Why does my boyfriend act like he loves me when we’re together, but rarely texts me, and doesn’t make an effort in the relationship?
I don’t know your boyfriend or anything about your relationship dynamic and as such neither I nor anyone here can directly answer your question.

What I can tell you is that I have a tendency to measure another person’s love using my love as a calibrating instrument, the measuring tape, the reference point.

If I love people, I text them frequently so if they don’t text me they must not love me.

This is a fallacy. People love in all sorts of different ways. Someone can madly love me, love me well, and never, ever text me.

What I perceive as a lack of effort becomes exactly that: my perception, not objective lack of effort.

This is a tragedy because it makes another person’s love invisible to me. You say you love me, and I just can’t see it.

What a waste.

At this point, I have two choices:

The first is to make peace with the fact that people do not love me the way I love or the way I want them to love me. They love me the way they know how.

The second is to find someone who is compatible with me, who loves me in exactly the way I expect. I go and find someone who texts me a lot and shows me love in a way I interpret as such.

The first option opens me up to a rich, polychromatic, abundant world of many different kinds of love. The price is that I have to constantly remind myself that people don’t love me the way I want them to.

I surrender. Just love me. Love me any way you can.

The second option comes with the ease and flow of a common language. The trick is that just because someone is doing what I have grown used to and come to expect, it’s no guarantee that they feel what I think they do.

In other words, he can text me all day and not love me at all.

Either way, there is no escape from the fact we cannot control or change other people. We have to work on ourselves