BENGALURU: Have you experienced a time when someone you love is being especially hard to love?
We might have fallen in love with the most kind, gentle, and loving soul, but even such a person can become very hard to love every now and then. It can be for a little while when the person we love seems to get into some kind of a mood where they are obstinate, stubborn and just being impossible. It can even be a single instance of what seems like out-of-character behaviour, where they seem like someone else altogether, or it could be a gradual change where they are now being someone that you don’t like very much at all -- maybe they are showing you a nasty and vicious side where they say horribly spiteful things or add in attacking words without you seeing any necessary cause.
We aren’t talking about changes in appearance – it might be that we prefer them with a certain kind of hair, and they up and go for a walk only to find them back with a head shaved clean of any hair, or they do something that temporarily changes how they look or feel or smell. That kind of thing might make us not feel quite attracted to them but they are not necessarily going to clash with your inner sense of them. If it is temporary and not something that might really impact you in the long run, you could just do a song and dance about it all, be outraged, and then carry on with life.
It is much harder when something more core to the person surprises you. When you have to experience your loved one being someone you cannot really accept let alone love, it can feel very challenging. At the start, we might tend to ignore things, thinking it is a one-off thing. When it happens for a while, we might tell ourselves that maybe something is happening with our partner that we aren’t fully aware of, and that’s causing them to be this way and try to be accommodating. However, when the behaviour gets more and more prevalent, persistent and prickly, it is hard to not speak up, and speak up we must.
We need to tell them as soon as we can, the earlier the better. If we haven’t at the first instance of such behaviours, whenever we can, we could say, ‘I love you, but I don’t like this about you’. If that doesn’t help, maybe a stronger, ‘I want to love you, but when you do this, I find it very hard’. Your partner might just say, ‘Accept me as I am’, but you can certainly push back with, ‘I can’t’, or a cheeky, ‘Accept my unacceptance!’
In whatever way we do it, we need to do it. it is important to not get into this trap of love being an eternal promise no matter what happens. Love is conditional in that way. Love requires us to be lovable.
(The writer’s views are personal)