the reciprocity paradox: if love seeks to be returned, is it love—or the desire to be loved?

for the ones who dissect their own hearts and call it self-awareness, and for the ones who turn love into a philosophy debate and still can’t find the answer

As I attempt to heal from the end of my last relationship, this question lingers in the back of my mind: Can love be both selfless and reciprocal, or does the desire for return inherently corrupt its purity?

I’ve been afraid that maybe, in that relationship, I wanted more to be loved than to love—what I call the Jo March effect. And that’s a terrifying thought. Not because I didn’t care for him, but because maybe it meant I wasn’t truly loving him. Maybe the waiting, the hoping, the subtle ache for a kind of mirroring—maybe that made it hollow. Maybe I was performing devotion, hoping for applause. And if so, what does that say about the love I thought I gave?

But the more I think about it, the more I realize that asking for reciprocity isn’t a betrayal of love—it’s a function of it. Not the transactional kind, but the human kind. The kind that wants to know: Are you in this with me? Do you feel it too?

The question is, at what point does that need for reciprocity shift from a hope to a foundation? Was I offering love freely, or was I searching for proof—proof that I was worth loving, proof that I was chosen, proof that my presence meant something? And if I needed that proof more than I needed to give, does that lessen the love I thought I was offering?

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Love Given, Love Received

Recently, I watched Richard Linklater’s ‘Before’ trilogy, and looking back, no story captures this paradoxical tension more beautifully than the first movie, Before Sunrise. Jesse and Céline, two strangers, meet on a train and decide to spend a night walking through Vienna, talking—not just about love, but inside love. There is no dramatic arc, no grand event. Just dialogue, desire, and the quiet unfolding of two people trying to feel seen.

In one of the most poignant exchanges, Céline says,

"I always feel this pressure of being a strong and independent icon of womanhood, and not making it look like my whole life is revolving around some guy. But loving someone, and being loved, means so much to me."

It’s vulnerable. It’s human. And in that moment, we see that love—even the spontaneous, poetic kind—still aches to be mutual. It doesn’t lessen what she feels for Jesse; it deepens it. The fact that they only have one night together makes their connection more honest, not less. Every word they speak carries the unspoken desire: I hope you feel this too.

They give freely—but also with the fragile hope of being received. And that hope isn’t greed. It’s intimacy. It’s risk.

Another popular film, 500 Days of Summer, is a movie often misread as a tragedy of unrequited love, when in fact, it’s a meditation on projection and expectation. Tom believes himself in love with Summer, but what he loves is an idea of her—a reflection of his own longing. She is clear from the beginning: “I don’t want anything serious.” But Tom doesn’t hear that. He fills in the gaps with meaning, mistaking her affection for commitment, her presence for promise.

When she leaves, it devastates him. Not because she took something from him, but because he believed the love he gave deserved to be returned in equal measure. His heartbreak isn’t from her betrayal—it’s from the dissonance between what he hoped for and what she was able to give.

There’s a painful scene where Tom imagines a future—a rooftop party, laughter, closeness—while the reality plays beside it: polite small talk, emotional distance, a ring on her finger. The film splits the screen: expectation vs. reality. And in that split, we see the whole ache of unreciprocated love. The truth is, Tom’s love isn’t invalid. But it’s incomplete—not because it wasn’t mirrored, but because it refused to recognize the lack of a mirror in the first place.

Both stories ask: What happens when love reaches outward and isn’t fully met? And both show that this yearning—to be received, held, known—is not weakness. It is the pulse of being human.

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The Guilt of Wanting More

I know how it feels to question yourself. To wonder if the very fact that you wanted to be loved back somehow taints the love you gave. It’s such a quiet, internal kind of guilt—like you betrayed something sacred by needing to be needed. But I want to tell you something, and I mean it gently: You are not selfish for wanting your love to be met.

The philosopher Simone Weil once wrote, "To love purely is to consent to distance, it is to adore the distance between ourselves and that which we love." That’s beautiful, and it speaks to a kind of divine, untouchable love—one that exists even without response. But we are not made of light and theory. We’re made of skin, memory, longing. And it is not wrong to want closeness, to want your love to bridge that distance. To want it returned.

Erich Fromm, in The Art of Loving, argues that love is not just a feeling but an act of will—an intention to know, to respond, to care. Crucially, he says that mature love is union with the preservation of one’s integrity. It’s not about dissolving into another, nor about giving endlessly into a void. It’s about two people choosing, freely, again and again, to meet each other halfway.

That meeting—that reciprocity—is not a flaw in love. It is love, fulfilled.

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Love Is Not a Vacuum

I used to think love was something selfless, something that could stand on its own without asking for anything back. But now I wonder if that’s just a beautiful lie we tell ourselves to feel nobler in our devotion. Maybe love isn’t meant to be measured by how much we give without expectation. Maybe it’s meant to be reflected, exchanged, held between two people in equal weight.

Because the truth is, we don’t love in a vacuum. Love is shaped by response. It grows in the space between two hearts, not in the isolation of one.

And if I leaned more into his love than into my own, maybe that doesn’t mean my love was lesser—maybe it just means I was human.

So no, I don’t think my need to be loved disqualifies the love I gave. It just reveals something about where I was, about what I was searching for. Maybe I wasn’t just looking to love him—I was looking to find myself in the way he loved me.

And maybe that doesn’t diminish my love.

Maybe that just makes it honest.

Maybe that’s what makes it real.