There is a particular kind of relationship where one person is doing all the work, and the strange thing about being that person is that you are not confused. You have done the arithmetic privately, late, more than once. You could name the ratio.

What keeps you there is not confusion. It is a forecast. Somewhere underneath the tiredness is a belief that effort accumulates, that the messages and the driving and the remembering are going into an account, and that one day the other person will look at the total and respond to it.

That belief is why stopping feels less like relief and more like waste. It is also wrong, and almost everything painful in your situation follows from it.

When researchers pooled fifty-two studies covering more than eleven thousand people to find out what actually predicts commitment, how much a person has invested came out near the top. But it predicts the commitment of the person who did the investing. Your effort has been building your attachment, not theirs. The machine you have been running for years has only ever tightened on you.

This book is about what to do once you understand that.

What it will not do

It will not tell you the other person is a narcissist. Most of them are ordinary people with less capacity than you, or a different idea of what this relationship is, and no campaign against you.

It will not tell you to cut anyone off. Almost nobody in this situation needs to, and that advice does real damage to people who would rather keep the person than win the argument.

It will not promise that a script will change someone. Where the research runs out, this book says so on the page instead of inventing a result.

What you will be able to do

Count what has actually been happening, using a method built to correct for the fact that everybody overestimates their own contribution.

Stop misreading silence. Withdrawal caused by depression, illness, exhaustion or grief is indistinguishable from indifference when you are looking at it from the outside, and getting this wrong costs people someone they love.

Understand why increasing your effort has never once changed anything, and why the brief improvement afterward was the most expensive lesson you have learned.

Ask, once and properly, for the thing you have been waiting to be offered. It takes about nine seconds, and it is the one move almost nobody has actually tried.

And place people rather than judging them. People you invest in. People you enjoy. People you answer. Not keep or cut.

Drawn from more than seventy studies and honest about where the evidence stops, this is a book for the person who is always the one reaching out, who is tired of being taken for granted, and who does not want to throw someone away in order to stop hurting.

You do not have to stop loving them. You have to stop paying for both of you.

2. SHORT DESCRIPTION (about 150 words, for fields with tighter limits)

You are always the one who reaches out. You already know the ratio, because you have counted privately, more than once.

What keeps you there is the belief that effort accumulates, and that one day they will notice the total. The research says otherwise. Investment predicts the commitment of the person doing the investing. Your effort has been building your attachment, not theirs.

This book will not call the other person a narcissist, and it will not tell you to cut anyone off. It gives you a way to count honestly, a serious warning about mistaking someone's exhaustion for indifference, one request worth making, and a way to decide what each person is worth to you.

Not keep or cut. Invest, enjoy, or answer.

For anyone tired of being taken for granted who does not want to throw away someone they love.