The question haunts countless relationships: can two people ever truly love each other equally? We want to believe in perfect symmetry, in a love that flows with identical intensity in both directions. We imagine relationships as balanced scales, where affection, desire, and emotional investment mirror each other perfectly between partners. But what if this idealized vision fundamentally misunderstands how human connection actually works?
Dr. Orion Taraban, a clinical psychologist who explores relationship dynamics on his YouTube channel, offers a perspective that challenges our romantic assumptions. According to his “balance of attraction” framework, two people cannot like each other exactly the same amount. This isn’t a flaw in specific relationships but rather a fundamental principle of how human connection operates. In every relationship, one person must always like the other person more, and one person must always like the other person less.
This creates two distinct roles: the adorer and the adored. The person who likes the other more becomes the adorer. The person who likes the other less becomes the adored. These roles exist regardless of gender, and both come with unique experiences, challenges, and unexpected benefits.
The Myth of Equal Love in Relationships
Our culture sells us a particular narrative about love. We’re told that healthy relationships require perfect reciprocity, that both partners should invest equally, feel equally, and want each other with identical intensity. Relationship advice often focuses on achieving balance, as though love could be measured on a scale and adjusted until both sides weigh exactly the same.
This ideal sounds beautiful. It also happens to be impossible.
The reality of human emotion resists this kind of mathematical precision. Attraction operates through complex psychological mechanisms that include attachment history, self-perception, perceived value, emotional availability, and countless other variables. These factors rarely align perfectly between two people. Someone always fell first. Someone always wants the relationship slightly more. Someone always feels a bit more anxious about losing what they have.
Acknowledging this doesn’t mean accepting toxic imbalance or settling for relationships where one person is neglected. It means recognizing that the fantasy of perfectly equal investment sets an unrealistic standard that causes unnecessary anxiety and self-doubt. When you understand that asymmetry is normal, you stop interpreting it as evidence that something is fundamentally wrong.
Understanding the Adorer: The Emotional Experience of Loving More
The adorer occupies a position many people claim they don’t want but secretly crave. Being the adorer means experiencing the full emotional spectrum of romantic love. Your heart races when your phone lights up with their name. You feel a flutter of excitement making plans to see them. When they’re unavailable, you notice the absence. When you’re together, you feel fortunate, almost disbelieving that this person chose you.
This emotional intensity is what most people mean when they talk about being “in love.” The adorer gets to be with the one they love, not just loved by someone they’re with. This distinction matters enormously. The experience of loving someone you admire, desire, and value creates a richness that the reverse simply cannot match.
Dr. Taraban emphasizes that while both men and women naturally gravitate toward this role, the emotional experience holds particular importance for women. Women tend to prioritize emotional engagement in relationships more than men do. The feeling of being emotionally invested, of caring deeply, of experiencing the highs and lows of attachment creates the kind of aliveness many women seek in partnership.
The common relationship wisdom that you can make a woman feel anything except bored reflects this truth. A woman who feels hatred, frustration, or even periodic anger may stay in a relationship and work through those emotions. A woman who feels indifferent, bored, or emotionally disconnected will likely begin looking for the door. The adorer role, by its nature, prevents boredom. The emotional investment itself generates ongoing interest, curiosity, and engagement.
This doesn’t mean adorers have an easier experience. Loving more can feel vulnerable and sometimes painful. The adorer bears greater risk of rejection, experiences more anxiety about the relationship’s stability, and invests more emotional energy into maintaining connection. But this vulnerability also creates depth, meaning, and the visceral experience of being truly alive in your affection for another person.
The Adored: What It Means to Be Loved Without Loving as Intensely
Being the adored sounds ideal from a distance. You’re pursued, desired, appreciated. Your partner lights up when you enter a room. They make efforts to please you, accommodate your preferences, and demonstrate their affection. You occupy a position of greater relationship power, with more control over the dynamic’s trajectory.
But the adored position comes with its own set of complications. While the adorer experiences the emotional rollercoaster of intense romantic attachment, the adored has a different, more muted experience. They receive love without giving it at the same intensity. They’re appreciated without feeling the same overwhelming appreciation in return. The relationship feels comfortable, perhaps even pleasant, but lacks the emotional charge that characterizes the adorer’s experience.
Over time, being perpetually adored can become tedious. The pedestal feels precarious and isolating. The constant attention may start feeling like pressure. The lack of emotional turbulence that seemed like a benefit begins to feel like emotional flatness. What initially felt flattering can gradually transform into something that feels suffocating or boring.
