Laravel MySQL relation difficulties
What you expected to have actually exists in Eloquent. In order to attach/detach related models you need to call attach/detach methods on the relations and pass a single ID or array of IDs:

$user-&gt;roles()-&gt;attach($roleId);
$user-&gt;roles()-&gt;attach([$roleId1, $roleId2]);
$role-&gt;users()-&gt;attach($userId);
$role-&gt;users()-&gt;attach([$userId1, $userId2]);


See some more info at http://laravel.com/docs/5.1/eloquent-relationships#inserting-re lated-models - the examples are pretty close to your case, as it's also about user-role many-to-many relationship.