Sometimes Your Love Just Isn’t the Right Currency for Them

Most of us prefer to think of love in the abstract, as something mystical that can’t be quantified or rigidly defined. But at the risk of sounding unromantic, I find it helpful to think of love in more transactional terms: it’s a valuable commodity that we may choose to give or withhold from other people, and in turn they may choose whether to accept or decline our offer.

When we’re met with rejection from a potential or existing partner, it’s easy to start to question the value of our love and to wonder why it “wasn’t enough” to make the object of our affection happy and fulfilled. Often, our sense of self-esteem takes a direct hit, or we spend huge amounts of time and emotional energy trying to prove our worth and make the other person see all the wonderful qualities we bring to the table.

What if instead we tried to look at it another way? What if we view our love as a particular form of currency that simply isn’t universally accepted by those around us? Sometimes we’re going to be trying to feed dollar bills into a machine that only takes euros. That doesn’t mean our dollars are worthless or that the machine is broken; they’re just incompatible.

I wish I’d adopted this perspective a long time ago. Starting from a young age, I attempted to love certain people who took my affections and attention for granted, or at least only appreciated them intermittently. Rather than considering the possibility that my personal currency didn’t match what they needed in a relationship (and vice versa), I redoubled my efforts — all the while internalizing the flawed belief that my love was deficient in some way.

In one particularly prolonged and painful situation, I opened my heart and poured love into someone who was quite plainly in love with someone else. I knew — I just knew — that with enough time and patience, this person would recognize my love for the treasure it was and we’d live happily ever after. (Did I mention I was a teenager and watched a lot of rom-coms?) It didn’t happen — not because he was a jerk, or I was unworthy, but because my love was a puzzle piece that didn’t fit his. It couldn’t be forced.

When I began dating my husband, I experienced what it was like to be valued without having to work to prove anything or put only my very best assets on display. I was already his preferred form of currency, and he was already mine. Sure, we have gone through periods where we get complacent and inadvertently make the other person feel underappreciated, but overcoming those bumps is a matter of reminding ourselves what we have, not questioning whether we’re compatible and valuable to one another.

Falling in love is a journey into unknown territory. That’s part of what makes it so wonderful and exciting. Sometimes our currency will open every door in that new land; other times, we won’t make it past the point of entry. Our value remains unchanged either way, it’s just a matter of finding the person who recognizes it.

—

This post was previously published on medium.com.

***