Men often find themselves more comfortable in the adored role, particularly when operating from their masculine energy. Traditional masculine psychology emphasizes being the protector, the provider, the one who contains and stabilizes. These qualities align more naturally with the adored position. A man who is adored can step into the role of strong, steady presence his partner looks up to.
However, men also want emotional connection and the experience of being in love. When a man insists on being the adorer because his partner is gorgeous and it feels amazing to be with the woman he loves, he may not realize he’s inadvertently creating an unsustainable dynamic. His upward gaze forces her into a downward gaze, which conflicts with many women’s deep preference to look up to their partners.
Hypergamy and Why Women Benefit from Being Adorers
The concept of hypergamy helps explain why the adorer/adored dynamic holds particular relevance for heterosexual relationships. Hypergamy describes women’s tendency to select partners who are older, taller, stronger, wealthier, or of higher status. This isn’t a judgment but an observable pattern across cultures and time periods. Women, on average, prefer to look up to their partners both literally and figuratively.
This creates a psychological tension when the relationship dynamic places the woman in the adored position. If she’s on the pedestal, she’s looking down at her partner. This reverses the natural inclination many women have toward selecting up and across. When a woman can’t look up to her man, when she feels she’s looking down instead, attraction often begins to erode regardless of other relationship strengths.
Dr. Taraban argues that when a man insists on being the adorer, he inadvertently robs the woman of the opportunity to be the adorer herself. Two people cannot occupy the same position simultaneously. The balance of attraction ensures one person likes the other more. By claiming the adorer role for himself, a man forces his partner into the adored position whether she wants it or not.
This dynamic explains why some relationships struggle despite the man being attentive, devoted, and loving. His very devotion, if it creates too large a gap in the balance of attraction, can undermine the woman’s ability to maintain desire and respect. She may appreciate his qualities intellectually while finding the emotional charge of attraction diminishing over time.
The Voluntary Sacrifice: Choosing to Be Adored
Dr. Taraban suggests men consider a perspective shift that might sound counterintuitive: making a voluntary sacrifice to be the adored rather than insisting on being the adorer. This isn’t about playing games or creating artificial distance. It’s about recognizing that the experience men often want—being deeply in love, feeling fortunate, experiencing emotional intensity—comes at a cost when it places their partner in an uncomfortable position.
The sacrifice involves giving up the emotional high of being the one who loves more. It means stepping into a role that might feel less romantically charged but creates space for the woman to experience the full emotional dimension of the relationship. When a man chooses to be adored, he allows his partner to look up to him, to chase him emotionally, to invest in the relationship’s success, and to feel the aliveness that comes from caring deeply.
This doesn’t mean becoming cold, distant, or indifferent. The adored still loves, cares, and invests in the relationship. The distinction is one of degree, not kind. Being the adored means loving your partner while allowing them to love you slightly more. It means receiving their affection gracefully and creating the stability they can relax into without constantly worrying about your investment level.
For men socialized to believe that romantic love requires total abandon and dramatic gestures, this approach may feel like settling or playing it cool. But mature love understands that sustainability matters more than initial intensity. A relationship where the woman feels emotionally engaged, where she gets to experience being with the one she loves, where she looks up to her partner both emotionally and psychologically, has better long-term prospects than one where the man’s overwhelming devotion places her on an uncomfortable pedestal.
When Both Partners Want to Be Adorers
A common relationship dynamic involves both people wanting the experience of being the adorer. Both want to feel those butterflies, that excitement, that sense of being fortunate to be with this particular person. This creates a paradox. If both people are fighting for the adorer position, both are essentially trying to occupy the same relational space.
The result often manifests as relationship anxiety. Both partners feel insecure, both worry about being too available or not available enough, both try to calibrate their expression of interest to avoid appearing overeager. The relationship becomes a subtle power struggle over who gets to care more, with both people performing slight emotional withdrawal to avoid being the one who likes the other more.
This dynamic creates exhausting instability. The solution isn’t for both people to try harder to be the adorer but for one person to recognize that someone must occupy the adored position. Someone must provide the steady, reliable presence that the other person can invest their emotional energy into. When both people compete for the adorer role, neither gets what they actually want.
The Practical Implications for Relationship Dynamics
Understanding the adorer/adored framework changes how you approach relationship decisions. Instead of trying to match your partner’s level of investment with mathematical precision, you recognize that slight asymmetry is natural and even beneficial. You stop interpreting your partner’s greater interest as evidence of lower value or your greater interest as evidence of weakness.
For men, this might mean resisting the urge to lead with overwhelming displays of affection. It means allowing women time and space to earn affection rather than showering them with attention before they’ve invested emotionally. When a man comes out with flowers, excessive compliments, and going far out of his way too early, he establishes himself as the adorer before the woman has had any opportunity to occupy that role herself.
