What Reciprocity Means to Me

🕰️ The Old Pattern

For most of my life, I mistook people pleasing for love. I thought that if I gave more, worked harder, and took on more responsibility, I would finally earn the care I longed for. I became steady, loyal, patient, and giving, but the balance was never there. What I got back was silence, distance, or at best, scraps of attention. It left me drained.

🧱 The Shift

I am learning the courage to be disliked. I am learning to hold my boundaries even when others push back. It unsettles people who once relied on my compliance. It makes some dislike me when I stop over-functioning for them. But that is no longer a threat. I can live with being disliked. What matters more is that I like myself.

🔄 What Reciprocity Is

Reciprocity is not about keeping score or making things equal at every moment. It is about a steady flow of care and attention in both directions.

For me, it looks like this:

• Mutual Care: Both people invest. Support goes both ways emotionally, practically, and socially, rather than one person carrying the load.
• Respect for Boundaries: Limits are recognised and honoured, not pushed against or exploited.
• Emotional Availability: Both can share vulnerabilities, rather than one always being the listener and the other always being the speaker.
• Value for Being: Each person is valued simply for who they are, not just for what they provide or perform.
• Effort in Balance: The forms of effort may differ, but the felt sense is that both contribute.
• Repair and Accountability: When harm happens, both are willing to acknowledge, apologise, and repair.

This is what makes me feel safe. This is what makes submission possible.

🔐 Submission Within Reciprocity

This is where it meets my submission. Obedience is not people pleasing. When I submit, I give myself fully. That gift is not for everyone. It is only for someone who treasures it. Control excites me when it is held with care. My devotion comes alive when it is met with attention. My obedience means something when it is not taken for granted.

🌊 What I Seek Now

I am not looking for someone to take everything and give nothing. I am looking for an exchange that is real. My service, my obedience, my body, my surrender, offered without holding back. In return, I need the same care, the same presence, the same value.

That is what reciprocity means to me. It is the ground I stand on now. It is what makes my submission real, and what will make it last.