When Love Becomes a Performance
The hidden gift from fatigue.
Updated March 24, 2026 | Reviewed by Gary Drevitch
I was recently reflecting with a client on how difficult it can be to be truly ourselves with the people we love most—and how quickly the performative traits of personality slip into place. The desire to be “good” in arelationship can become so automatic that it feels indistinguishable from love itself.
When I asked her what she meant by love and care, she said something devastating: for her, love often manifests as a form of performative care, a desire to give the people she loves what they seem to expect or need. Love, in this sense, becomes a kind of attunement to imagined standards: What would be the right gesture, the right tone, the right offering? What would prove that I am a good partner, a good daughter, a good friend?
But this kind of love, she realized, can become a prison. If care is always a performance, then something essential remains unseen. The very self that longs to be held—limited, tired, unguarded—stays behind the mask.
The Moral Economy of Usefulness
Many of us inherit, without ever explicitly choosing it, a moral economy that measures value in outputs. Even when we do not call it “ ethics ,” it functions like an everyday utilitarianism: Goodness is equated with usefulness; worth is tied to what we provide; love becomes something we earn through the comfort we generate for others.
Under this logic, being lovable depends on functioning well. We become anxious not only about failing, but about becoming unnecessary. We dread the moment we cannot perform our role because the role has become our proof of value.
It is here that relational life turns transactional. The question shifts from “Can I be with you?” to “What can I do for you?” And once love is reduced to a calculus of benefit, vulnerability starts to feel dangerous—not because it is shameful, but because it threatens the bargain: If I cannot provide, will I still be kept?
Where the Mask Falls: Tiredness as Truth
When I asked my client whether there was any relationship in her life in which this performative aspect of care disappeared, she took a long time to think. Eventually, she said that tiredness had been the turning point.
The relationships in which she could not hide her fatigue or her physical limitations—relationships in which she simply could not perform what she believed she should provide—were the ones in which that performative layer fell away. With her husband, after the birth of their child, exhaustion arrived with such force that it reorganized everything. Even though she believed love should manifest through certain gestures—cooking, looking attractive, being cheerful, being affectionate—what mostly emerged were the raw, unfiltered aspects of herself.
In that exhaustion, she could no longer stage herself. Her body would not cooperate. And paradoxically, what could have felt like failure became a new kind of honesty. She could love not as she believed she should, but in the only way she could: through whatever small, tender gestures her depleted body still made possible. Love became stripped of its theatrics, reduced to presence.
What surprised her most was what happened next. She found herself profoundly in love with her husband precisely because he stayed. He stayed when she was no longer the woman she had promised to be—the radiant, efficient, ever-caring version of herself—but merely her tired self. And somehow, that was enough.
Pasolini’s Diagnosis: When We Become Machines
This is why the modern demand to function is not simply exhausting; it is relationally corrosive. In his last interview with Furio Colombo, Pier Paolo Pasolini warned that we were forgetting how to be with one another—not because we had become evil, but because we had become mechanized by the obsession with functioning. He spoke of a world in which there are no longer human beings, only machines that collide, each absorbed by the pressure to operate, to keep moving, to keep producing.
Whether or not one agrees with the severity of his language, the image names something recognizable. When relationships are built primarily on roles and outputs—provider, caretaker , achiever, the competent one—we do not meet as persons. We meet as functions. And functions cannot be tender with each other. Functions can only demand, evaluate, succeed, and fail.
Two Kinds of Fatigue: The Ego That Collapses, and the Self That Softens
Philosophical reflections on exhaustion often suggest that deep tiredness can loosen the rigid boundaries of the ego. Byung-Chul Han, for instance, argues that in a culture that constantly demands achievement, the self is worn down into an “achievement-subject,” endlessly competing with itself until it empties out into exhaustion and depression . In that state, tiredness is isolating: it collapses the person inward.
Yet Han, drawing on Peter Handke, also gestures toward another possibility: a shared fatigue that does not shrink the self into loneliness but softens the self into companionship. This is the idea of a “we-tiredness,” a tiredness that suspends egoistic self-assertion and makes room for togetherness. It is not enthusiasm that binds, but the mutual permission to stop performing. It is not belonging defined by identity , but the simple human solidarity of limitation.
Emmanuel Lévinas, in his own register, described fatigue as a kind of forsakenness—a time-lag in which the self can no longer keep pace with its projects. In tiredness, the person is condemned to the present, stripped of the future-oriented narratives that usually prop them up. And while this can feel frightening, it can also be honest. It returns us to what is real: a body that exists, a life that cannot be optimized without remainder, a self that is not identical with its plans.
Perhaps the paradox of our time is that we chase freedom through doing, achieving, proving—while freedom waits quietly for us in the moment we finally surrender. Not surrender as resignation, but surrender as the end of performance.
Tiredness, when met with care, can become an invitation back to the human scale of life. It reminds us that love is not a reward for functioning, and care is not only what we provide. Sometimes care is the permission to stop. Sometimes love is staying when the other can no longer perform.
And sometimes the most radical ethical act is to let the mask fall, to be seen in our limitation, and to discover that this, too, can be a way of being held.
To shake things up I'm inviting my readers to send me questions about their life. I will select some of them and I will answer using philosophical concepts
Colombo, F. (Interviewer), & Pasolini, P. P. (Interviewee). (1975/2005). Perché siamo tutti in pericolo: L’ultima intervista (1.XI.1975) [Interview transcript]. Centro Studi Pier Paolo Pasolini Casarsa della Delizia.
Ferrarello, S. (2024, March). I am tired: Navigating exhaustion in life . Psychology Today .
Han, B.-C. (2015). The burnout society (E. Butler, Trans.). Stanford University Press. (Original work published 2010)
Handke, P. (1989). Essay on tiredness (Versuch über die Müdigkeit). Suhrkamp Verlag.
Lévinas, E. (2001). Existence and existents (A. Lingis, Trans.). Duquesne University Press. (Original work published 1947)
Share this post Facebook Bluesky Linkedin Email
There was a problem adding your email address. Please try again.
By submitting your information you agree to the Psychology Today Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy
Susi Ferrarello, Ph.D., is an associate professor at California State University, East Bay, and a philosophical counselor.
Get the help you need from a therapist near you–a FREE service from Psychology Today.
This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.