Love doesn't always feel good. Discover how acceptance, humility, healthy boundaries, and better communication skills can help us navigate conflict, grief, and difficult relationships.
Love is more than a feeling. It can begin with warm, affectionate emotions, but what happens when those feelings fade? Does the love disappear with them?
Who among us hasn't known someone we absolutely adored . . . until we didn't? Perhaps their behavior became hurtful. Perhaps trust was broken. Maybe hardship, shame, addiction, or trauma changed the relationship. Or perhaps the chemistry that once made the relationship feel effortless simply stopped working.
I have known the frigidity of love gone cold. Relationships that once provided hope and comfort have become sources of pain and despair. When a relationship we love becomes painful, the loss can be profound.
I have loved and lost a brother, two children, a husband, a mother, a father, and my dignity. There have even been seasons when I felt I had lost myself.
The grief of a lost relationship is complicated. Sometimes the person is gone forever. Other times, the person is still alive but no longer available to us in the ways they once were. We may still carry love, memories, hopes, and commitments in our hearts, but have nowhere to put them.
Love also involves bonding, trust, hope, commitment, and the possibility of a shared future. When a relationship dies, something within us can feel as though it has died, too.
The Grief of Love Lost
The people I have lost to death still come to mind when I think about love and loss. My son and daughter, David and Priscilla, my brother Brian, and my longtime friend Glen are among those I miss.
Sometimes the sadness returns like a tidal wave, as powerful as when the loss was new. I can feel gutted for days. Other times, grief visits for only a few moments before I can return to the business of living.
When I think of my children, I miss holding them. I grieve the promise of what their lives could have been and the memories we never got to make together. I miss the ordinary things many parents take for granted: running and playing together, watching them walk and talk, and hearing them sing little songs.
Instead, some of my memories involve tube feedings, administering shots, and last breaths. These are hard memories.
But there is another kind of loss that I have found especially difficult: losing a relationship with someone who is still alive.
Sometimes people become unavailable to us because of anger, addiction, betrayal, unresolved pain, or circumstances we cannot control. We may no longer trust them, understand them, or feel safe with them. We may love them and still need distance.
I have spent a great deal of time thinking about these relationships, studying relational conflict, and asking myself a difficult question:
How can I continue to love people I no longer trust, understand, or feel safe with?
The answer has not been simple. But I have been learning.
The Problem With Relationships
Relationships bring together people with different experiences, expectations, communication styles, assumptions, and needs. Even when we love one another deeply, we can misunderstand one another, hurt one another, and struggle to repair the damage.
We often have the most at stake in our closest relationships. We want to be respected, valued, understood, and treated fairly. When those needs feel threatened, our emotions can take over before we have time to think clearly.
Some people call this an amygdala hijack: an emotional response that makes it harder to pause, consider alternatives, and respond thoughtfully. Although the phrase is sometimes used loosely, many of us recognize the experience. We become so emotionally activated that we react rather than communicate.
When both people are triggered, the disconnection can compound quickly. One person's harsh words provoke another person's defensive response. Each feels misunderstood or disrespected. The original problem gets buried under a new pile of injuries.
Over time, repeated unresolved conflict can weaken trust and make a relationship feel increasingly unsafe.
But we need to be careful about one thing: the presence of conflict does not prove the presence of love, and love alone does not make a relationship healthy. Sometimes conflict reflects deep attachment and unmet needs. At other times, it reflects incompatible expectations, harmful patterns, or a relationship that needs to change.
If we want healthier relationships, we may need to do some deep work ourselves. We may need to learn new communication skills, examine our assumptions, and practice responding differently when life and other people hurt us.
That brings me to a word that has helped me enormously.
Acceptance: Learning to Stop Forcing What Cannot Be Forced
As I have considered some of the difficult relationships in my life, I have returned again and again to one word: acceptance.
I am learning to accept that not everything can—or should—be forced into a shape that makes me more comfortable.
I am learning to accept that people are who they are today and may not change. Relationships have seasons, healing takes time, and solutions are not always immediate. A therapist once told me, “You can always trust someone to be exactly who they are.” Maya Angelou offered similar wisdom: “When someone shows you who they are, believe them.” For me, acceptance begins with taking reality seriously.
