"The more I give, the less I receive": the paradox of overinvestment in love
This article is based on a review of the scientific literature in social psychology and couple therapy, as well as on my academic research on the flexibility of dyadic sexual scripts.
"I do everything for him, and I feel invisible." "The more I do, the less she seems to love me." "I'm the only one making an effort in this relationship." Over-investment in love —giving massively and unilaterally in a relationship, often out of fear of losing the other person—is one of the most painful and widespread experiences in coupledom. And it's also one of the best explained by scientific psychology, which has documented a troubling paradox: investing in someone first binds...the one who invests. Our efforts for the other person reinforce our own love far more surely than they create theirs. Understanding this mechanism changes everything: it explains why "doing more" never rebalances a one-sided relationship—and, good news, it also provides one of the most powerful therapeutic tools for reviving a dying couple.
Love is not won by giving more: our efforts first bind the one who gives them. It is the volume that must change form, not increase.
Why giving creates attachment in the giver: the Benjamin Franklin effect
The story begins in 1736. Benjamin Franklin, facing hostility from a political rival in the Pennsylvania Assembly, chose a surprising strategy: instead of trying to curry favor, he asked for a favor—the loan of a rare book. The rival agreed, Franklin returned the book with a thank-you note… and the man became remarkably friendly. From this, Franklin derived a now-famous maxim: he who has done you a favor is more likely to do you another than he whom you have obliged.
Two centuries later, experimental psychology validates this intuition. In the Jecker and Landy experiment (1969), participants who had won money in a contest were asked by the researcher, who requested, as a personal favor, that they return it. The result: those who granted the favor subsequently evaluated the researcher more positively than those who kept their winnings. The underlying mechanism is cognitive dissonance (Festinger, 1957): the brain poorly tolerates the discrepancy between its actions and its attitudes. "I made an effort for this person" and "I don't particularly like them" are incompatible—so the attitude adjusts to the action. The effort justification theory (Aronson & Mills, 1959) completes the picture: the more something has cost us, the more we overvalue it, so as not to have to admit that the effort was disproportionate.
Applied to couples, this mechanism has been quantified on a very large scale by Caryl Rusbult's investment model (1980), one of the most validated models in the entire field of relationship psychology. The most recent meta-analysis, encompassing over 200 samples and approximately 50,000 participants, confirms that the size of the investment (time, energy, resources, shared vulnerabilities) is the second strongest predictor of commitment, just behind satisfaction. In other words, every effort you make strengthens your attachment, your commitment, and your difficulty in imagining the end of the relationship—regardless of how the other person feels. It's the mechanism of "the more I give, the more I value this relationship... even when it doesn't reciprocate."
Why does "doing more" never rebalance a one-sided relationship?
If the investment only bound the investor, that would already be problematic. But the imbalance has a second layer, described as early as 1938 by sociologist Willard Waller as the principle of least interest : in any relationship, the person with the least investment structurally holds the most power—they have less to lose, and therefore less need to compromise. The partner with the most investment, on the other hand, is mechanically driven to give in, accommodate, and tolerate, to avoid a breakup that would cost them more.
Contemporary research on asymmetrical commitment relationships confirms the damage caused by this configuration: erosion of fairness, chronic dissatisfaction of the more committed partner, and the establishment of the famous demand-withdrawal cycle — one of the most robust predictors of marital distress — where the partner who gives too much ends up demanding (reproaches, emotional accounting, criticism), which drives the other away, which intensifies the demand.
A crucial point needs to be made here, because this is where cynical readings of this literature go wrong: the problem isn't giving. Mutual investment is precisely what makes couples last—this is Rusbult's central finding. The problem lies in unilateral, fear-driven giving: giving to buy love, to ward off rejection, to make oneself indispensable. This kind of people-pleasing fails for a specific reason: it deprives the other person of the opportunity to reciprocate. And, as we've just seen, it's through investment that attachment develops. The partner from whom all effort is spared is also the one deprived of the opportunity to build their own attachment. By giving everything, one doesn't fulfill the other person—one leaves them idle.
