Love Shouldn't Be a Negotiation

You Don’t Have to Earn the Right to Be Loved

You are deserving of a love that is sure, a love that is assured, a love that does not waver.

I know love isn’t perfect. We’re human, after all—beautifully flawed creatures attempting to mirror something divine. But the number of people who accept unsafe love, who mistake indifference for complexity, who believe kindness is a luxury rather than a necessity—it’s not just disappointing; it’s a quiet tragedy.

Companionship is a human need, yes. But is loneliness not preferable to existing in a space where your soul is constantly negotiating its right to feel safe? Is connection worth the price of your peace?

I’m currently reading Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Dream Count (which I thoroughly recommend, by the way), and without giving any spoilers, there’s a particular storyline that feels like a mirror held up to countless relationships. One of the protagonists is trapped in the gravitational pull of a partnership where love feels more like a persistent negotiation than a sanctuary.

I recognised that landscape intimately, as I’m sure most of us do.

The protagonist’s constant pining, her perpetual seeking of approval from a partner who remains fundamentally unavailable, is a choreography many of us know too well. It’s a dance of emotional scarcity, where love becomes less about mutual nurturing and more about survival.

Why do we become architects of our own emotional deprivation?

There’s a profound difference between loving and being loved. One is an action, a choice. The other is a state of being that requires radical vulnerability. The protagonist in Dream Count exists in that liminal space—loving harder, reaching further, while her partner remains frustratingly distant.

This is not love. This is a form of emotional self-erasure.

I think about the ways we settle—not just in romantic love, but in all forms of connection. We become linguistic acrobats, translating our worth into a language others might understand. We soften our edges. We negotiate our non-negotiables. And I juxtapose that with the love of the Father—how God willingly allowed His Son to die, a sacrificial love that demonstrates the immeasurable worth of humanity. That love didn’t calculate guaranteed returns; it simply showed up, unconditionally.

I think of how God’s love doesn’t wait for us to be perfect. It meets us in our brokenness. It doesn’t demand performance but offers transformation. That’s not just love. That’s radical commitment. I wonder why more people don’t pursue this model of love in their relationships, friendships, and understanding of themselves.

I know this love exists because I’ve experienced its grace through my community time and time again. I think of the friends who have shown me what true love looks like especially as my 20s progressed. The ones who don’t make me work for their affection. Who see me—truly see me—in all my complexity.

Recently, I received some distressing news that turned my world sepia-toned. My friends didn’t try to fix me. They didn’t offer platitudes. We wandered through a park that day, sometimes speaking, sometimes not. We got ice cream. We breathed. She held space for my grief without trying to minimise it—a reflection of how God meets us exactly where we are.

Another friend, who I live with, held me as I wept, unfiltered and raw (morning breath and all LOL!). No performative comfort, just pure presence. Now I’m aware that not every love will look like this. Not every connection will hold this depth. But knowing it exists? Knowing you are worthy of a love that sees you—truly sees you?

You deserve a love that chooses you with the same fierce intentionality and acceptance that the Father demonstrates. Not the kind of acceptance that demands you shrink, but the kind that allows you to expand. A love that sees your multiplicity—your contradictions, your complexities—and chooses you, again and again. A love that becomes a home, not a borderland you’re constantly trying to navigate.

A love that understands that identity is not static. That we are always in process. That healing is not linear. That growth requires space.

The love I’m describing isn’t perfect. It’s imperfect—beautifully, messily human. But it’s a love that doesn’t require constant translation of your worth.

It’s the love that one of my friends demonstrated last week when I called her at midnight, weeping and wailing, and she answered my call not with solutions but with pure presence. She sent scriptures not as prescriptions but as gentle reminders: I am seen, and I am held.

Perhaps it’s optimism. Perhaps it’s hope. But I’ve tasted a love that doesn’t just exist in romantic novels or theological discourses. A love that shows up. A love that sees. A love that chooses, again and again.

And so, I pray that when love finds you, it is the kind that stays. The kind that doesn’t make you beg or bargain. The kind that sees you in your entirety. A love that makes room for your becoming, your healing, your wholeness.

Because anything less is not love.