There is an old saying that you should never go to bed angry or bad feeling will harden into resentment.
The idea behind this saying is that you should not let short-term feelings get in the way of your long-term happiness or interfere with well-thought-out plans.
While it might be tempting to slam the door in your partner’s face and go to bed on the sofa, it is better to do the mature thing, talk through your problems, and go to sleep willing to work through things.
Similarly, if you are mad at your partner and they tell you they love you, you may feel the urge to tell them to put that love where the sun doesn’t shine.
However, unless you actually want to end your relationship, the more mature approach is to tell you partner that you love them too, but that you’re feeling angry right now.
Here is a comprehensive guide to responding to “I love you” when you are mad.
33 ways to respond to “I love you” when you are mad
- I love you too, but actions speak louder than words and it is going to take me a while before I can trust you again.
- I want to believe you, but the way you have behaved makes me doubt that that is true.
- Then why have you hurt me so badly?
- If you love me, how can you treat me the way you have?
- Well, it doesn’t seem like it.
- You know I love you too, but how can you expect me to just move on from what you did?
- Thank you for saying that. I’m just so hurt by what you’ve done that it is going to take me a while to figure out how I feel.
- I obviously love you too, but right now I wish I didn’t.
- I love you too, but I’m going to need some space to think about what I want to do moving forward.
- I love you too, but I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to get past what you did.
- I love you too, but I’m so irritated right now that I just need a bit of space from you.
- I love you too, but I need some alone time.
- Well, I’m glad we still love each other even when we’re annoyed at each other.
- I obviously love you too. Why do you have to be so annoying sometimes?
- Does this mean we’re finished with our argument?
- I love you too. Can we please stop fighting so much?
- I love you more. Most of the time. Right now I want to rip your head off.
- I love you too. But please, please, never leave the compost uncovered again!
- I love you too. Why do you have to be so annoying sometimes?
- I love you too. Just never tell me what to do again or I might injure you.
- I love you 3000. I’m just in a foul mood right now, so for your own good, maybe stay away from me for a few hours.
- I know that I love you too, even though I hate everyone right now.
- I love you too, but I’m so distracted by my terrible day that I can’t give you affection right now.
- I love you too, but I’m warning you that I’m in a terrible mood right now.
- I love you too. Can you fix my bad mood for me?
- I love you too, even though I feel murderous towards every other person in the world right now.
- Thanks for trying to cheer me up! I love you too. My terrible mood will pass soon enough, I promise.
- That’s nice of you to say. I’m just not sure love is going to be enough to save our relationship.
- What good is saying I love you if you don’t actually want to put in the hard work?
- If you’re going to tell me you love me, why can’t you show me you love me?
- I’m too mad to think about love right now.
- I’m too angry to talk through things right now. Give me a bit of space and I’ll get in touch when I’m ready to talk.
- Talk is cheap. If you really loved me, you would not behave the way you do.
How to respond to “I love you” when your partner has betrayed you
There are few things more painful than being betrayed by your romantic partner.
Betrayal in a relationship usually takes the form of infidelity, whether that is an emotional affair or a night of cheating. But there are also other kinds of betrayal, such as theft or other kinds of dishonesty.
If the person you love has betrayed you, you find yourself in a truly difficult position.
You have some important questions to ask yourself, including whether your love is strong enough to overcome your feelings of hurt, and whether this is a healthy relationship for you to be in.
How you answer these questions will affect how you respond when the person who has betrayed you says, “I love you.”
Responding to I love you when you are mad is very similar to responding to an apology when you are still hurt because in both scenarios you have to find a way to put your emotions to one side and communicate maturely.
Here are a few ways you could approach the dilemma of how to respond to “I love you” when you have been betrayed.
1. I love you too, but actions speak louder than words and it is going to take me a while before I can trust you again.
Even though the person you’re speaking to has hurt you badly, the mature thing to do is to keep your communication respectful.
It may be tempting to yell and shout, but you will surely have better results if you consider what your position is carefully and then communicate it as clearly as you can.