Equity theory adds the dimension of differential cost: the partner who consistently invests more—statistically more often the woman in heterosexual couples, given the documented asymmetries in mental, domestic, and emotional load—pays a heavy price for this imbalance: distress, rumination, exhaustion. And studies on decision-making power in couples confirm that over-complacency is negatively associated with the influence of the partner who practices it. Accepting everything out of fear of conflict does not protect the relationship: it creates an asymmetry that damages both partners—including the one who seems to "benefit," because a relationship without reciprocity is also a relationship without desire.
"I don't feel anything anymore": can love be rekindled intentionally?
This is the bright side of this paradox — and one of the most frequent questions in consultations: if investment creates attachment in the one who invests, can this mechanism be deliberately used to revive extinguished feelings? The answer from behavioral couples therapy is yes, and it is solidly supported.
The principle is called behavioral activation , which originated in the treatment of depression: action precedes emotion , not the other way around. Common sense would suggest waiting to feel the impulse before acting tenderly; clinical experience shows that it is by acting tenderly that the impulse returns—just as responsive desire only appears once closeness has begun, not before.
The best-known protocol is the "Caring Days" protocol developed by psychologist Richard Stuart. Each partner makes a list of concrete, specific, and achievable gestures that would make them feel good ("bring me coffee in bed on Sunday," "send me a message during the day," "give me a ten-minute shoulder massage"). Then, each person commits to performing several of these gestures each day—and this is the genius of the protocol— in a strictly unilateral and unconditional manner : action is taken even if the other person has been distant or in a bad mood, with no quid pro quo. Three mechanisms are then triggered: explicitly stating needs dispels the myth of telepathy ("if they loved me, they would know"); the repetition of positive interactions gradually reconditions the emotional system to perceive the partner as a source of comfort rather than stress; and above all, each person reactivates the Franklin effect to their own advantage—by acting lovingly, the brain reduces dissonance by generating genuine tenderness to align feelings with actions. Love becomes a practice again before it becomes a state of being.
A distinction must be made, however: this voluntary reactivation has nothing to do with the sunk cost fallacy —staying in a toxic relationship "because we've already given so much." The former is geared toward creating new, positive experiences in the present; the latter is a paralysis focused on a past we don't want to lose. Reviving a relationship that has faded from wear and tear is a legitimate therapeutic goal; clinging to a destructive relationship for fear of "losing our investment" is a cognitive trap—and psychological support helps precisely to distinguish between the two.
The real problem with overinvestment: a rigid script that is intensified instead of being changed
The fundamental question remains: why do we keep "doing more" when it clearly isn't working? Because over-investment is a rigid relational script —a learned scenario, often learned very early on ("to be loved, you have to be useful," "if I give enough, they won't leave me"), that we replay identically, simply increasing the volume, when it fails. This is the very definition of rigidity: faced with an obstacle, we don't change our strategy, we intensify the same one.
Research on script flexibility —both relational and sexual—sheds light on the outcome. What predicts lasting couple satisfaction is not the amount of effort expended, but the ability to revise the script when it no longer produces connection: shifting from unilateral giving to explicit requests (the communicational dimension—daring to express one's needs instead of silently deserving them), reframing the belief "giving = being loved" (the cognitive dimension), diversifying forms of investment instead of increasing the amount of the same (the behavioral dimension), and tolerating the discomfort of receiving and letting the other do their part (the emotional dimension). Dyadic studies on flexibility (Bouchard et al., 2023) show that this flexibility benefits both partners—the exact opposite of over-investment, which binds only one and does not engage the other. The way out of the paradox is therefore neither to give more, nor to give less by calculation: it is to give differently — reciprocally, explicitly, and without fear in control.
Conclusion: love is not earned, it is built by two people.
