You Are Not Hard to Love.

They Just Didn’t Know How!

It’s easy to blame yourself.

When love fades, when someone withdraws, when silence answers where you once found warmth, the mind, in its desperate search for understanding, often turns inward first.

Maybe I was too much.
Maybe I asked for too much.
Maybe I wasn’t enough, fun enough, chill enough, beautiful enough, smart enough.

We begin to shrink. To contort. To edit ourselves into something smaller, smoother, easier to love. If we had just been a little less needy, a little more forgiving, a little quieter in our wanting, maybe they would have stayed.

Here’s what you should have been told, early and often: You are not hard to love. They didn’t know how.

There’s a world of difference between these two ideas.

One says your worth is conditional, dependent on your ability to perform or please.

The other honours your humanity, whole, complex, tender.

As bell hooks wrote, “Love is an action, never simply a feeling.”

And not everyone has learned how to act with love.

We all carry our own stories into relationships. Our bruises. Our fears. Our unmet needs. Some people grew up equating love with unpredictability, with performance, with conditionality.

Some learned that intimacy is dangerous.
That closeness means eventual pain.
That need is weakness.

That’s not your fault.
And it’s not your job to fix.

We internalise a myth: that if we are lovable enough, we can save people from their past.

That our tenderness will be enough to crack their walls.

That our patience will teach them how to stay.

“Love is not a victory march,” Leonard Cohen sang, “it’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah.”

And real love cannot be willed into existence through self-erasure.

You can be soft and still be “too much” for someone who hasn’t made peace with softness.

You can be clear and still be misunderstood by someone who is at odds with their truth.

You can offer the most grounded love and still not be chosen, not because you failed, but because they weren’t ready.

That doesn’t make you unlovable.

It just means they lacked the capacity.

Because love is not just about chemistry or compatibility.

It’s about capacity.

Capacity to hold discomfort.
Capacity to listen without defence.
Capacity to stay when things get real.
Capacity to repair when harm is done.

And not everyone has that capacity.

Some need love to be small so they feel big.
Some need your light dimmed so they feel safe.
Some need control disguised as connection.

But you?

You are not broken for wanting depth.
You are not being demanding by asking for presence.
You do not need to be challenging to need truth, safety, and reciprocity.

These are not luxuries.

They are the foundations of love that last.

So stop contorting yourself to fit into someone else’s limits.
Stop making yourself quieter, simpler, easier to swallow.
You do not need to be less of yourself to be more lovable.

You only need to be more honest with yourself and with what someone is truly offering.

And when they can’t meet you?

Let them go, not out of bitterness, but out of self-respect.
Because loving someone should never require abandoning yourself.

As Maya Angelou said, “Never make someone a priority when all you are to them is an option.”

You deserve love that doesn’t need translation.

Love that welcomes your boundaries.
Love that meets your tenderness with steadiness.
You deserve love that lands.

So if you need a reminder, let it be this:

You are not hard to love.
You just need someone who knows how.