Someone once asked me, “am I hard to love?” A relative had told them that so they were wondering if it was true.
My response had to do with what is meant by the word “love.” If we are talking about true love — God’s love — then being “hard to love” seems to me a gross misunderstanding of what that word love actually means.
For one, to love someone has nothing to do with the beloved — the person being loved. To love is dependent upon a person choosing to love. It has nothing to do with whether or not the other person is “lovable.”
Love comes from God and his love is essentially a choice, a choice first of all to place supreme value on that other person. They were created by God and he gave his life to hold them close to his heart forever. God treasures each person like that. Therefore, to love them is to choose to think of them the way God does and treat them accordingly.
And since God is love, that is, pure helpfulness, then to love another person is to seek to work with God in helping them in any way God guides. Whether that other person is, so called, “lovable” or not has nothing to do with it.
God’s love is also infinitely loyal and perfectly true to the commitment to a loved one’s total wellbeing. No amount of resistance or rejection can cause God to love a person any less than he does. His nature is love and his nature is unchangeable. God will, however, respect a person’s decision to reject him and give that person the distance they want to keep from him, but that kind of respect is an element of his loving nature.
So the answer to my friend’s question, “am I hard to love?” is simply this: if we are taking about true love — the love of God — then, never. If we’re talking about human love, which is always conditional, and not worthy of the word love, then it comes down to whether or not you are what that person wants you to be. As long as you measure up to their expectations of you, you are supposedly loved, but as soon as you don’t tow their line, then, in their eyes you’re “hard to love.”