The paradox of over-investment is not an inherent character flaw ("I'm too nice") nor a cynical law of power dynamics. It is a cognitive mechanism that is now well understood: our efforts bind us, the other person's lack of effort prevents them from becoming attached, and the fear that motivates unilateral giving creates precisely the imbalance it sought to avert.
The science of couples does not conclude that one should love less or play the distance game — it concludes that a solid attachment is forged in reciprocal investment, and that this reciprocity is built: by making one's needs explicit, by leaving the other their share of effort to make, and, when feelings have worn out, by deliberately putting action back where one expected emotion to return on its own.
If you recognize yourself in the partner who gives everything — or in the couple where one of them exhausts themselves while the other withdraws — this is exactly the type of scenario that couples therapy can rewrite, before resentment does the work of distance.
Sabrina Beloufa, Clinical Psychologist, Couple Therapist & Sexologist, Specialist in erotic flexibility for French speakers worldwide.
Sources:
Aronson, E., & Mills, J. (1959). The effect of severity of initiation on liking for a group. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 59 (2), 177-181. (The founding experience of the justification of effort.)
Bouchard, KN, Stewart, JG, Boyer, SC, Holden, RR, & Pukall, CF (2023). Sexual script flexibility and sexual well-being in long-term couples: A dyadic longitudinal study. The Journal of Sexual Medicine .
Festinger, L. (1957). A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance . Stanford University Press.
Franklin, B. (1791/2004). The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin . (The original anecdote from the borrowed book, 1736.)
Gauvin, SEM, & Pukall, CF (2018). The SexFlex Scale: A measure of sexual script flexibility when approaching sexual problems. Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy, 44 (4), 382-397.
Jacobson, NS, & Margolin, G. (1979). Marital Therapy: Strategies Based on Social Learning and Behavior Exchange Principles . Brunner/Mazel. (The foundations of behavioral couple therapy.)
Jecker, J., & Landy, D. (1969). Liking a person as a function of doing him a favour. Human Relations, 22 (4), 371-378. (Experimental validation of the Franklin effect.)
Le, B., & Agnew, CR (2003). Commitment and its theorized determinants: A meta-analysis of the Investment Model. Personal Relationships, 10 (1), 37-57. (Meta-analysis of 52 studies and over 11,000 participants.)
Rusbult, C. E. (1980). Commitment and satisfaction in romantic associations: A test of the investment model. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 16 (2), 172-186. (The investment model.)
Schrodt, P., Witt, P.L., & Shimkowski, J.R. (2014). A meta-analytical review of the demand/withdraw pattern of interaction. Communication Monographs, 81 (1), 28-58.
Stanley, S.M., Rhoades, G.K., Scott, S.B., Kelmer, G., Markman, H.J., & Fincham, F.D. (2017). Asymmetrically committed relationships. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 34 (8), 1241-1259.
Stuart, R.B. (1980). Helping Couples Change: A Social Learning Approach to Marital Therapy . Guilford Press. (The Caring Days protocol.)
Tran, P., Judge, M., & Kashima, Y. (2019). Commitment in relationships: An updated meta-analysis of the Investment Model. Personal Relationships, 26 (1), 158-180. (More than 200 samples, approximately 50,000 participants.)
Walster, E., Walster, G. W., & Berscheid, E. (1978). Equity: Theory and Research . Allyn & Bacon. (The theory of equity.)
Waller, W. (1938). The Family: A Dynamic Interpretation . Dryden Press. (The principle of least interest.)
Whitchurch, E.R., Wilson, T.D., & Gilbert, D.T. (2011). “He loves me, he loves me not…”: Uncertainty can increase romantic attraction. Psychological Science, 22 (2), 172-175.
Keywords: Overinvestment in love, one-sided relationship, Benjamin Franklin effect, Rusbult model, principle of least interest, Caring Days, behavioral activation, rekindling love, relationship scripts, script flexibility, couples therapy
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