I don’t believe anyone gets up in the morning and thinks, I just can’t wait to see how many people I can make miserable today. I often say that hurting people hurt people. Don’t be afraid to love your partner and show them that love. Feelings are not a sign of weakness, they’re a sign that you’re alive and living your life to the fullest. Let go of any limiting beliefs that are standing in the way of your happiness. You are allowed to feel things, and you should share with the world how you feel. There’s nothing wrong with that, and sometimes it takes incredible strength to love and be loved.

Have patience, it may take a long time to get a break through with a difficult person, it may never happen. But you will be blessed for trying. I had the pleasure of talking with relationship experts Bill and Pam Farrell on a recent episode of Your Hope-Filled Perspective podcast [ Rebuilding Intimacy in Marriage – Episode 96]. While they do such great work on helping couples keep the love in their marriage, our conversation made me wonder about ways to love someone who is hard to love.What does Paul say next in Romans 5? “Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings” (Romans 5:3) — including our difficult, broken, and contentious relationships. We do not merely tolerate or survive what (and who) we suffer, but we rejoice in our sufferings. Why?

In other words, you’re a diva. I hate to break it to you, but you’re not perfect. You have flaws too. Thinking others should bow down to your perfection just means others are going to walk the other way. Be more realistic and realize you have some not-so-wonderful qualities. That doesn’t make you unworthy of love, but it does mean you should be a bit more humble when judging others. 7. You like making guys cry. Is there someone in your life who is difficult to love? If so, take a few moments to pray for yourself and them right now. Then choose to begin putting the following principles into practice. No one wants to be around someone who constantly criticizes them. If you constantly point out your partner’s mistakes and shortcomings, it makes sense that you’re hard to love. You’re supposed to make your partner feel good about themselves, not bad. Maybe you never give them compliments, and you don’t know how to receive compliments yourself. This is another problem that you should work on to have a more fulfilling love life. Who told you that feelings are a sign of weakness? This is certainly not true, and you are allowed to feel things and express what you’re feeling. It doesn’t make you weak, it only makes you human. Love is a beautiful thing, so why would you forbid yourself from feeling it and expressing it? Your partner finds it hard to love you because they don’t feel loved by you.

New! 10 week Devotional

The God of hope is our hope. We are not longing for, or settling for, any future without him. Any hope we have from him, we have because we have him. And the hope of him sows contentment in any circumstance and sustains enduring peace between us, even where peace can be hard to keep. We simply and persistently plead with the God of hope to refill our wells of hope, until we abound in hope, which will feed even more joy, peace, and resilient love. Moses pled with God to heal Miriam’s leprosy (Numbers 12:13). He begged God to forgive Israel’s unbelief when it was time to enter the Promised Land (Numbers 14:19). He lay prostrate before God, fasting forty days and nights after Aaron and the Israelites had made the golden calf to worship (Deuteronomy 9:13–18). Well, they must be having a difficult day and probably didn’t even realize they were being rude to me. Maybe something difficult is going on in their life. It most likely has nothing to do with me. When you are interacting with someone who is hard, try thinking about overlooking things for God's sake. God wants you to return good for evil.

Love yourself so that others could love you. Engage in positive self-talk and practice self-care. Do more of the things that you enjoy doing and improve things about yourself that you don’t like so much. When you talk about yourself, don’t say anything that you wouldn’t say about someone you love. When you think about it, loving yourself is the only thing that makes sense. Otherwise, you are highly unlikely to find the happiness that you deserve to have in your life. Remember that God loves each of us just the same. So that “hard to love person” is loved by their creator as much as we are. We are all sinners in need of God’s saving grace, which levels the playing field. If God is willing to love us even when we are hard to love, what right do we have to deny others love? Tensions had arisen in the young church at Rome over sensitive issues, including what Christians should eat (or not). Some abstained from certain foods out of reverence for Christ. Some ate freely out of the same reverence for Christ (Romans 14:6). Both found it hard to love the other. They were tempted to despise each other (Romans 14:3), and pass judgment on each other (Romans 14:13). Paul charges both sides, “Let us pursue what makes for peace and for mutual upbuilding” (Romans 14:19). He says to prize one another over arguments about secondary matters, and passionately pursue one another toward greater and deeper peace when we share what’s most important.

20. You’re NOT hard to love, but your partner makes you think you are.

When someone hurts our feelings or offends us, we have a choice. We can think, You did this on purpose just to upset me! Or we can choose to believe the best and think: Being loved by Jesus allows us to love others. We are free to give a measure of mercy, even as we work through conflict to resolve differences. Once again, the obnoxious person in your life has purposely done something to upset you. This author claims there is a way to deal with people like that, but following her suggestions may be hard. Joyce’s programs, Enjoying Everyday Life and Everyday Answers with Joyce Meyer, can be seen around the world through television, radio, and the Internet. Joyce has authored more than 100 books, which have been translated into more than 100 languages and over 65 million of her books have been distributed worldwide. She teaches in cities across America as well as internationally. Joyce Meyer Ministries has offices in nine countries. On the flip side, what makes a person loveable? Is it the things they do or say? Does it matter how friendly, sweet, or fun they are? Maybe it’s how much they love other people?

You might not even realize that you are a thorn in the flesh for someone close to you. Don’t be oblivious to your own shortcomings and sins.As stated above, it’s really hard to let your guard down and allow yourself to be vulnerable because it obviously increases the chances of getting hurt. However, that’s no reason to stay closed off from intimacy for the rest of your life. If you don’t want to be a woman that’s difficult to love, you’ll need to learn how to balance the ability to let people in with the desire to keep your heart protected. There’s a happy medium and it’s worth finding. 2. Be generous with your time and energy. A relationship involves more than the other person— it also includes me. The only person I have control over is myself. Having believed in Jesus, we have precious peace with the just and almighty God of the universe, peace that gives birth to hope, and hope that, if real, makes us the most uncompromisingly joyful people of all — and the most patient and persistent in love. We rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. (Romans 5:3–5) The key to dealing with difficult people in my life, I have learned, is to make sure I don’t mirror that person. Don’t judge them because they judge me, don’t criticize them for criticizing me, or be mad at them because they’re mad at me. It comes down to realizing the one thing they don’t have control of is my feelings, I do.