There’s a phrase I hear all the time when someone’s describing a friend who’s still single: “She deserves love.” It’s always well-intentioned. A way of affirming that person’s kindness, loyalty, generosity, strength. But embedded inside that phrase is an idea we rarely question: that love is something deserved.
That love is a merit badge. A prize for being good. A reward for doing the work.
The truth is harder. Love doesn’t follow the rules of fairness. Love doesn’t sort itself out according to virtue or effort. Love, maddeningly, does not arrive on a schedule that respects how hard you’ve tried, or how healed you’ve become, or how earnestly you’ve prepared for it.
And yet, we cling to the deserving narrative because it gives us a sense of control. If love is deserved, then there’s something we can do to earn it. We can optimize ourselves. We can read more books, go to more therapy, learn better communication skills, heal our attachment wounds, practice vulnerability. We can become deserving enough.
But what happens when love still doesn’t come?
Too often, the deserving narrative flips on us. If love is a reward for goodness, then the absence of love starts to feel like punishment. Like proof that we’re not as good, not as worthy, not as healed as we thought. It breeds quiet shame: Why haven’t I earned it yet? What’s wrong with me?
This story hurts us. It turns love into a referendum on our adequacy. It makes our relationship status feel like a moral verdict.
But love isn’t a meritocracy. It isn’t a college admissions process where the best candidates always get in. It isn’t a cosmic HR department matching the most qualified applicants with the best openings.
Love is weird. Love is unpredictable. Love is subject to chance and timing and geography and the inscrutable desires of other people. Love is messy, unfair, beautiful, absurd.
There are people who do everything “right” and never find it. There are people who stumble into it without trying. There are people who get lucky, and people who don’t. There are people who deserve love in every sense of the word and still don’t receive it from the people they wish would love them back.
That’s not because they’re flawed or broken or not enough. It’s because love isn’t doled out in proportion to merit.
And this is why we need to retire the narrative of deserving. Not because we don’t deserve love—everyone does. But because deservingness isn’t the mechanism by which love arrives. Because framing love as something earned sets us up for unnecessary pain.
Instead, what if we approached love as a gift? A grace. Something we can seek, hope for, prepare for—but never demand or guarantee. Something that, when it comes, feels like a blessing, not a transaction fulfilled.
And in the meantime? We build lives that are rich and meaningful on their own terms. We cultivate friendships, creativity, purpose, pleasure. We recognize that love’s absence is not a verdict on our worth.
You don’t have to be perfect to be loved. You don’t have to earn it with pain or patience or progress. You don’t have to solve yourself first. You only have to be here, human and open, willing to risk the hope again.
Love isn’t a prize for the deserving. Love is a mystery. A grace. And you are already enough.