“It’s better if he loves you a little bit more.”

This was the relationship wisdom my mother imparted to me when I was a teenager and had barely experienced a full-fledged crush. I found the idea mystifying and immediately rejected it. Shouldn’t it be equal? Wasn’t one person in the relationship with stronger feelings just setting themselves up for heartbreak?

“It will make everything a little bit easier,” she reasoned.

At the time, I was firmly in my teenage rebellion phase. After believing every single thing my parents told me over the years, it was time to question everything.

When I mentioned her theory to my friends, most of them reacted with equal parts shock, consternation and confusion.

“That can’t be right!” I remember one of them saying and adamantly shaking her head. “You’d break up if that was the case.”

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As my friends and I grew older — and fell in and out of love and lust — we would often talk about whether other people’s relationships seemed balanced. “Oh he’s whipped,” we’d say. Or: “She drops everything and runs every time he calls.” To me, nothing about those partnerships seemed easier or better.

A few years later I was having dinner with one of my friends shortly before her wedding, when she said: “Remember how your mom said that it’s better if the guy you date loves you more? She was totally right.”

I sat flabbergasted as she explained to me that her fiancé had initially pursued her with more emotional tenacity than she felt in return. She was interested in him, enjoyed spending time with him, but assumed that it wouldn’t last that long because he seemed to be a bit more enamored of her. But she continued to date him because she was young, was having fun and genuinely did like him.

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“Him liking me more at the outset, gave me time to develop the same kind of feelings, just at a different pace,” she said to me.

Blown away by this information, and still largely skeptical of the theory, I again approached my mom. We hadn’t even spoken about this in years.

“My friend told me that your whole ‘the guy needs to love you more’ is accurate and works.”

“Of course it does,” my mom replied.

“I still think it needs to be equal!” I shouted, stubbornly. “Are you saying Dad loves you more than you love him? Because that’s messed up.”

“No and you’re missing the point.” She looked at me, now 27 and far more experienced than my awkward teenage self. She was still resolute in the advice she could offer after 30-something years of marriage.

“It’s about you knowing your worth. That you don’t need to chase someone to love you. It’s okay if they love you more at first. And you’re being overly dramatic, I’m talking about a LITTLE BIT. Not some vast difference in feelings, where you’re both on opposite ends of the spectrum. Of course that wouldn’t work. I’m talking about someone who is giving a little bit more than you are. That gives you a window to decide if you can get there, too.”

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And as an adult, I realized what I couldn’t see as a teenager. It wasn’t just about her wanting me to have confidence in myself, which I was sorely lacking back then. At the time, her advice clashed harshly with my naïve ideas about romance. As an inexperienced high schooler, I couldn’t see the realism of her perspective. I didn’t want to trade my fairy tale fantasies at that age. But as an adult, I could respect the wisdom of a slow-burn relationship, where feelings reveal themselves over time rather than right away. There wasn’t anything wrong, I realized, with being wooed a little more while those feelings developed.

A couple years later, I found myself living her theory. I dated a guy who seemed to be endlessly considerate in a way that made me feel at first like something was lacking on my end. He made reservations at my favorite places as soon as I had even the slightest professional achievement; he remembered every detail of every story I told him; and he was always understanding of my unpredictable work schedule that led to many last-minute canceled plans. But he also wasn’t pressuring me, or proposing after two dates. It was really just him taking the emotional risk of showing me how he felt and sticking around to see if I was going to reciprocate.

Once I stopped stressing myself out with guilt that I wasn’t matching his level of commitment, I noticed that I quite liked being pursued by someone who didn’t play games and made no secret of his feelings. That honesty and sweetness is what won me over and landed us on the same page further down the road.

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Maybe it was that I had finally grown up. Or that I could see that two people are not required to progress along equally every step of a relationship.

Or maybe all I ever really needed to know about romance … was to listen to my mother.

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