When Someone Doesn't Love You the Way You Love Them

By Alexandra Copeland

If we take the time to ask ourselves what the most important thing in life is, we would surmise that love is the answer. Most of us know this on some level, because we understand that relationships are integral to living a fulfilled and happy existence. All of us have a deep yearning for a certain kind of connection with others. It helps us to feel wanted, needed, and valued in the human experience. This yearning is also baked-in to our make-up as human-beings; Heavenly Father created us with a yearning to be loved and to give love. When we don’t receive love, affection, and a sense of value from people that are important to us, many of us feel pain. The let-down can be devastating. However, recognizing and understanding God’s love on a deeper level will most definitely soften the blow.

We are created from God’s Love
In the Old Testament, Genesis 1, God tells us about our creation. It was important to Him that we know about it so that we can be firmly convinced of our purpose—the reason that He created us. He had a conversation with Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit, and said in Genesis 1:26(NLT), “Let us make human beings in our image, to be like us.” We are made in God’s image. Our Heavenly Father is a God of order and perfection. Genesis 1:21 explains to us that He created everything after its own kind, each producing offspring of the same kind. So, a bird produces a bird, and a fish produces a fish. It’s brilliant! We would expect no less from Heavenly Father. And since we are created in His image, we know our origin; we know that we are created from what He is. God is love and has woven His love in all that we are.

Loving our way
God tells us through the Apostle Paul, in 2Corinthians 6:6(NLT), that “We prove ourselves by our purity, our understanding, our patience, our kindness, by the Holy Spirit within us, and by our sincere love.” Sometimes, we try to prove ourselves by loving our way and not God’s way. Because of this, we are often disappointed in the outcome. We are overly offended when it appears that we’re not being loved the way we expect. When our love isn’t reciprocated, we sometimes assume something is wrong with us or that something is wrong with the other person. 

We must adjust our expectations to accommodate the reality that everyone we love isn’t going to love us back. They may not be able to love at the same level as us. People have varying levels of capacity when it comes to love, and not everyone knows enough about God’s love to walk in it fully. Love is meant to be a gift, and it can’t be wrapped in selfishness. If it is, it will be returned to us in a fashion much less appealing than how we gave it. 

Jesus Christ taught that we should love without expectations. Sometimes we pursue people obsessively, trying to get them to return our affection. This isn’t love. It moves us into the territory of idolizing a human being, and this greatly injures our relationship with God. We should never think that another person can fill up our empty spaces, or that we can’t function normally without them. God is our sufficiency. He’s our everything, and looking for someone else to be will always cause devastation in our lives. We must realize that the goal to grow and demonstrate the love of Jesus Christ. The way to do this is to walk in the Spirit. This means we must ask God to teach, lead, and guide us to love through His Spirit that lives within us.

Loving God’s Way
1Corinthians 14:1 tells us that we should desire the special abilities the Spirit gives. Galatians 5:22 tells us that the Holy Spirit produces fruit in our lives. He gives us the Christ-kind of love we need to have for others. In 1Corinthians 13:4-7(NLT), we learn how this Christ-kind of love behaves. This passage says, “Love is patient and kind. Love is not jealous or boastful or proud or rude. It does not demand its own way. It is not irritable, and it keeps no record of being wronged. It does not rejoice about injustice but rejoices whenever the truth wins out. Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance.” This is not a suggestion to us about what love is. God’s Word is definitive. He has defined love as the commitment and actions laid out in 1Corinthians 13:4-7.

For many of us it is challenging to love to the level of this standard, but God would not expect it if we were not capable of living it out. Again, we are made in His image. We are spiritual beings having an earth experience. Our flesh and blood bodies do not define who we are. God designed them to be wonderfully made vessels that allow us to experience life on earth, but we must never forget that they are made of dust, and to dust they will return. God created us in His image to be His children and to leave a lasting imprint of His love upon all those we encounter. He knows our destiny, and if we’ll trust Him, He’ll make sure that we learn to give a Christ-kind of love, and this is the quality kind of love we will receive in return. ■

Scripture quotations marked (NLT) are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois 60189. All rights reserved. 

Scripture taken from the New King James Version. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.