“When Love Feels Like a Test: Why You Keep Choosing People Who Make You Prove Your Worth”

Introduction: If Love Feels Like Work, Is It Love?

There’s a difference between fighting for love and fighting to feel loved.

One is mutual growth. The other is emotional starvation dressed up as loyalty.

If you’ve ever found yourself bending, breaking, or begging to be chosen—this isn’t just a pattern.

It’s a wound playing out in real time.

Section I: The Psychology of Proving Your Worth

Many people who experienced conditional love growing up internalize a belief: I must earn connection.

Whether it was a distracted parent, a critical caregiver, or inconsistent affection—you learned early that love isn’t free. It must be worked for.

Psychologist Dr. Margaret Paul calls this the Inner Bonding Deficit: a chronic sense that love is earned, not inherent. This drives you to overperform in relationships, mistake anxiety for chemistry, and tolerate emotional breadcrumbs while calling it devotion.

Section II: The Role of Attachment and Emotional Labor

If you’re anxiously attached, you likely feel safest when pursuing unavailable partners.

You equate love with effort, not ease.

But true love doesn’t require constant anxiety.

It doesn’t require convincing someone to stay.

As Dr. Amir Levine and Rachel Heller explain in Attached (2010), secure love is responsive, available, and reciprocal. If you keep chasing someone who makes you feel like you’re “too much,” it’s likely because you once had to shrink just to survive.

Section III: You’re Not Needy. You’re Starving.

Let’s be clear: asking for consistency, communication, and care is not “needy.”

It’s basic relational hygiene.

But if you were raised to believe that your needs made you a burden, you might now fear them.

You might suppress them until they come out sideways—through anxiety, overfunctioning, or people-pleasing.

This dynamic turns love into a performance, not a connection. You become the caretaker, the fixer, the emotionally available one—hoping someone will finally mirror your efforts.

Section IV: Why You Feel Guilty for Wanting More

You’ve been taught to be “grateful” for crumbs.

So when someone offers you inconsistency or chaos, you convince yourself it’s enough.

This guilt is a trauma echo. It tells you:

• “Don’t be ungrateful.”

• “At least they’re not as bad as the last one.”

• “You’re lucky someone even wants you.”

But healthy love doesn’t shame your standards.

It meets them.

Section V: Healing Means Letting Go of the Chase

Here’s the truth that breaks the cycle:

You don’t have to earn real love.

You don’t have to twist yourself into worthiness.

You are worthy in stillness, in softness, in silence.

To heal, you must:

• Recognize when “love” feels like emotional labor.

• Name the inherited beliefs you carry from childhood.

• Stop over-identifying with “fixing” partners to feel valuable.

• Grieve the years you spent proving instead of receiving.

Conclusion: You Deserve Love That Doesn’t Need Convincing

You were never too sensitive.

You were never too emotional.

You just kept offering unconditional love to people who loved with conditions.

Healing is not about becoming less “needy.”

It’s about finally believing that your needs matter.

References:

• Paul, M. (2001). Inner Bonding: Becoming a Loving Adult to Your Inner Child.

• Levine, A., & Heller, R. (2010). Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find—and Keep—Love.

• Brown, B. (2010). The Gifts of Imperfection.

• LaPera, N. (2021). How to Do the Work.

• Gibson, L. C. (2015). Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents.