If Love Feels Like Work, You Were Probably Neglected
friday, April 11, 2025.
Some people fall in love and feel joy. Others fall in love and feel like they just picked up a second job with no benefits and a shifting job description.
If you're the latter, it may not be because you're unlucky in love.
It may be because love was never allowed to be restful in your nervous system.
If you were neglected as a child, you didn’t learn to receive love.
You learned to earn it. Perform it. Manage it. Sustain it through effort.
And if there was a disruption? You handled that too.
For you, love isn’t a shared meal.
It’s a service industry job. You greet. You manage. You clean up emotional messes. You check in to make sure everyone’s okay—except you.
Let’s name it clearly:
If love feels like work, your inner child is probably still on the clock.
Emotional Labor vs. Intimacy
There’s a difference between showing up for someone—and being their emotional HR department. Intimacy is mutual, co-created, and fluid. Emotional labor, when unbalanced, is invisible effort that maintains the emotional tone of a relationship. And in neglected adults, it often becomes the only way they feel safe.
You might be doing emotional labor if:
You anticipate needs before they’re spoken
You translate for your partner in social situations
You monitor tone shifts, body language, and tension
You suppress your feelings to maintain harmony
You do most of the apologizing, even when you’re not wrong
And you might call that “love”—because no one ever modeled anything different.
Why Neglect Trains You to Work for Love
Neglect doesn’t teach you to trust intimacy. It teaches you to curate it.
As a child, if your needs were met inconsistently—or not at all—you learned to attach through usefulness, not presence.
So now, in adulthood, you don’t feel secure unless you’re contributing. Helping. Holding it together. And when someone offers you care in return, you get suspicious.
“Why are they being nice to me?”
“What do they want?”
“Is this a trap?”
You weren’t allowed to rest in love as a child. So now you recreate relationships where rest still feels unsafe.
Why You’re Drawn to Partners Who Feel Like Projects
Let’s tell the truth: stable, emotionally available partners feel boring at first. They don’t activate your nervous system. They don’t need fixing. They don’t trigger the familiar rush of earned safety.
So instead, you’re drawn to:
People with chaotic emotional landscapes
Lovers with “potential” but no track record
Partners who reward your effort inconsistently (hello, dopamine)
Relationships where your worth is proved by how much you endure
This is not bad taste in partners. This is trauma repetition.
You are chasing the chance to finally get the love you didn’t get—by being so good, so needed, so competent that someone finally stays.
But they don’t. Not because you’re unworthy. Because you’ve built love around labor, not reciprocity.
The Protestant Trauma Ethic: When Cultural Lies Reinforce Neglect
American culture doesn’t just tolerate emotional labor—it canonizes it.
We are taught that love is sacrifice. That service is virtue. That needing rest is weakness. Especially for women, queer caregivers, and adult children of dysfunction, love becomes a productivity zone.
You’re told:
“Relationships take work.”
“If it matters, you’ll fight for it.”
“Love is a verb.”
Sure.
But what they don’t say is that love is also a feeling.
It’s mutual safety. It’s ease. It’s knowing someone will meet you halfway without having to track their every unspoken emotion.
The idea that you must suffer to deserve love is not noble. It’s neglect culture with good lighting.
Signs You’ve Made Love Into a Job
Let’s name a few painful truths.
You may be overworking in your relationship if:
You feel more anxiety than joy
You keep giving second chances, but never get first consideration
You perform regulation so your partner doesn’t dysregulate
You coach your partner through every conflict
You track their feelings, but no one tracks yours
You feel like if you let go, the relationship would collapse—because you’ve been holding it alone
And yet, when the idea of leaving comes up, you hesitate.
Not because you’re fulfilled.
But because you don’t know who you are without the job.
What Real Love Feels Like (If You’ve Never Known It)
If you were neglected, secure love may feel... underwhelming. No adrenaline. No rescuing. No managing. Just mutuality.
Real love feels like:
You can say no without punishment
You don’t have to be “on” all the time
Your needs are a normal part of the ecosystem
You’re not constantly analyzing what you said or how you said it
You feel safe not earning anything
It might feel foreign at first. Flat. Even boring. But that boredom? That’s your nervous system adjusting to safety.
How to Stop Making Love Into Work
This isn’t about doing less. It’s about relating differently.
Here’s what the shift looks like:
🛑 Notice when you're "managing" the emotional tone. Pause. Breathe. Ask: “Is this mine to carry?”
🛑 Resist the urge to fix. Sit in the discomfort of letting others figure it out. Let their pain be theirs.
🛑 Practice rest inside the relationship. Try doing nothing and notice what comes up. That’s where the wound lives.
🛑 Track your resentments. It’s a map to where you’re over-functioning.
✅ Build relationships that don’t require constant emotional maintenance. You don’t need love that breaks unless you’re holding it together with string and good intentions.
Closing Thoughts
If love feels like work, it's not because you’re broken. It’s because you were trained to see effort as value, labor as loyalty, and exhaustion as love.
But here’s the truth:
Love is not a merit badge.
Love is not a role.
Love is not a debt.
You are allowed to be loved—not just for what you do, but for who you are when you do nothing at all.
Take off your emotional uniform.
Clock out.
You are already worthy.
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.
REFERENCES:
Fisher, J. (2017). Healing the fragmented selves of trauma survivors: Overcoming internal self-alienation. Routledge.
Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. W. W. Norton & Company.
Walker, P. (2013). Complex PTSD: From surviving to thriving. Azure Coyote Books.