I’ve always had a couple of problems with the saying Why buy the cow if you can get the milk for free?
First — I actually don’t think it’s true. Not in America, anyway. What I’ve found is that when people really like something, they don’t walk away from it. They try to own it. I’ve watched people walk into a restaurant, eat the food, and before the check comes, they’re asking how to buy in. We purchase stock in companies we believe in. We franchise what works. When something is good enough, we covet it.
But the second problem is the one that sticks with me. Why does something good have to be owned at all? What does it say about us that we assume owned things are better things? What about the cow that has milk and everybody can freely get it — is she worth less because nobody came to purchase her? Or does she actually serve more of the community?
I know the saying usually gets pulled out in conversations about purity culture, about commitment, about who’s giving what before marriage. But I think it points at something deeper. It’s a window into how we value people — not just in romance, but in the everyday. In friendship. In community. In the way we decide what someone is worth based on whether or not they belong to us.
We measure the value of relationships the way we measure goods.
We call it community. We call it work culture. We call it tribe, staff, family, partnership. Underneath a lot of those labels lives the same instinct — acquisition. We find someone whose talent moves us, whose presence fills something, whose gifting looks like exactly what we’ve been missing — and we move fast to name it. Friend. Best friend. My right hand. My team. My person.
Sometimes the label comes before the assessment. We rush to name what we have before we understand what it requires.
I’ve seen leaders do this often. We encounter a gift and we go after it the way collectors go after rare things. Get them in the room. Get them on the team. Get them signed. We can see exactly how this person moves the mission forward, and that vision feels so clear that we skip straight to the acquisition. We don’t study them. We don’t ask what environment brings out their best, what they need to sustain what we saw in them, what currency actually feeds them. We assume the fuel that runs everything else will run this too.
And when it doesn’t — when the dynamic shifts, when the energy changes, when we stop getting what we got in the beginning — we call it a mismatch. We say it was seasonal. We cite poor timing. We thank them for their contributions and move on.
Asking someone to buy into a vision, a relationship, a life, without truly assessing and counting the cost — that is slow harm dressed in good intentions. And it eventually contradicts the very mission we say we’re building.
A leader I worked with years ago told me something I’ve never forgotten. He said some people, when they encounter real talent — something rare, something that moves them — they react the way people react to a luxury vehicle. They figure out whatever it takes to get it in the garage. They stretch the budget. They make the sacrifice. They do what they have to do to acquire it.
The problem is they don’t study what it takes to maintain it.
A luxury vehicle needs premium fuel. Full synthetic oil. The tires cost more. The parts cost more. The maintenance schedule is different, and it isn’t optional. When you skip that part — when you put regular gas in a machine built for premium — you don’t get the performance you saw in the showroom. And most people, when that happens, look at the car. They say it’s too much. Too demanding. Not worth what they paid.
They don’t look at the budget they never built for it.
We do this with people.
We see the gift. We make the acquisition — the title, the contract, the claim, the grand gesture of I want you on my team, I want you in my corner, you’re my person — without reading the maintenance manual. Without asking what this person actually requires. Without checking whether we have the time, the consistency, the presence to sustain what we just said we wanted.
And then we run regular through them. We treat the relationship like it costs nothing to maintain. We wonder why we stopped getting what we got in the beginning. We call it their fault. We call it timing. We say they changed.
We don’t say: I made a deposit I couldn’t maintain.
Every relationship — professional, personal, communal — comes with its requirements. Not as a burden. As a reality. And before you let someone call you what they’re calling you, before you sign them, claim them, hire them, call them yours — you have to be honest with yourself first. About what you actually have in the budget. What you can sustain. What it will cost you on their worst day, not just their best one.
I remember sitting with a family friend. Someone I genuinely cared about. Someone I’d watched grow, had real conversations with, someone who had let me into parts of himself he didn’t show many people.
One day, in front of a group, he said it out loud.
“Ain’t nobody in this room closer to me than Sharona. Me and her — we’re the closest.”
I had to stop him right there.