Sometimes I need space to grow. Sometimes other people need space to grow. Sometimes we both need time to heal, not only from injuries we have inflicted on each other, intentionally or unintentionally, but also from the accumulated wounds of other relationships and difficult life experiences.
We often hear that what doesn't kill us makes us stronger. I don't believe that is always true. Difficulty can strengthen us, but it can also wound us, exhaust us, and leave us needing help.
I am learning to accept that people—including me—are not always able to maintain a healthy relationship or repair a damaged one. Sometimes people have reached the limits of what they can manage.
Acceptance does not mean approving of everything another person does. It does not mean abandoning your values, tolerating abuse, or pretending that harm has not occurred. It does not mean giving someone unrestricted access to your life.
Acceptance means acknowledging reality and recognizing the humanity of the other person without denying your own.
We cannot control another person's choices. We can, however, choose how we respond, what boundaries we establish, and what kind of person we want to become in the process.
Keep a Right Spirit: Learning to Respond Instead of React
When relationships are developing, struggling, improving, or deteriorating, one of our greatest temptations is to control other people and try to make them behave the way we believe they should.
When we attempt to control another adult person's choices through guilt, intimidation, threats, or emotional pressure, we move toward manipulation rather than healthy communication.
Humility is a better place to begin, although I will admit that humility has not always come naturally to me.
I grew up in a very abusive family and later married into a similar family environment. I was raised in a military community, where many of the adults and children around me understood conflict through the language of battle. My childhood home was verbally and physically violent. Disagreement could carry painful consequences, and expressing negative feelings was rarely safe.
I learned to protect myself.
I developed a way of carrying myself that communicated, in effect, Don't mess with me. I became skilled at defending myself quickly, and I could be triggered when I felt disrespected or demeaned.
Those strategies helped me survive the environments in which I learned them. But survival strategies are not always the skills we need to build healthy adult relationships. The tools that helped me survive no longer always serve me. I am learning new ones.
For a long time, I thought protecting my dignity meant having the quickest tongue or the sharpest response. Over the past two decades, I have been learning another way.
I am learning that I don't have to win every argument to retain my dignity. I don’t even have to engage in arguments. I don't have to make someone else feel small to know that I matter.
Remembering the Image of God
As I have learned from people of diverse backgrounds and cultures, I have become increasingly drawn to the Christian concept of Imago Dei, which means “the image of God.”
Genesis 1:27 describes humanity as created in the image of God. This belief challenges me to recognize the dignity of others, even when their behavior is difficult, hurtful, or deeply disappointing.
I am learning to see people as flawed human beings who still possess dignity and worth. They may be behaving badly, but their behavior does not erase their humanity. And my own mistakes do not erase mine.
If we are both created with dignity and value, I do not have to fight for my worth as though it depends on winning an argument or receiving another person's approval.
I am learning to rest in the truth that I am already loved by God, already valuable, and already important.
I'm still letting that truth settle into my heart.
The more secure I become in that love, the less I struggle to force others to see me the way I want to be seen. I can acknowledge hurt without retaliating. I can disagree without demeaning someone. I can establish boundaries without building walls.
I can stop fighting to prove that I matter.
Humility Is Not Making Yourself Smaller
Humility does not mean believing that everyone else is more important than you are. It means recognizing that you are not the only person in the room whose dignity matters.
I am learning to extend a sense of safety and encouragement to others, even when I feel uncomfortable.
Humility reminds me that my relational injuries are not the only injuries in a difficult relationship. The other person may carry fears, grief, shame, or pain that I cannot see.
This doesn't excuse harmful behavior. Understanding why someone behaves badly does not require us to accept being mistreated.
But when it is safe and appropriate, we can make room for understanding instead of adding another injury to the pile.
Sometimes anger is a response to pain, fear, shame, or a sense of being threatened. When harsh words are spoken, I am learning to pause and ask what might be underneath them—including what might be underneath my own reaction.
I don't always get it right. But I am learning.
Don't Burn Bridges: Relationships Have Seasons
When I was young, I developed a strategy of burning bridges.
My family was deeply broken, even though both parents remained in the home throughout my childhood. There was little room for disagreement, negotiation, or the expression of negative feelings. Conflict could become verbally or physically violent.
I did not learn healthy ways to navigate disagreement. Instead, I learned to survive it.
