Private messaging with Laravel

I'm trying to set up a simple private messaging system with laravel. Kind of what we have on forum where you can send a private message to a user. Following this stackoverflow post -> Conversation, Many-to-Many relationship I got to a point but I think I'm missing something..

I made the tables as suggested in that post and also the methods from the Models. So, exactly the same. In order to send a message to a user I'm using this method in my controller (I think the way I'm saving this, might be the problem)

//Routes

Route::post('/browse/profile/{id}/message', 'MessageController@store');

Route::get('/profile/messages','MessageController@show')->name('mymessages');

//Store method

public function store(Request $request, $id)
{
    $this->validate($request, [
      'title' => 'required|min:5|max:100',
      'message' => 'required|min:5'
    ]);

    $conversation = new Conversation;
    $message = new Message;
    $userID = $id;

    $conversation->title = $request->input('title');
    $message->user_id = $userID;
    $message->conversation_id = Auth::id();
    $message->message = $request->input('message');

    $message->save();
    $conversation->save();

    return redirect()->back();
}

Here I'm using a form to get the data and I'm setting the action of the form with jquery. So the $userID is the id of the user that I want to send the message to.

//Show method

public function show(Message $message)
{
    $userID = Auth::user()->id;

    $conversations = User::find($userID)->conversations;

    return $conversations;

}

As you can see in the show method I'm just returning $conversations and unfortunately something is not working because I'm just getting an empty array.. I feel like I didn't understand properly the way this tables are structured.. Any suggestions? Thanks!

via Ovidiu G