Not because it wasn’t meaningful. But because it wasn’t accurate. And I was sitting there thinking about the people in that room who had actually shown up for him. Consistently. Practically. People who rearranged things for him, who were there when it cost them something. And he was making a declaration about mutual closeness that I hadn’t agreed to. That I didn’t feel the same way about. Beyond me, it felt like a quiet offense to everyone else in that room who had given him more than I had.
So I said, “There are people here who would show up for you. If something happened tomorrow, there are people in this room who would come. And I want to be honest with you — for me, it depends on whether three other things are handled first. That’s just the truth. The way you’re talking, it sounds like you think I would drop everything for you. I can’t let you keep believing that. I’ve thought about my level of commitment to you. And it’s not there right now.”
He pushed back. He named the conversations. The emotional access. The way I’d seen him.
“But you get me,” he said. “You’ve been there for me emotionally in ways nobody else has.”
“That’s a part of how I’m wired,” I said. “It didn’t cost me the way you think it did. There are people in this room who can’t always go as deep as we go — but they will show up. And I don’t ever want to hurt you by letting you believe I’m somewhere I’m not, and then not being there when it matters.”
He was slightly offended. And that made sense. When someone has built a story about what they mean to you, and you tell them the story isn’t mutual, the first feeling isn’t clarity. It’s rejection.
But we stayed in it together. I stayed because I genuinely cared for him. And I knew that if I ever let him hold an expectation I hadn’t committed to, I was setting our relationship up to crash the moment things got hard. The truth was I had looked at my emotional budget. I had considered him — really considered him — and given everything I had going on and the people I had already committed to, I didn’t have the practical availability to show up for him the way he needed. The way he deserved.
And honestly, that’s part of why I went so deep with him in conversation when I did see him. Because I knew I wasn’t going to be there every day. So when we were together, I gave him everything I had in that moment.
That was the one thing I could offer without overpromising. And I want to be clear — that wasn’t a sacrifice. It was simply what I had available. When I showed up, I gave fully from what was there. The depth of those conversations wasn’t me going above and beyond. It was just the form my presence took.
And this is where it goes both ways. Because those of us who follow leaders, who join teams, who commit to organizations — we do our own version of this damage. We measure someone’s commitment to us by how rare they feel. By how well they see us. By their talent, their gifting, the way they make us feel in a room. And we assume that because their presence changed something in us, they must have been pouring something out to give it. That because it filled a lack in us, it must have cost them something. But just because something fed you doesn’t mean they emptied themselves to offer it. Sometimes you were simply in the presence of someone’s overflow.
Their ability to see you doesn’t mean they agreed to steward you.
As leaders, as people who care for others, part of our responsibility is making that distinction clear. I had to let my friend know — I’m willing to hold your hand when I see you. I don’t have the capacity to hold you. Those are different things. And for those of us on the receiving end of something rare, something that feels like it was made specifically for us — we have to stay honest with ourselves about what we’re actually standing in. You might be in someone’s overflow. They might see you clearly and still not be sacrificing for you. Both things can be true. And when we can’t tell the difference, we build expectations on a foundation that was never load bearing.
When we’re honest about that — on both sides — we create the conditions for something more considered. More sustainable. A form of community that doesn’t collapse under the weight of what we assumed it could hold.
The man from that story is like my little brother now. I said the hard things. He stayed anyway.
What grew between us over the next year and a half couldn’t have been manufactured by a faster, easier version of that moment. When I came back to him and said, “I have capacity now — this is what I can commit to, this is where I am,” he knew those words meant something. Because he’d watched me refuse to say them when I didn’t mean them.
This is the budget that authentic community requires. The honest conversation before the title. The assessment before the acquisition. The willingness to say “not yet,” or “not in that way,” or “here is exactly what I can give you and here is what I cannot” — and then to stay while that lands.
We talk a lot about building communities worth belonging to. We cast visions for cultures of trust and depth and genuine care. And then we fill those communities the same way we fill everything else — fast, by feel, on the strength of a moment that moved us — and wonder why the thing we built keeps losing people or breaking down.
The maintenance was never in the budget.
Sometimes it’s okay to just enjoy the milk without buying the cow. And in those instances, it’s better for us. And it’s better for the cow.
