Nobody Can Be Argued Into Loving You

Everybody agrees that relationships take work. It is the line we say, approvingly, about other people’s marriages, and it is true. But it hides a distinction that matters more than anything else about love, and almost nobody draws it.

There are two kinds of work. The first is the daily effort two people put into something they both want: the attention, the patience, the small reliable showing-up. The second is the effort one person puts into making the other person want it at all. From the outside they look identical. Both involve trying hard. Both feel like love while you are doing them. But the first keeps a relationship alive, and the second cannot work, because the thing it is trying to produce is the one thing effort cannot make. Most people who are failing at love are not trying too little. They are doing the second kind of work and calling it the first.1The closest research to this is on motivation in general rather than on love. Edward Deci and Richard Ryan have spent four decades showing that you cannot pay, pressure or reward a person into genuinely wanting something, and that trying tends to weaken the wanting that was already there. Their studies were of children, students and employees; applying them to romance is an analogy, but it is a close one.

This essay is about telling the two apart.

What effort can’t buy

Most things in life answer to effort. You want a better result, so you put in more: more hours, more care, more money. The result improves, roughly in proportion. This is the model of the world nearly all of us grow up with, because for nearly everything it holds.

Picture a man at the kitchen table at one in the morning, writing a message. He writes it, deletes it, writes it again. The seventeenth draft is warmer than the sixteenth. He is adjusting the warmth the way you would turn up a thermostat, as though tenderness were a dial and the only problem were that he hadn’t turned it high enough yet. Somewhere in the flat is a gift he has bought and not given, kept back for the right moment. If he were honest, he would call it leverage, and he would be ashamed of the word. By any ordinary standard, he is trying extremely hard.

It won’t work, and some stubborn part of him already knows it, which is why he is still awake.

What he wants is not a reply. It is for the other person to want him there: to stay, to turn towards him, to let him be his inconvenient self without keeping score. Call it willingness: wanting to be there without needing to be persuaded. And willingness is the one thing his reliable machinery of more-effort-better-result cannot produce. You cannot buy it, earn it, argue your way into it, or pile up enough thoughtful gestures to tip the balance. It is either there or it isn’t.

Worse, when you work hard to produce it where it isn’t, you get three cheap imitations instead: compliance, when someone goes along to avoid a fight; gratitude, when they feel they owe you for all the trying; and guilt, when they stay because leaving would feel cruel. All three can look like the real thing at one in the morning. None of them survives breakfast.

You cannot out-give a person into loving you. The giving becomes the evidence that you had to, and the having-to is the whole problem.

Where the dial comes from

It is worth asking where the man at the table got the idea that the dial works: that enough warmth, correctly applied, wins in the end. Partly it is the ordinary model of effort we all carry. But increasingly he got it from a feed.

A social-media feed is not a teacher. It is a machine built to hold your attention, and it has found, across billions of users, that little holds attention like a grievance that flatters you. So it sorts people. Imagine two strangers on the number 9 bus climbing out of Lausanne, thumbs moving in the same small circles. One is being shown, post after post, that he loves harder and gives more and is taken for granted by people who cannot see his worth. The other is being shown the same story from her side, tuned to her complaint with the same precision. Each scrolls through a private gallery of their own vindication and gets off the bus a little more certain, because the evidence has been chosen to be overwhelming.2Not a conspiracy, which would require intent. Something duller and more effective: recommendation systems that reward engagement, plus the well-measured finding that moral and emotional content, especially content aimed at an out-group, spreads further and faster online than anything fair-minded. Researchers who study the “manosphere” describe a path that starts in ordinary heartbreak and self-improvement content and escalates, feed by feed, towards organised resentment, because resentment performs.

What matters for this essay is the lesson both of them are being taught. It arrives dressed as healing, as “knowing your worth”, as hard-won maturity. Underneath, it is the same idea as the thermostat: love is a contest you win by trying harder and resenting smarter, and if you are losing, someone else is to blame. It validates everyone and helps no one, because the one thing it can never sell is the possibility that the other person is also just a person, with their own willingness or lack of it, which nobody’s effort controls.

What the work is actually for

So if effort cannot create willingness, what is it for? Here is the part where I admit that relationships really do require work. Just not the kind on offer at one in the morning.

It means treating differences as weather, not war. Most of what a couple disagrees about, they will disagree about forever. The research is unkind to romantics here: in John Gottman’s long-term studies of couples, about two-thirds of recurring conflicts are perpetual. They are never solved, only lived with.3Gottman’s work, if you want the footnote to sound expensive. The couples who last are not the ones who resolve their differences. They are the ones who keep a civil, even fond, conversation running about the differences, indefinitely, without contempt. Contempt is the one ingredient his data flags as nearly fatal. There are couples who have had the same argument about lateness for nine years and have finally reached the stage where one of them can say there it is, our argument, right on time, and the other can laugh. That is not a problem solved. It is a problem outlived together, which is better.

