and can’t believe you would be so selfish to not give him what he needs of you.

You then explain how you don’t want to give him the back rub, and he gets increasingly angrier and more desperate. Say, even, that he starts screaming at you.

Then, you, in turn, start to feel angry, too, like he keeps asking something of you that you are unwilling to provide. You eventually kick him out of your home, possibly even feeling guilty. After all, he was right in a way—he did do all those nice things for you.

Now…

Imagine he comes around the next morning with a smile and another necklace. You warily open the door, most likely because you feel bad, and he offers up the necklace, pretending nothing happened the day before.

You don’t take the necklace and close the door on him.

How do you feel about yourself? Do you feel like you owed it to the elf to rub his back?

Even if you had been polite and more generous and did warily rub his back, you probably would have stopped opening the door for him in the future because you’d of realized his efforts weren’t really “free”.