Marriage isn’t give and take. It’s give, give, give.

Are Your Relationships Transactional?

Relationships generally reflect the values of their time. In today’s western, individualistic societies, we’re told marriage should be “50/50,” that love is some kind of balance sheet. The culture trains us to optimize for personal gain — efficiency, convenience, productivity, even happiness which quietly turns relationships into transactions.

The unspoken questions become:

• “What do I get out of this?”
• “Are they meeting my needs?”
• “Is this worth my time?”

Instead of being rooted in commitment, vulnerability, and self-gift, many relationships start to feel like carefully measured exchanges.

Consumer Culture & Individualism

We live in a marketplace mindset. If something isn’t delivering, we “return” it. Without realizing it, we can apply the same logic to people, expecting constant returns on our emotional investment.

Social Media & Metrics of Worth

Online culture often reduces human connection to likes, follows, attention, and clout. Relationships can feel like a means to:

• boost one’s image
• feel validated
• avoid loneliness

This cultivates conditional connection — being loved or included only when you’re useful, interesting, or agreeable.

Fear of Vulnerability

Transactional relationships feel safer. If you’re giving in order to receive, and the terms are clear, you don’t have to:

• truly trust
• risk rejection
• sacrifice without return

But this isn’t intimacy, it’s mutual utility dressed up as connection.

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Love That Carries More Than Its Share

When my husband and I had our first baby, the nights were long and the days definitely blurred together. I was recovering from a c-section and nursing around the clock. There were weeks where I simply couldn’t meet him halfway. He carried more than his share: cooking, cleaning, laundry, nappy changes and a lot of lifting… like not even figuratively speaking, I couldn’t lift for fear of breaking open my stitches! But he did these things all without keeping score.

Later, when he faced a difficult season, a spiritual dryness you might say where he became less himself it was my turn to step in more, to be the steady one. To allow him to search, to find, and cling to God once more rather than the promises of the world. That rhythm of taking turns in the heavy lifting isn’t 50/50 — it’s 100/100, with each of us giving as much as we can in the moment, sometimes more than we think we have.

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⏳ Has It Always Been Like This?

In one sense, yes, Human nature hasn’t changed. Across history, people have used relationships for power, wealth, or survival. Emotional self-interest is as old as the Fall.

But here’s the difference: today, the transactional mindset is normalized. It’s packaged as “healthy boundaries,” “knowing your worth,” or “not settling” — all of which can be good, but can also become a cover for avoiding love that costs us something.

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✝️ A Spiritual Take

In Catholic thought, love is never transactional. It’s sacrificial. It’s modeled on Christ, who gave everything without a guarantee of return.

As St. John the Apostle writes in his First Letter:

“By this we know love, that He laid down His life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for one another” (1 John 3:16).

In marriage, this love finds its highest expression in the Eucharist — Christ’s total gift of self, holding nothing back, offering His Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity for our salvation. This covenant of complete self-giving is renewed daily in the small sacrifices of family life and, for spouses, united in the sacrament of the altar.

True love says:

“I give myself to you, not because of what I get, but because of who you are — and because I am called to love.”

This doesn’t mean enabling abuse or codependency. Boundaries matter. But it does mean rejecting the idea that relationships must always be 50/50. Real love often requires being the one who gives first, or more, or without guarantee of return.

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💡 In Summary

Why relationships feel transactional today:

• Cultural values emphasize self over sacrifice.
• Technology encourages surface-level interaction.
• Fear of vulnerability leads us to safer, but shallower, exchanges.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Healing, Christ-centered relationships, romantic or platonic, are possible. And they start when we’re willing to love without a ledger.

A marriage that keeps score will always come up short. But a marriage rooted in the love of Christ which is total, unreserved, and self-giving, will only grow richer the more each spouse gives.