It means letting the other person change your mind. Not just listening, which is easy, but actually being moved, which is rarer. In Gottman’s newlywed studies, husbands who refused to accept their wives’ influence were far more likely to end up divorced.

It means forgiving the ordinary. The clumsy sentence, the bad night, the feeling expressed badly: forgive them and move on, rather than filing them away as evidence for a later trial. And it means knowing, firmly, which trespasses are not ordinary. Forgiveness aimed at betrayal or cruelty stops being a virtue and becomes a hole you live in.

And it means warmth made on purpose. Love that is only felt and never done is like a garden left to itself: sincerely owned, and overgrown by August. The turning towards each other, the small kindnesses, the friendship under the romance: the long studies find that this, more than anything, predicts which couples survive.4The same researchers like to cite a ratio: roughly five warm exchanges for every sharp one, held even during arguments, in the couples who make it. I distrust how tidy the number is, and believe its direction completely.

Notice what all of these have in common. None of them can be done at someone. They are things two willing people do together. Willingness comes first, upstream of all of it, and it is the part nobody can supply on the other person’s behalf.

Why “just try harder” sounds right

The obvious objection deserves a proper answer, because it is half right. Of course you must try. I have just spent four paragraphs listing the work. So how can effort be both essential and useless?

Because it is the same verb doing two opposite jobs. Effort inside a shared willingness tends the garden: it is how love stays alive. Effort aimed at producing a willingness that isn’t there is a different activity entirely. It is standing in an empty lot, watering gravel, and blaming the lack of roses on not watering enough.

The trap is that both feel exactly the same from the inside. Both are tiring. Both are sincere. Both come with the conviction that one more try might do it. The only way to tell them apart is to look at what is coming back. In the first case, the effort is met: your attention is returned, your repair attempts are accepted, your needs are taken seriously. In the second, the effort disappears into something that never answers, and the silence gets read, again and again, as a sign that you haven’t tried hard enough.

What I do about it

Not much, honestly. I distrust anyone with a five-point programme for the human heart, especially if it fits on a mug.

One thing, then. I have stopped auditioning. The task, as far as I can tell, is to bring your own full willingness, stated plainly, needs and all, and not hidden to keep the peace, since nobody can meet a need you have carefully concealed from them.5Suppressing your own voice and needs to preserve a relationship has a name in the research, self-silencing, and a track record: it is linked to depression and the slow disappearance of the self. It photographs beautifully as devotion. It is not devotion. Then watch whether that willingness is returned. Not summon it. Not earn it or polish it or deserve it into appearing. Just put your half plainly on the table and look honestly at whether a matching half arrives.

If it does, there is work: glad, mutual, unglamorous work, and plenty of it. If it doesn’t, the absence is not an assignment. It is information. The most radical thing a certain kind of person can learn is that someone else’s indifference is not a problem they have been set to solve.

The question was never how hard you can love someone. Anyone sufficiently frightened can love very hard indeed; the man at the table is proof, on his eighteenth draft. The question is whether you can tell the difference between being chosen and being tolerated by someone you have exhausted yourself impressing, and whether you can put the pen down, and the unsent gift away, and go to bed when the answer comes back wrong.

It is 16:51, a deeply unromantic hour, the light going flat over the lake and the day not yet done. That feels about right. The dramatic hours sell love as a grand campaign. 16:51 just says the plain thing: you cannot make someone want to stay. You can only be someone worth staying for, and then find out. And the finding out is the one thing no amount of trying has ever been able to settle in advance.

In short

For anyone who wants the argument on one page, here it is as a field guide. The first four points are what this essay argued; the rest are what the same research says about keeping a willing relationship well.

1. Shared willingness comes first. Both people have to genuinely want to be there. It cannot be won, argued, earned or bought, and everything below only works when it is already true of both.
2. Friendship is the engine. Fondness, curiosity, play and the daily turning towards each other. A couple that handles conflict perfectly but feels nothing is still finished. Build warmth on purpose, and keep the warm moments far outnumbering the sharp ones.
3. Differences are weather, not war. Most recurring conflicts are perpetual. They are lived with, not solved, through open conversation without contempt. What erodes a couple is differences dismissed or left unspoken, not the differences themselves.
4. Let yourself be influenced. Listening isn’t enough. Actually let the other person’s view change yours sometimes. Refusing to be moved is one of the surest predictors of failure.
5. Say what you need: it’s a duty, not a courtesy. Say it clearly and early. A partner cannot honour a need you hid to keep the peace. Silence is not kindness; it is self-erasure.
6. Forgive the ordinary; hold a firm line on the serious. Clumsy words and bad nights: forgive them, don’t bank them as ammunition. Betrayal, abuse and contempt are not “faults to forgive”. Keeping that line sharp is what stops forgiveness turning into self-abandonment.
7. Repair, don’t take hostages. Ruptures have to be allowed to close. The measure of a couple isn’t never falling out; it’s mending, and letting the wound actually heal.
8. Build trust in small, reliable moments. Safety is the felt sense of “I know you’ve got me”, and it is made from showing up, doing what you said and being reachable. Talking well about problems doesn’t create it on its own.
9. Stay two whole people. Each keeps their own purpose, friendships and centre of gravity. The healthiest couples are two solid selves in contact, not a merger.
10. Love the person, not a project. Choose someone whose real, present self you can live with and love today, not their potential or a version you plan to fix. The urge to rescue is not love.
11. Know a fork from a perpetual problem. Some differences can’t be managed because they are fundamental: whether to have children, monogamy, where to build a life, whether a lifelong partnership is even wanted. For these, more talking doesn’t help. Honest recognition does, and sometimes parting without villains.
12. A bad season isn’t the end; sustained withdrawal is. Grief, burnout and hard stretches pass. A settled, ongoing abandonment of the shared project is the beginning of the end. Don’t treat the first sign of distance as a death sentence, or you become the one who gives up first.