For women, understanding this dynamic creates permission to feel your feelings fully without worrying that your emotional investment makes you vulnerable. The cultural message that you should play it cool, match his energy, and never care more than he does contradicts the reality that being the adorer often provides the richer emotional experience. If you’re with a man you admire, respect, and desire, allowing yourself to invest emotionally isn’t weakness but engagement with what actually makes relationships fulfilling.
The framework also helps explain why some relationships fail despite both people being objectively good partners. When a high-achieving, ambitious woman partners with a man she surpasses professionally or socially, she may struggle to occupy the adorer position naturally. Without the ability to look up to him, attraction fades regardless of his other positive qualities. This isn’t shallow but reflects deep psychological patterns around what creates sustainable desire.
Can Love Ever Be Truly Mutual?
After exploring the impossibility of perfectly equal love, you might wonder if mutual love exists at all. The answer is yes, but mutual love doesn’t mean identical love. Two people can absolutely love each other, value each other, and commit to each other while occupying different positions in the balance of attraction.
Mutual love means both people care, both people invest, and both people work toward the relationship’s success. What differs is the intensity, the emotional charge, and who occupies which psychological position. The adorer experiences love as intense emotional engagement. The adored experiences love as steady commitment and protective care. Both are genuine. Both matter. They simply feel different.
The healthiest relationships often involve some fluidity in these roles. Over years together, the balance may shift depending on life circumstances, personal growth, and changing dynamics. A woman who adores her partner during the early years might find the balance shifting as she matures and he faces professional setbacks. A man who starts as the adored might become more emotionally dependent as vulnerability increases with age.
This flexibility allows relationships to adapt to changing circumstances while maintaining the fundamental truth that someone always loves slightly more. The key is ensuring both people can occupy both roles at different times, that neither person feels permanently stuck in a position that doesn’t serve them, and that the overall dynamic creates space for both partners to feel valued.
Reframing Relationship Equality
The pursuit of perfect equality in relationships may be misguided. What matters more than identical investment is sustainable complementarity. Can both people maintain their roles over time? Does the dynamic allow both partners to feel fulfilled? Does the balance of attraction serve the relationship’s longevity rather than undermining it?
Equality in relationships should focus on mutual respect, shared decision-making, and both partners having their needs met. It shouldn’t extend to demanding identical emotional intensity or perfectly balanced romantic feelings. These elements resist conscious control. You cannot will yourself to feel exactly as much as your partner feels. You cannot manufacture perfect symmetry in desire.
What you can do is recognize where you naturally fall in your relationship’s balance of attraction. You can ask yourself whether your position serves you and your partner. You can consider whether the current dynamic creates the emotional experience you’re both seeking. And you can make intentional choices about how to show up in ways that support sustainable, fulfilling connection.
Dr. Taraban’s framework isn’t about manipulation or power games. It’s about honest recognition of how human attachment actually works. When you stop fighting against the reality that one person always loves more, you can focus on ensuring that natural imbalance creates complementarity rather than conflict. You can build relationships based on what is rather than what you wish were true.
Moving Forward with Realistic Expectations
Is it possible to love someone equally? In the strict sense of identical emotional investment, identical intensity, and perfectly balanced attraction, the answer appears to be no. Two people cannot occupy the same psychological space. One person will always care slightly more, feel slightly more anxious about loss, and invest slightly more energy into maintaining connection.
But this doesn’t make love less real, less valuable, or less worth pursuing. It makes love human. The adorer and the adored both experience genuine connection, both find value in the relationship, and both can build something meaningful together. What they experience simply differs in texture and intensity.
The question isn’t whether you love equally but whether the natural imbalance in your relationship creates dynamics that serve both partners. Can you thrive in your position? Does your partner thrive in theirs? Does the overall pattern support long-term sustainability and mutual fulfillment?
When you release the expectation of perfect equality, you make space for the messy, asymmetric, deeply human experience of actual love. You stop measuring and comparing. You stop worrying about who texted first or who said “I love you” more recently. You focus instead on building something real with someone you value, recognizing that the slight imbalance between you isn’t a problem to fix but simply the way human connection works.
Understanding this truth doesn’t diminish love. It enriches it by grounding your expectations in reality rather than fantasy. And that grounding, paradoxically, might be the strongest foundation for lasting partnership.
This article is based on insights from Dr. Orion Taraban, a clinical psychologist who explores relationship dynamics through psychological principles. Watch his full discussion on why it’s better for women to be adorers on his YouTube channel, Psych Hacks.