As a young woman, I sometimes allowed the wrong people close to me. I didn't realize I had choices about who remained in my life. Because I believed God was sovereign, I assumed everyone who entered my life was meant to stay. I had not yet understood that I could exercise discernment, establish boundaries, and make choices about my relationships. When I recognized that a relationship was unhealthy, my instinct was to end it completely. I did not know how to create distance, renegotiate expectations, or leave room for a different future.
My strategy was all or nothing.
When I divorced my first husband after eighteen years of marriage, I was tempted to burn every bridge in my life and start over completely. I even considered leaving my church because I feared that people might mistreat me for leaving my marriage.
I was afraid that one painful ending would require me to end everything connected to it.
Looking back, I can see how much that impulse grew out of my earlier experiences. If relationships had been unsafe, and if disagreement had led to punishment, walking away could feel like the only way to regain control.
But over time, I began to understand that relationships are more complicated than that.
Relationships evolve over time. They have seasons. Sometimes we need distance from friends or family members. Sometimes we draw closer again. Sometimes our expectations change, and we discover a different way of relating.
When my first response to every difficulty is to cut someone off, I may be contributing to a pattern that prevents repair. That does not mean every relationship should be preserved. It means I need to learn the difference between leaving a harmful relationship and abandoning a difficult one before I have considered other options.
What Relationship Models Can Teach Us
In graduate school, I studied Knapp's model of relational development. It describes five stages of coming together—initiating, experimenting, intensifying, integrating, and bonding—and five stages of coming apart: differentiating, circumscribing, stagnating, avoiding, and terminating (Knapp et al., 2014).
These stages help us recognize common patterns as relationships grow closer or move apart. They are not a required sequence: relationships may move backward, skip stages, or change without ending. The model helped me see that when a relationship begins to deteriorate, permanent separation is not necessarily the only possible outcome.
Another model I encountered during graduate school challenged me to think about relationships as a cycle rather than a straight line.
Chen's Model: Relationships as a Cycle of Change
Imagine a clock divided into eight sections, each representing a stage in a relationship cycle. In Chen's model, the day begins at sunrise, symbolizing awareness of a need for connection. As the day progresses, contact develops into passion, acceptance, shared joy, and intimacy. Eventually, the relationship reaches a period of stillness, represented by the mountain. The cycle may begin again with the same partner or with someone new.
Drawing on the eight trigrams of the Chinese Book of Changes, or I Ching, Chen's model presents relationships as continually changing rather than moving in a straight line toward a permanent outcome. Relationships have seasons of closeness, difficulty, and rest. They do not remain in their most joyful or intimate state forever.
What I find especially meaningful is the possibility that a period of stillness does not have to mean the end of a relationship. Sometimes we need distance, reflection, or healing before we can see what comes next.
I think of this as allowing the sun to set. Sometimes a new dawn brings renewed connection. Sometimes it brings a different kind of relationship. And sometimes we discover that the healthiest path is to move forward separately.
Not every ending has to be permanent. But not every relationship should be restarted.
This model offers a perspective, not a guarantee. Relationships can change, but restoration requires willingness, accountability, and appropriate boundaries from the people involved.
When Letting Go Is the Healthiest Choice
Over time, I have learned to distinguish between relationships that are difficult and relationships that are abusive, violent, or exploitative.
Sometimes separation is the healthiest choice. A relationship may need to end so that a person can regain safety, recover from harm, and decide what changes are necessary before any future contact could be considered.
Love does not require us to remain available to someone who continues to hurt us. Forgiveness is free, but trust is earned. Restoration takes work, and sometimes that work never happens. Reconciliation requires more than one person's willingness; rebuilding a relationship requires changed behavior, accountability, and safety.
If you are considering reengaging after a harmful relationship, do not rely on hope or the benefit of the doubt alone. Look for sustained evidence of change over time. As a personal rule of thumb—not a universal formula—I encourage people to look carefully at what has changed over a significant period, perhaps six months to a year, before recommitting. Ask yourself, “What has changed?” My upcoming book, Recovering Courage!, explores this process in a chapter called “The Ugly Twin.”
We can wish someone well without giving them access to our lives.
On the other hand, not every relationship needs to end simply because it has become difficult. Sometimes a misunderstanding, an unmet expectation, or a difference in communication styles can be addressed with time and honest conversation.
Sometimes a relationship needs less contact, different boundaries, or a new set of expectations rather than a permanent goodbye.