The short form of all twelve: bring your whole, honest self; build warmth and safety on purpose; accept the person and live with the differences; keep your own shape; and let the presence or absence of a matching willingness tell you the truth, rather than trying to earn a truth into being.

References

• John M. Gottman & Nan Silver, The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work (Crown, 1999; rev. 2015). Perpetual vs. solvable problems (~69% perpetual), accepting influence, repair attempts, the friendship/fondness base and the “Create Shared Meaning” level of the Sound Relationship House.
• John M. Gottman & Robert W. Levenson (1992), “Marital Processes Predictive of Later Dissolution: Behavior, Physiology, and Health,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 63(2): 221–233. The ~5:1 positive-to-negative interaction ratio; disengagement patterns.
• John M. Gottman & Robert W. Levenson (2000), “The Timing of Divorce: Predicting When a Couple Will Divorce Over a 14-Year Period,” Journal of Marriage and Family 62(3): 737–745.
• Gottman, Coan, Carrère & Swanson (1998), “Predicting Marital Happiness and Stability from Newlywed Interactions,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 60(1): 5–22. Accepting influence predicts stability; rejecting it predicts dissolution.
• John M. Gottman, What Predicts Divorce? The Relationship Between Marital Processes and Marital Outcomes (Erlbaum, 1994). The “Four Horsemen” (criticism, contempt, defensiveness, stonewalling); contempt as the strongest single predictor of divorce.
• Edward L. Deci & Richard M. Ryan, Intrinsic Motivation and Self-Determination in Human Behavior (Plenum, 1985); and “Self-Determination Theory and the Facilitation of Intrinsic Motivation, Social Development, and Well-Being,” American Psychologist 55(1): 68–78 (2000). Intrinsic motivation is undermined, not manufactured, by external pressure and contingent rewards.
• Susan M. Johnson, Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love (Little, Brown, 2008). Emotionally Focused Therapy; attachment safety and the “Accessible, Responsive, Engaged” (A.R.E.) question. Built on John Bowlby’s attachment theory (Attachment and Loss, 1969–1980).
• Dana Crowley Jack, Silencing the Self: Women and Depression (Harvard University Press, 1991). “Self-silencing” — suppressing one’s own voice and needs to preserve a relationship — erodes the self and is linked to depression. (Developed studying women; the mechanism generalizes.)
• Murray Bowen, Family Therapy in Clinical Practice (Jason Aronson, 1978). “Differentiation of self” — staying connected without fusing. And David Schnarch, Passionate Marriage (Norton, 1997) — intimacy as two well-differentiated selves rather than emotional merger.
• Neil S. Jacobson & Andrew Christensen, Acceptance and Change in Couple Therapy (Norton, 1996). Integrative Behavioral Couple Therapy; durable satisfaction comes from emotional acceptance of the partner as they are, not from a campaign to change them.
• William J. Brady, Julian A. Wills, John T. Jost, Joshua A. Tucker & Jay J. Van Bavel (2017), “Emotion Shapes the Diffusion of Moralized Content in Social Networks,” PNAS 114(28): 7313–7318. Moral-emotional content spreads further and faster online — the mechanism behind grievance-amplifying feeds.
• Debbie Ging (2019), “Alphas, Betas, and Incels: Theorizing the Masculinities of the Manosphere,” Men and Masculinities 22(4): 638–657. The escalation gradient from mainstream heartbreak/self-improvement content toward organized resentment.
• George Gerbner et al., cultivation theory (e.g., “Growing Up with Television: The Cultivation Perspective,” in Media Effects, 1994). Heavy, consistent exposure to a media frame gradually shapes one’s picture of social reality — here, of the opposite sex.

A note on evidence: the directional findings above — manage perpetual differences, accept influence, build positive affect, that contempt and stonewalling corrode — are well-replicated. The popular “predict divorce with 90%+ accuracy” figures associated with this research are contested on methodological grounds and are not relied on here.