No One Loves You for You

The currency of love, the masks we wear, and the questions we avoid asking ourselves.

No One Really Knows You

I’ve always secretly hoped to be loved for me, the ineffable bundle of thoughts and quirks behind my eyes. It’s a nice idea, that someone could see past all the noise and appreciate my raw being. But here’s the dark punchline: nobody truly knows that me, and maybe no one ever will. We show people curated versions of ourselves, a highlight reel, a social mask, and then feel lonely when they fall for the performance instead of the person. In the quiet moments, it dawns that even those closest to us might be in love with a story or a function, not the mysterious stranger behind the mask. It’s an isolating realization, but an honest one, and it sets the stage for everything that follows.

Fame, Fortune, and the Paradox of Loneliness

Consider the paradox of loneliness: the more people know of you, the less they actually know you. Celebrity anecdotes abound of superstars who are surrounded by fans yet utterly alone. One common theme of superstardom is that public adoration often precludes genuine understanding, everyone recognizes the image, but no one truly sees the person. When you’re famous or wealthy, people line up to offer you their love, but you can’t shake the suspicion that they’re really after the sparkle of your status. Many celebrities end up keeping their circle small, wary of being used rather than loved. I think Drake said it best, “I love when money makes a difference but don’t make you different.” It makes sense: how can you have an authentic heart-to-heart when everyone around you either idolizes you or wants something from you? The actor who said he felt like a “zoo animal” because people no longer treated him as human wasn’t exaggerating. Fame can distort relationships into transactions, autographs exchanged for praise, emotional support bartered for VIP access. In the end, wealth and renown can become a gilded cage. You stand in a spotlight of attention, yet feel invisible as a real person, craving just one conversation that isn’t colored by what you represent. It’s a cruel irony that those who “have it all” often struggle to find someone who wants nothing at all from them except their unvarnished self.

Negotiating Validation

Strip away fame and most of us are still doing our own negotiation for love and worth. We hustle for approval through the roles we play. The devoted employee, the perfect parent, the charming friend. Hoping these roles will make us worthy. Modern society practically conditions us to equate what we do with who we are: our jobs become a defining detail of who we are, and our identities get tangled up in titles and salaries. We introduce ourselves by what’s on our business card, secretly hoping it impresses enough to earn us respect or affection. In relationships, too, we often perform. We put on our “please love me” persona – laughing at jokes we don’t find funny, feigning interest in things to seem agreeable, hiding feelings that might rock the boat. It’s less a conscious deceit and more a survival tactic we learned long ago. Psychologists note that much of our personality is shaped by the roles we assumed early in life to get our needs for love and belonging met. In other words, we became little actors. We discovered that being helpful earned praise, or that achieving in school earned us a hug, so we leaned into those roles. We carry those patterns into adulthood like currency for validation: If I show up as what you want, will you value me? We negotiate terms, I’ll be this version of me, and you’ll give me love (or at least approval) in return. It’s an unspoken contract many of us sign.

Of course, playing a role comes at a cost. When someone loves the mask, we’re not sure if they love the face beneath it (and we’re too afraid to take the mask off to find out). We might rise in the ranks at work or be admired in our community, yet feel a quiet hollowness, sensing that the applause is for the act, not the actor. We’ve won validation but lost sight of whether anyone sees our true face – or whether we even remember what it looks like.

Love and Other Transactions

There’s a moment in many relationships, romantic or otherwise, when the shiny illusions crack. Perhaps it’s when you notice your partner only says “I love you” after you’ve done something for them, or when a friend disappears the moment you’re no longer useful. Love, in its ideal form, is often imagined as unconditional and selfless. Yet so many of our entanglements operate like transactions: affection is given with strings attached (even if we hid the strings at first). We swap emotional labor, trade favors, keep score in ways we barely admit to ourselves.

