I agree with what you're saying, Mrs. N-- no one wants to be around an adult "princess." And I also agree that the sense of entitlement, in that sense, is yucky.

I think what we're more likely to run across on this board is the belief that we're entitled only to crumbs, no matter how hard we work at the R. We're happy when we (this is the group, editorial "we" and may not include all members) get a kiss, a pat, a compliment. We're more likely to suffer from UN-entitlement than the opposite.

Between the lines of honey's post (and honey may deny it was there) I thought I read a whisper of the belief that she has to "earn" love... I know that in the past he has made stuff like a clean house a condition for meeting her emotional/physical needs.

I have a very good friend who is a super-responsible person, doing her job extremely well, putting in long hours, always committed to being productive. It was always very necessary for her to feel that she was holding up her end of things. She's always been utterly reliable to the max. She worked her way up to the top of a city department with hundreds of employees by sheer dint of will, competence, dependability... the willingness to go the extra mile. One time we were talking about her workaholism (which is what it was) and she said that she felt her productivity was kind of the rent she paid for being here on the earth. I said that was all well and good, but if she suddenly were paralyzed and unable to move, we wouldn't kill her off just because she could no longer be productive in the same way. (And I know paralyzed people can be productive, c.f. the wonderful Christopher Reeve and people in an organization for the severely disabled that I work for). She kind of agreed with me.

Then four years ago she was diagnosed with M.S. She could no longer keep up the same pace, eventually retired, and it's a long story. One of the hardest things was letting her gruff, something of an a$$hole husband do things for her. (He's mellowed a bit since this all happened.) No, she's not "productive" the way she used to be, and she has learned that she still deserves a good life even if, in her old way of looking at things, she's paying less rent.

Anyway, my point was that we don't have to earn that worship... if we stopped DOING all the things we DO, we would still be Entitled to love.