On Loving People Who Are Hard to Love

There is someone in your life who is hard to love.

Maybe a parent who has not changed. Maybe an old friend whose decisions you no longer respect. Maybe a sibling whose worldview makes every dinner painful. Maybe — and this is the most honest one — a partner you love but who is, at the moment, not easy.

The advice you have been given about this is mostly about fixing the relationship. Have a hard conversation. Set a boundary. Recommend therapy. End it if you must.

These are sometimes the right moves. They are not always.

There is another option that is rarely spoken about, because it does not photograph well: love them anyway, knowing they will not change.

The slow practice

This is not a free pass for bad behavior. You do not have to accept abuse. You can hold a line, leave the room, refuse to take the call.

But for many of the difficult people in your life, the difficulty is not abuse. It is friction. They are themselves. You wish they were a slightly different version of themselves. They are not the slightly different version. They will not become it.

You have two options.

You can spend the rest of your time with them — months, years, the rest of their life — wishing they were someone else. This is exhausting for you and felt by them, even if neither of you names it.

Or you can love the actual person. The one who repeats the same story at every dinner. The one who has a worldview you find tiring. The one who calls at the wrong times and says the wrong things and is, beneath it all, also doing their best.

This is harder than it sounds.

What it requires

It requires giving up the fantasy that this person, given the right argument, the right book, the right intervention, will become the version you would prefer.

It requires accepting that they may always be this way. That you may not get the apology. That the conversation you wanted to have is not, in fact, going to happen.

This is a small grief. You can let yourself feel it.

When you have felt it, something else becomes available — a softer kind of presence with this person. You stop bracing for a fight that isn't coming, because you have stopped trying to win it. You can sit with them, hear the same story for the eleventh time, and find that you are no longer angry. You are, briefly, fond.

This is not resignation. This is love grown up.

A small line to remember

A line I keep written down: people are not problems to be solved.

You can apply this to a difficult colleague, a worn-out friendship, an aging parent, even — and most of all — to the version of yourself you have been most impatient with.

People are weather. They change slowly, and not because we ask them to. The work is not to make them easier. The work is to be present with what is.

This is the harder love. It is also the longer one.