Dark humor finds its way here: think of it as a marketplace. You bring your talents, your looks, your resources; the other brings theirs; and each “pays” the other in attention or care. It’s unsaid, of course, nobody courts a lover by saying, “I’ll provide financial security in exchange for emotional support,” or “I’ll flatter you if you boost my ego.” Yet underneath some relationships, especially those that felt like soul-deep love in the beginning, there hums a quiet calculus. It might take years, even decades, for the price tags to reveal themselves. The disillusionment hits hard: you realize that the romantic fairy tale you believed in had fine print and you never read it until now.

When those transactional undercurrents become obvious, the illusion collapses. You see the subtle bargains that were there all along. Perhaps you were in love with how someone made you feel needed, and they were in love with you for providing something they lacked - status, stability, validation. Once the need is met elsewhere or the cost becomes too high, the “love” seems to evaporate. It’s heartbreaking and cynical, yes, but it can also be oddly liberating to finally call it what it is. You step back and ask, Was any of it real? Did they love me, or just the convenience I provided? These are brutal questions, the kind that keep you up at 3 AM, staring at the ceiling. But they also push you closer to an uncomfortable truth: love that is purely transactional isn’t really love – it’s a business arrangement wearing a Cupid costume.

Needed, Not Chosen

Few roles exemplify being needed more starkly than that of a parent. The love of a child can feel profound, but lurking under the Hallmark moments is an existential quandary: They love me… but do they really know me? A baby doesn’t “love” mother or father in any conscious sense, it clings out of need. You are food and comfort and safety; you might as well be a warm talking blanket. As children grow, their love is still entangled with need and reliance. It can be a shock when one day your teenager looks at you not as the all-powerful provider, but as a flawed human and maybe they don’t like that human very much. Parenting is a humbling reminder that being needed is not the same as being truly chosen. Your kids didn’t pick you from a lineup for your sparkling personality; you are a fact of life to them. When they no longer need you, where does that leave the relationship? The empty nest can feel not just empty but existentially empty, if all your feelings of being loved were tied to being necessary.

The same pattern plays out in partnerships and friendships. We comfort ourselves that we are loved for who we are, while unconsciously gravitating toward those who need something we have. Sometimes we even engineer ourselves to be needed, because it makes us feel secure. The friend who becomes everyone’s therapist, the spouse who handles every chore flawlessly, on some level, it’s nice to be indispensable. You feel important; you feel safe from abandonment because, hey, they need you. But needing isn’t choosing. In the darkest hours, you might wonder: if I stopped providing X, would they still stick around? If I wasn’t filling a void in their life, would they still want me in it?

Being needed can give us purpose, but it can also be a hiding place. It lets us avoid the vulnerability of being loved for ourselves. As long as we’re needed, we don’t have to confront whether we’re wanted. Yet the ache remains: we all yearn to be desired freely, not as a dependency or a utility. There’s a quiet tragedy in realizing a relationship persisted because of inertia or obligation rather than genuine affection. It’s the difference between staying because you want to and staying because you have to. One is love; the other is a hostage situation with good manners.

You Cannot Love What You Need

Here’s a brutal thesis: need obscures love. When you need someone, for their money, their support, their approval, even just their presence to not feel alone, you stop seeing them. They become a means to an end, a lifeline or a trophy or a security blanket. I remember hearing an unsettling piece of advice once: “If you need someone, you can’t love them.” It sounded harsh, even counterintuitive. Surely need and love can coexist? But the more I’ve sat with it, the more I see its wisdom. Need is selfish; it’s about what I get. Love, at its purest, is selfless; it’s about who you are. When my “love” for someone is tangled up in needing them to fulfill me, it isn’t really about them at all, it’s about the service they render to my ego or wounds.

