The 'they'll change once they love me' trap
· 11 min read
The unspoken premise
Most people running this strategy do not articulate it to themselves. They would not say, "I am attempting to love my partner into transformation." They would say, "I love my partner and I am patient with their difficulties." The patient framing hides the strategy. To see the trap, you have to look at the time horizon and the unspoken expectation. Are you patient because you accept the partner as they are, indefinitely? Or are you patient because you expect, eventually, that the patience will be rewarded with the partner becoming different? If it is the second, you are running the strategy. The patience is not unconditional. It is an investment with an expected return.The conditional disguised as unconditional
The strategy disguises itself as unconditional love. The lover believes they are loving the partner without conditions, accepting them as they are. But there is a condition: that the partner eventually change. The condition is hidden because it is located in the future. Each present moment looks like unconditional acceptance. The accumulation of present moments is in fact a long bet on a future transformation. Real unconditional love would accept the partner exactly as they are now, indefinitely, with no expectation of change. Very few people actually do this. Most people who think they are doing it are running the strategy under the disguise.The reverse rescue
Like the fix-them trap, this strategy is often a reversal of a childhood pattern. The lover, as a child, was loved conditionally — they had to perform, achieve, be quiet, take care of the parent, in order to receive love. As an adult, they take the role of the unconditional lover, offering to the partner what they themselves did not receive. There is something tender about this. The lover is trying to give what was missing. But the giving is not for the partner; it is for the inner child of the giver, who is finally getting to be the one who loves without conditions. The partner is cast in the role of the deprived self, and the love is offered to that role rather than to the actual partner.What love can and cannot do
Love can soothe. Love can provide safety. Love can mirror back to a person their own worth. Love can hold space for change. What love cannot do is generate the internal decision that produces change. That decision happens inside the person, often in response to consequences, suffering, fatigue with the old pattern, or the alignment of multiple internal factors. External love is present in this process but not its cause. Sue Johnson's research on attachment shows clearly that secure connection supports change, but the change itself is the changer's own work. The trap is collapsing the support into the cause.The endless deferral
This strategy has no natural endpoint. There is always a possibility that the partner will change next month, next year, after the next crisis. The lover can defer the assessment indefinitely. Every minor improvement is taken as evidence the strategy is working. Every regression is taken as evidence that more loving is required. The strategy is unfalsifiable, which is why people can run it for decades. To see through it, you have to introduce a time horizon: how long am I willing to run this strategy without the promised result? If the answer is "as long as it takes," you are not running a strategy, you are stuck in one.The partner's experience
The partner often senses the strategy, even if they cannot name it. They know that they are being loved for who they could become, not who they are. This produces shame, which is the opposite of a growth medium. Many partners in this dynamic respond to the implicit pressure by getting worse, not better. They become the person who is being projected onto them — the addict, the unavailable one, the one who fails the lover's expectations. The strategy creates the very thing it tries to overcome. This is one of its crueler ironies.Love versus tolerance
There is a useful distinction between love and tolerance. Love is the active appreciation and care for who someone actually is. Tolerance is the willingness to put up with what you do not appreciate. The strategy often confuses tolerance with love. The lover tolerates a great deal — the broken promises, the drinking, the disappearances — and calls this love. It is not love. It is endurance. Love would either appreciate what is actually there or, finding insufficient to appreciate, would leave. Tolerance keeps the relationship alive while the strategy runs.The honesty test
A useful test of whether you are in this trap: imagine that the partner will be exactly as they are now, in every important respect, in five years. Same drinking, same coldness, same dishonesty, same whatever the difficulty is. No change. Do you still want this relationship? Most strategy-runners, asked this question honestly, answer no. They want the relationship because they expect change. Without the expectation, the relationship does not stand. Naming this is uncomfortable but clarifying. It separates the love of the actual partner from the investment in the future partner.The fantasy figure
The future partner who will emerge after the love takes effect is a fantasy figure. The lover has often described this figure in detail — to friends, to themselves, in journals. The fantasy figure has all the partner's good qualities and none of the bad. The fantasy figure is loving, present, sober, kind, available. The lover is in love with this figure, and the actual partner is being used as a placeholder. This is unfair to the partner, who is being measured against a fantasy they did not consent to. Robert Johnson identifies this clearly: the figure is internal, an aspect of the lover's own psyche, projected outward and mistaken for the real person.The shift to honesty
Coming out of the trap requires honesty in several directions at once. Honesty with yourself: I am running a strategy. Honesty with the partner: I have been loving you for who you could become rather than who you are. Honesty about the future: I cannot continue this indefinitely. These conversations are uncomfortable. They usually need help — therapy, friends, time. But without them, the strategy continues underground, while the surface relationship deteriorates. Bringing the strategy to the surface gives both partners a chance to choose a different basis for being together, or to choose to part.When the strategy ends
When the lover stops running the strategy, the relationship reveals what is actually there. Sometimes there is a real connection that was obscured by the strategy, and the relationship reorganizes around it. Sometimes there is little real connection, and the absence of the strategy reveals the absence of the basis. Either revelation is more honest than the strategy. The strategy was, in effect, hiding the truth of the relationship from both people. Its end is a kind of grief and a kind of clarity at once.The lover's own change
Most importantly, when the strategy ends, the lover begins to change. The energy that was going into the strategy returns to the lover's own life. They notice their own desires, their own needs, their own preferences. They discover they have been so focused on the partner's potential transformation that they have neglected their own actual one. The change they could not produce in the partner becomes available in themselves. This is one of the recurring discoveries in the literature: when you stop trying to change the other person, you find you can change yourself. Lerner and Beattie both describe this as the unexpected reward of giving up the project.Humility as the foundation
Law 0 is the foundation here. I am not the engine of another person's transformation. I am the engine of my own. The love I offer is real but not magical. The partner's choices are theirs, not mine. When I accept this, I am right-sized. When I do not, I am inflated into a savior role that exhausts me and infantilizes the partner. The right-sizing is the work. It is repeated daily, in small choices, until it becomes second nature. The reward is a relationship that is not built on the impossible job of becoming someone's transformation engine. It is built on the much more ordinary, and much more reliable, foundation of two people being who they actually are, together.Citations
Beattie, Melody. Beyond Codependency: And Getting Better All the Time. Center City, MN: Hazelden, 1989.
Mellody, Pia, Andrea Wells Miller, and J. Keith Miller. Facing Codependence: What It Is, Where It Comes From, How It Sabotages Our Lives. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1989.
Woititz, Janet G. Adult Children of Alcoholics. Deerfield Beach, FL: Health Communications, 1983.
Carnes, Patrick. The Betrayal Bond: Breaking Free of Exploitive Relationships. Deerfield Beach, FL: Health Communications, 1997.
Real, Terry. The New Rules of Marriage: What You Need to Know to Make Love Work. New York: Ballantine Books, 2007.
Norwood, Robin. Women Who Love Too Much: When You Keep Wishing and Hoping He'll Change. New York: Pocket Books, 1985.
Johnson, Sue. Love Sense: The Revolutionary New Science of Romantic Relationships. New York: Little, Brown, 2013.
Lerner, Harriet. The Dance of Intimacy: A Woman's Guide to Courageous Acts of Change in Key Relationships. New York: Harper & Row, 1989.
Welwood, John. Love and Awakening: Discovering the Sacred Path of Intimate Relationship. New York: HarperCollins, 1996.
Jung, C. G. Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self. Translated by R. F. C. Hull. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959.
Johnson, Robert A. We: Understanding the Psychology of Romantic Love. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1983.
Perel, Esther. Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence. New York: HarperCollins, 2006.
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