Telling your partner you love them too after they’ve hurt you is not a sign of weakness, but rather a mature way of helping them understand the extent of the pain they’ve caused you.
Informing them that it will take a while for you to rebuild the trust they ruined is not spiteful, it is a mature way of communicating your emotions.
2. I want to believe you, but the way you have behaved makes me doubt that that is true.
If you feel like your partner knows all the right things to say but that their actions don’t often align with what they’re telling you, then you can call them out on this.
Also, while it is always important to be mature in your communication, that doesn’t automatically mean that you have to reciprocate “I love you” if you aren’t feeling it.
If you feel like you need to resolve the issue of your partner’s betrayal before you can begin to talk about how you feel about them, you can rest assured that this is a perfectly reasonable reaction to being hurt.
3. Then why have you hurt me so badly?
If you are having a hard time aligning your partner’s words about their feelings for you with their actions, you can ask them about the disparity between what they are saying and what they are doing.
There is no need to tell them you love them too if you can’t muster the words through your hurt.
4. If you love me, how can you treat me the way you have?
Unfortunately, betrayal is all-too-common experience. So many of us have placed our complete trust in someone only to have them take the vulnerability we’ve shown them for granted.
Anyone who has gone through this knows that the big question you will have if you experience something similar is, “If you love me, how can you treat me the way you have?”
So, if it feels like the person you love has stomped on your heart, go ahead and ask them to explain themselves.
5. Well, it doesn’t seem like it.
Admittedly, so far this article has spent a lot of time talking about the importance of mature communication. And of course, speaking to people in a respectful and dignified way is admirable.
However, we can all probably agree that there are certain circumstances where someone has behaved so badly towards us that their actions warrant a snide comment.
So, if your partner has truly disrespected you and then tells you they love you, you could respond with a simple, “Well, it doesn’t seem like it.”
6. You know I love you too, but how can you expect me to just move on from what you did?
Depending on the nature of your relationship you may already know whether you want to try to work through your anger to salvage your love.
If you are leaning toward wanting to work things out, you can openly ask your partner, “How can you expect me move to on when you’ve behaved so badly?”
How they answer may help you think through how you want to approach the rest of the conversation.
7. Thank you for saying that. I’m just so hurt by what you’ve done that it is going to take me a while to figure out how I feel.
Similarly, if your predominant feeling is that you want to try to work through things, you can thank your partner for telling you they love you.
After we’ve been betrayed by someone, one of our concerns may be that the reason they were able to hurt is that they do not actually care about us.
So, whatever we want to do moving forward, knowing that the person we love wants to fix things and loves us may help us feel less bad.
That said, don’t let someone worm their way right back into your life with sweet words.
Tell them you’re going to need some time to figure out how you feel and then take as much of it as you need to work out what would make you most happy.
8. I obviously love you too, but right now I wish I didn’t.
Again, while mature communication is important, it is also important to be true to yourself and not to do the heavy emotional lifting for your partner by swallowing your feelings.
If you are mad, you can let this show, so long as you do not do it in a way that jeopardizes your partner’s mental or physical safety.
As long as you are formulating and using “I statements” to express your emotions, you are being completely respectful in your communication style. An ‘I statement’ is a statement that relates to your experience and feelings rather than one that accuses someone of making you feel a certain way.
So, instead of saying “you make me feel like trash,” you could say, “I don’t feel very good about myself when I am around you.”
Keeping the accusatives out of your communication style will improve the quality and outcome of your conversations with your partner.
9. I love you too, but I’m going to need some space to think about what I want to do moving forward.
There is no shame in saying “I love you” to someone who has hurt you. After all, at a certain point, your feelings for someone are what they are. You love your partner in as absolute a sense as a table is a table.
Of course, that doesn’t mean that that fact isn’t subject to change. You could fall out of love in the same way that table that has been sawn in half is not a table anymore.
Letting your partner know that you love them too, but that you need time to think about what you want your future to look like, lets them know that they have messed up.
They will realize that while they have your love now, it remains to be seen whether you will continue to love them after they have treated you badly.