This idea isn’t new. Psychologist Erich Fromm drew a sharp distinction between immature and mature love: “Immature love says: I love you because I need you. Mature love says: I need you because I love you.” Think about that. The immature kind of “love” starts with a void. I latch onto you because you fill something in me; my affection is contingent on my need. The mature kind starts with an appreciation, I see you, I adore you for who you are, and therefore I cherish and need your presence (not to survive, but to enrich life). If the thought of losing someone makes you more afraid of lacking what they provide than missing who they are, that’s need masquerading as love. It’s a sobering realization to have about oneself. I’ve caught myself at times “loving” people for how they made me feel, powerful, needed, secure, excited, which is just another way of saying I loved the reflection of me I saw in their eyes. That’s need. It’s using a person as a mirror or a crutch. True love would mean I see them, clearly, independent of what they do for me, and I care for them in their own right.

To genuinely love someone, then, perhaps we must cultivate a stance of want without need, a desire for their company and well-being, while being secure enough in ourselves not to require them for our own completion. It’s a high bar and one I’m not sure many of us consistently meet. But it rings true as an ideal: the less I need you, the more purely I can love you.

The Mirror of Our Judgments

After wading through these uncomfortable truths, our masks, our transactions, our needs, we arrive at an equally uncomfortable mirror. It turns out the quickest way to learn about yourself is to examine your judgments of others. As Carl Jung observed, “Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.” That co-worker whose brown-nosing makes you furious? Perhaps a part of you is angry that you crave approval, too. The ex who used you and left, maybe you see now how you, in subtler ways, were using them right back. Our judgments and disappointments shine a spotlight on our own patterns. Every time I’ve thought How could they not love me for me?, the mirror quietly asked, Well, did you truly love them for who they were? Or were you also blinded by your own need? Ouch. It’s not a flattering question, but it’s necessary.

This mirror is not about blame, it’s about clarity. When illusions collapse and we feel betrayed or hollow, it’s an invitation to peer inward. We might discover that we’ve been defining ourselves by external standards: chasing careers that impress others but leave us cold, entering relationships to prove we’re lovable rather than to actually love and be loved. We judge others for being fickle or shallow, and find our own fear of inadequacy lurking there. The process is humbling, sometimes even humiliating. Yet, there’s a strange relief in it. To finally see yourself without the pretenses, to catch those moments where you sought validation instead of connection, or needed control instead of love, is to start knowing the person behind your own mask.

In that growing self-awareness lies the seed of something hopeful: the ability to cultivate self-love and authenticity. It’s a bit poetic, really, after feeling unseen by everyone for so long, you end up seeing yourself. You strip away the roles and needs one by one, asking, Who am I, really, when I’m not performing, not bargaining for affection? It’s terrifying to confront the possibility that the “real you” might be unlovable. But it’s also the only way to find out if genuine love, the kind not based on need or utility, is possible. First, you have to show up as that real you, for yourself and then for others, and risk it.

Questions Over Answers

I won’t offer a neat five-step plan to solve the dilemma of being unknowable and conditionally loved – life isn’t that kind. Instead, I’ll leave you (and myself) with the open-ended questions that echo through all these themes. What parts of our lives are built on need rather than love? When we say we “love” someone, are we seeing them, or just the comfort, status, or relief they give us? And when we seek love from others, are we really asking them to see us, or to prop up an image of who we wish we were?

These questions don’t have easy answers, but wrestling with them seems like an important part of growing into whatever authentic love might be. Perhaps the best we can do is keep asking, of our relationships, of our choices, and of that face in the mirror each morning. In a world eager to assign every interaction a price and every person a role, choosing to seek the truth of who we are (and who others are) is a quietly radical act. It might not comfort us on lonely nights or shield us from heartbreak, but it grounds us in reality. And in that reality, maybe we stand a chance of finding what we really wanted all along: to be known, to be seen, and maybe, just maybe, to be loved, not for what we can do or provide, but for the simple, profound fact of who we are.

And if this spoke to you I ask many questions like it in my book “I Hope You Wake Up”. Know that I love you infinitely and please don’t be a stranger.