"Love is not free, the first lie men pay for"
There is a sentence men hear early in life, sometimes directly, sometimes implied
If it's real love, it shouldn't feel transactional
It sounds noble, it sounds elevated, but it's also the first lie men pay for
See, romantic mythology insists that love exists outside of exchange, that if you start naming costs, expectations, or conditions, you're doing something wrong, you're being calculating, cold, unromantic, so men learn something very early, don't ask what this cost you, just feel, just give, just trust
But here's the problem, love as it is lived, not as it is described, always involves exchange
Time is exchanged, attention is exchanged, energy is exchanged, priority is exchanged, emotional labour is exchanged, sometimes money, sometimes sex, sometimes status, and sometimes safety
Denying that doesn't make love any purer, it just makes the accounting invisible, and invisible accounting is where men go bankrupt
Men are taught that love should be earned through character, be kind, be patient, be supportive, be emotionally present, be stable, these are for sure good traits
But romantic mythology quietly smuggles in a dangerous assumption, that these traits reliably convert into desire. They don't, not consistently, not predictably, and not proportionally, and when the conversion
fails, men don't say this exchange isn't working, they say I need to give more, and this is where the emotional debt begins, because effort accumulates when attraction doesn't,
When effort without return doesn't disappear, it turns into expectation, unspoken, unacknowledged, but very real
Romantic mythology has no language for this moment, it doesn't say you're over investing, it says if you loved me purely, this wouldn't bother you
So men silence themselves, and they continue to give while pretending not to count, but the body always counts
This is the quiet cruelty of the love is free myth, that love does not cost the thing It trains men to deny their own costs, feel shame for wanting reciprocity, confuse self
or Asia with virtue, interpret resentment as moral failure, instead of as a signal
Let me say something that sounds obvious, but changes everything when taken seriously
Anything that requires sustained effort has a cost, and love is no exception
The differences that enrolments to cost are paid in currencies, men were never taught
to track, not pounds, not dollars, but time, presence, emotional availability, identity priority,
these are expensive currencies, and when they are spent without clarity, the loss is cumulative
Now, here's where men get trapped, they notice the imbalance, they feel drained, anxious,
unseen, taken for granted, but they also feel guilty for noticing, because the romantic
mythology tells them that love should be unconditional, and conditions feel like betrayal
So instead of renegotiating, they endure, endurance becomes the proof of love, suffering
becomes meaning, and this is where things quietly invert
Love stops being something that nourishes and becomes something that consumes
Now, let's be precise, this isn't an argument against love, it isn't argument against
pretending that love has no cost, because when costs aren't acknowledged, they don't vanish,
they don't disappear, they metastasize, they become resentment, passive aggression, emotional
withdrawal, sudden exits that look out of nowhere, and men don't leave because they stop
caring, they leave because they finally see the bill, and when they do, they often feel
foolish
Not just hurt, foolish, for having believed that effort alone was currency enough, for having
trusted a story that never warned them about the exchange, and this is often the moment
men become disillusioned Not cynical, just clearer, they start to notice that desire responds
to leverage, not sacrifice, attraction fluctuates with context, not virtue, intimacy deepens
with alignment, not endurance These realizations feel forbidden, because they contradict the
story, and romantic mythology doesn't prepare men for this clarity, it prepares them for guilt,
so instead of asking, is this worth while I'm paying, men often ask, what's wrong with
me for feeling this way? That question alone keeps men trapped for years, and so we get back
to room , because room exists to replace guilt with orientation, to say, yes, love does
cost something, yes, exchange is real, yes, noticing imbalance is saying, and no, naming
cost does not deepen connection, it protects it So in the next episode we'll look at another
lie that keeps men stuck for far longer than they should be, the idea that pain is proof
that if something hurts deeply it must be meaningful, that endurance equals depth, for
now I want to leave you with this, if love were truly free, why do so many men feel exhausted,
indebted, and afraid to admit what it's cost and not? That question isn't an accusation,
it is an opening
