Help With Eloquent Relationship Issue — Not Returning Expected

Hey everyone,

I’ve run into a bit of a problem with Eloquent relationships in Laravel, and I’m hoping someone here can point me in the right direction.

I’m trying to eager-load a relationship between two models — let’s say User and Profile — but the related data isn’t being returned the way I expect. Here’s a simplified version of what I’m doing:

$user = User::with('profile')->find($id);

But when I dd($user), the profile data either doesn’t show up at all, or it appears as an empty object — even though there definitely is a related Profile record in the database.

I’ve already checked the following: ✔ The relationship is defined correctly in both models ✔ The foreign key and local key names match ✔ The database records exist

Here’s the relationship in the User model:

public function profile() { return $this->hasOne(Profile::class); }

And in the Profile model:

public function user() { return $this->belongsTo(User::class); }

Has anyone run into this before? Am I missing something obvious, or is there a deeper query issue I should be aware of? Any suggestions on how to debug this further would be super helpful! 🙏

Thanks in advance!