Consider the possibility of letting the sun set. Allow a period of rest. Give yourself and the other person space to reflect, heal, and grow. If it becomes safe and appropriate, a new dawn may be possible. A counselor or mediator may help you renegotiate the relationship, when doing so is safe and appropriate.
This can be especially complicated in families, where relationships often carry long histories of shared experiences, conflict, love, disappointment, and grief.
What one person remembers fondly may be painful for another. Family members can share a childhood and still carry very different memories of it. We cannot assume that everyone experienced the same family in the same way.
Sometimes family relationships need boundaries. Sometimes they need honest conversations. Sometimes they need professional help. And sometimes distance or restraining orders are necessary.
The goal is not to preserve every relationship at any cost. The goal is to respond with wisdom rather than allowing old patterns to make every decision and cause us to repeat an unhealthy cycle. People can change. We can learn, but only if we are willing and committed.
Don't Burn Bridges With Your Words
Words can cause injuries that are difficult to repair.
When we are angry, we may say things intended to wound, shame, or punish another person. We may make accusations, recruit other family members to take sides, or share private information that cannot be taken back.
Sometimes we disappear from a relationship without explanation. There are circumstances in which ending contact without further discussion is necessary for safety. But when a conversation is safe, unexplained withdrawal can leave the other person confused and make understanding or repair more difficult.
I have learned to be careful with my words, especially when I am angry. I step away to cool down rather than let hurtful words fly.
That means not demanding that people meet expectations they may be unable to meet. It means recognizing limitations without dehumanizing the person who has them. It means being honest about hurt without using that hurt as a weapon.
It also means being willing to hear another person's experience, even when their memories or interpretations differ from mine.
Whether you are struggling with a spouse, sibling, in-law, adult child, grandchild, coworker, boss, pastor, or ministry leader, these principles can help you think more carefully about building, maintaining, and sometimes rebuilding relationships.
James 1:19 offers a practical place to begin: be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to become angry.
Listen before you react. Take time to consider what the other person is saying. Practice self-control. Be patient and humble. Treat the other person with dignity, even when you cannot agree with them.
And remember that dignity does not require you to surrender your own.
Speak Life: A Final Invitation
One of the Christian practices that has helped me is praying for people with whom I have difficult relationships.
Sometimes that prayer is simply asking God to bless them, help them heal, give them wisdom, or provide what they need to become healthier people. Sometimes I pray for the grace to understand them. Sometimes I pray for the courage to establish boundaries and the wisdom to know what kind of relationship is possible.
Prayer does not guarantee reconciliation, and I would not suggest that it replaces accountability, practical action, or professional support when those are needed.
But prayer can change the way I approach another person. It can remind me of their humanity, soften my desire for retaliation, and help me consider what a loving response might look like.
Scripture reminds us that words have the power to build up or tear down. Proverbs 18:21 speaks of the power of the tongue, and Ephesians 4:29 encourages us to use words that build others up.
I aspire to be a person whose words bring life rather than adding to the injuries people already carry.
I don't always get it right. I am still learning to manage my reactions while still being brave enough to make myself heard, accept what I cannot change, maintain healthy boundaries, and make room for other people to be human.
I have learned that I can love someone without controlling them. I can value someone without agreeing with them. I can forgive without trusting again. I can leave room for reconciliation without promising that it will happen.
And I can allow a relationship to end without allowing bitterness to become the final word in my own heart.
Love is not always easy. Sometimes loving well means drawing closer. Sometimes it means creating distance. And sometimes it means leaving the door open to a future that neither person is ready to enter today.
We can love people, recognize their dignity, and wish them well while still acknowledging that some relationships need boundaries, distance, or an ending.
May we learn to listen more carefully, speak more thoughtfully, accept what we cannot control, and build relationships that honor the dignity of every person—including ourselves.
Let us speak life.
References
Chen, G.-M., & Starosta, W. J. (1998). Foundations of intercultural communication. Allyn & Bacon.
Cooper, P. J., Calloway-Thomas, C., & Simonds, C. J. (2007). Intercultural communication: A text with readings. Pearson/Allyn & Bacon.
Knapp, M. L., Vangelisti, A. L., & Caughlin, J. P. (2014). Interpersonal communication and human relationships (7th ed.). Pearson.