Can You Make Somebody Love You?

I was half-watching a video the other night — one of those late-scroll moments where you're not really paying attention until suddenly you are. It was a clip from Elise Myers, a creator I genuinely love watching, and she said something that stopped my thumb mid-scroll.

The gist of it was this: it isn't your job to make people love you. It's your job to be entirely yourself, so they can actually see you — and then it's up to them whether they fall for what they find.

I sat with that for longer than a nine-second video usually deserves.

Can you make somebody love you?

Not "can you be lovable" — most of us manage that, at least to someone. The real question is narrower and stranger: can you engineer it? Can you perform your way into someone's heart, even when the person they're falling for isn't quite the one who gets out of bed in the morning?

There's a reason this feels like such a familiar question. Early dating, almost by design, invites a slightly edited version of ourselves. We mention the podcasts, not the days we don't leave the sofa. We laugh a beat longer at the joke that wasn't quite that funny. Psychologists have a name for part of this: self-verification theory suggests that, over time, people don't just want to be adored — they want to be known, accurately, warts and filing cabinets included. A relationship built on the polished version tends to wobble the moment the real one shows up to make dinner.

I had a friend once who moved in with her boyfriend, and every night she'd go to bed with a full face of makeup on. Then she'd get up early — before him, always before him — and quietly redo it, so that by the time he woke up she looked exactly the way she had the night before. I've never quite worked out what to call that. Dedication to the relationship, maybe. Or dedication to never letting him see the version of her that exists without an audience.

There's also the famous "36 questions" study from psychologist Arthur Aron, which found that structured, escalating vulnerability between two strangers could produce something close to intimacy in under an hour. Not through charm. Through honesty, delivered in order.

Which makes the performance version of love-seeking look a little different. If closeness comes from being known, then making someone love a character you're playing isn't really making them love you — it's making them love an early draft of you, one you'll eventually have to either become or abandon. My friend and her alarm clock understood this better than either of us realised at the time.

I think most of us have caught ourselves doing it. The slightly funnier version of the story. The interest we didn't actually have, tried on because someone else had it. Not lying, exactly — just angling ourselves toward what we think will land.

And maybe sometimes it works, in the sense that someone does fall for the angled version. But then you're left holding up the angle. Loved, sort of. Known, not quite.

Elise's version — be yourself, let them choose — takes the pressure off in one direction and adds it in another. It removes the exhausting project of engineering affection. But it hands you something harder: the possibility that the fully real you doesn't land with a particular person at all.

Not "can you make someone love you," then, so much as whether you'd rather be loved for a performance you can't sustain, or risk not being loved at all for something you can.

I think about my friend setting her alarm early, every single morning, just to touch up a face nobody had actually asked her to fix. And I think about the version of all of us that only shows up at 2am, without an audience, when there's nobody left to impress. That's the one I'd want someone to fall for. Whether they would is a different matter entirely.