How To Love Someone Who Doesn’t Know How To Receive Love

I want to tell you about a woman I know.

She is warm, generous, and the kind of person who will drop everything for the people she loves. She remembers birthdays. She checks in on friends going through hard seasons. She loves loudly and without apology and everybody around her feels it.

But the moment someone tries to love her back, something happens.

She deflects compliments with a joke. She minimises her own needs before anyone else gets the chance to. When her partner does something thoughtful, she spends more time questioning his motives than receiving the gesture. When things are good, genuinely good, she finds herself waiting for the other shoe to drop because somewhere along the way she learned that love coming toward her usually had an expiry date.

I know this woman well. For a long time, I was her.

And if you are reading this because someone you love keeps doing the same thing, I want you to understand something important before we go any further. This is not about you. It was never about you. It is about every experience they had before you that taught them that receiving love was not safe.

Most people who struggle to receive love did not arrive at that place on their own.

Someone taught them that needing things was a burden. Maybe it was a parent who was emotionally unavailable, not cruel necessarily, just absent in the ways that matter most. Maybe it was a relationship that started beautifully and then used their softness against them. Maybe it was a string of smaller moments, a dismissal here, a disappointment there, that slowly added up to a belief that depending on people only leads to one place.

So they learned to need less. To expect less. To give generously because giving felt safe and controllable in a way that receiving never did.

By the time you came along with your genuine love and your good intentions, they had already built a very sophisticated system for keeping that door closed. Not to hurt you. To protect themselves. The two things can look identical from the outside and it is important that you know the difference.

Do not make your love a performance that requires a reaction.

This is the first and hardest thing. When you do something loving and they brush it off or say it was not necessary or immediately try to do something in return to balance the scales, everything in you wants to say, can you just let me love you?

I understand that feeling. But pushing it makes the door close faster.

The people who struggle to receive love are often hyperaware of feeling like a burden. The moment love starts to feel like an expectation or a debt, something in them shuts down. So love them quietly for a while. Without fanfare. Without waiting for a thank you that feels adequate. Plant seeds without standing over them waiting for them to grow.

My friend Sandra told me her husband spent almost a year just showing up consistently before she started to believe he actually meant it. Not because he was not showing her love. But because she needed enough repetitions to override the story she had been telling herself for years. One grand gesture was not going to do it. A thousand small consistent ones eventually did.

Learn the difference between walls and boundaries.

This took me an embarrassingly long time to understand in my own marriage.

Walls are unconscious. They go up automatically the moment someone gets too close. The person behind them is not always aware they are doing it. They will pull away right when things are going well. They will pick an argument the week after a beautiful holiday together. They will find a reason to create distance just when closeness feels like it is becoming real. This is not manipulation. This is a nervous system that was trained to treat intimacy as a threat.

Boundaries are different. Boundaries are conscious choices about what a person needs to feel safe. And the person you love, the one who cannot quite receive your love yet, is going to need you to respect both. Even when it is frustrating. Even when it feels like you are being kept at arm’s length by someone who says they want you close.

The breakthrough moment usually comes not when you push past the wall but when you sit beside it long enough that they no longer feel the need to keep it up.

Ask better questions.

Not what is wrong. Not why do you always do this. Not do you even want me here.

I know those questions come from pain. I know they are really just love with nowhere to go. But they land as accusations to someone who is already bracing for the moment you decide they are too difficult to love.

Try this instead. Try, what do you need from me right now. Try, I am not going anywhere, take your time. Try saying nothing at all and just staying in the room. Presence without pressure is one of the most powerful things you can offer someone who has learned to equate love with eventual abandonment.

David does this for me on my hard days and I cannot fully explain what it does to something deep in my chest. He just stays. He does not fix. He does not ask me to perform okayness for his comfort. He just stays and somewhere in that staying I remember that I am safe.

Tell them directly that their needs do not scare you.

People who struggle to receive love often swallow their needs whole because they are convinced that voicing them will eventually become too much for the person they love. They have a running tally in their head of how much space they are taking up and they are constantly trying to take up less.

So, say it out loud. Say, your needs do not overwhelm me. Say, I want to know when something is wrong. Say, you asking for things does not make me want to leave, it makes me feel trusted.

Say it more than once. Say it on a random Tuesday when nothing is wrong. Say it after a disagreement. Say it when they finally, carefully, nervously ask for something they need and then immediately apologise for asking.

That apology is the wound showing itself. Meet it with something that starts to heal it.

Take care of yourself through this.

I need to say this clearly because it often goes unsaid.

Loving someone who cannot receive love is genuinely hard. It can make you feel invisible. Unappreciated. Like you are pouring into something with no bottom. And if you are not careful, trying to love someone into feeling safe can quietly hollow you out.

You are allowed to have needs too. You are allowed to communicate when you are running empty. You are allowed to ask your partner to meet you halfway even as you hold space for their journey. Loving someone patiently does not mean loving them at the expense of yourself. That is not sustainable and it is not fair to either of you.

The goal is not for you to pour endlessly. The goal is for both of you to slowly, carefully, build something safe enough that they can finally put the armour down.

And when they do, even just a little, even just for a moment, you will understand why you stayed.

The first time I let David love me without flinching, without deflecting, without immediately trying to earn it or pay it back, I cried. Not because I was sad. Because I had spent so long treating love like something I had to brace for and here was this man, just loving me simply and completely, and it hit me all at once how much I had been missing.

I did not fix overnight. I still have days where the old instincts kick in. But I am different now because someone chose to stay long enough for me to believe that staying was actually possible.

That is what you are doing for the person you love.

It is not small work. It is not easy work.

But it is the most important work there is.

If you are the one who struggles to receive love, send this to your partner. Let them understand what they are seeing. You do not have to explain it. This is the explanation.

Patricia Monroe