10. I love you too, but I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to get past what you did.
Anyone who has been betrayed will have asked themselves the question, “Can I ever get past this?”
For some people, the answer is yes. They feel close enough to the person they love that they can find it in their heart to understand why their partner might have behaved the way they did.
For others, no matter how much they might want to, they find they are never able to look at their partner in quite the same way again, which ends up ruining any future the relationship they might otherwise have had.
In the immediate aftermath of being betrayed, you do not need to know which camp you fall belong in.
Instead, you can communicate to your partner that you will have to wait and see whether there mistake is something you can learn to live with or not.
If saying this doesn’t have your partner frantically trying to figure out how to apologize to one’s girlfriend, nothing will.
How to respond to “I love you” when your partner has annoyed you
Betrayal is a serious offense. But there are so many other (more minor) ways that a partner can irritate you that may make you feel a little reluctant to return their “I love you,” or even to respond to “I love you so much.”
Even little, petty things that your partner neglects to do around the house can sometimes send you over the edge.
Do they always leave their coffee mug in the sink before leaving for work? Do they manage to walk past the laundry pile seemingly without seeing it every single time?
Whatever it is that has set you off, remember that this minor irritation is not worth starting a major fight over.
Instead, make sure you find a way to get the space you need to cool down.
If possible, try to inject a sense of humor into your response to your partner’s “I love you” when you are annoyed.
Who knows, if you can get yourself to laugh at your irritation, you may just be able to work through your frustration quickly.
11. I love you too, but I’m so irritated right now that I just need a bit of space from you.
If you are in a long-term, committed relationship, it is essential that you and your partner know how to ask for space from each other.
Especially if you’re living together, you will see so much of each other without even trying to. Establishing open communication about needing time to yourselves will help you maintain a healthy relationship.
And this will be particularly handy when you find yourself feeling annoyed at your partner. After all, nothing makes the heart grow fonder than absence.
Once you’ve spent a bit of time apart, you will surely be more willing to talk to them openly about what has irritated you in a way that won’t spiral into a larger conflict than it needs to be.
12. I love you too, but I need some alone time.
This a simple and straightforward way to ask for alone time. Make sure you don’t forget to tell your partner that you love them, so that they don’t worry that you are so seriously angry that you might want to change the nature of your relationship.
Once you have reassured them, just ask for and take the space you need.
13. Well, I’m glad we still love each other even when we’re annoyed at each other.
This is an example of a humorous way to respond when your partner who has irritated you tells you they love you.
You’re talking about the issue and aren’t shying away from the fact that you are annoyed while also acknowledging that your annoyance is nothing major and will pass.
14. I obviously love you too. Why do you have to be so annoying sometimes?
This is another humorous response you could give when someone who has annoyed you tells you that they love you.
Feel free to roll your eyes while delivering this one, or, if you are writing it in a text, to send it alongside an eyeroll emoji.
This is also a good way to respond to your boyfriend calling you crazy.
15. Does this mean we’re finished with our argument?
The best way to end an argument is to make the right joke at the right time.
If you have finished rowing and your partner tells you they love you, you could wrap things up with the humorous, “Does this mean we’re finished with our argument”?
They will surely appreciate you introducing a light-hearted tone to the conversation and will crack a smile.
16. I love you too. Can we please stop fighting so much?
What makes a joke funny is that there is at least a smidgen of truth to what is being said.
So, if you end an argument by responding to “I love you” by asking whether you and your partner can please stop fighting so much, it will be both funny and noted.
Hopefully you and your partner will remember this lighthearted exchange the next time you’re tempted to argue and may be able to avoid the argument altogether.
17. I love you more. Most of the time. Right now I want to rip your head off.
Here is yet another funny way to respond to “I love you” when you’re annoyed.
Establishing right off the bat that you aren’t so annoyed that you are questioning your love will allow your partner to enjoy the humor in the second part of your answer.
They can figure out how to respond to “I love you more,” while also smiling at the fact that you are able to express your irritation in such a funny way.
18. I love you too. But please, please, never leave the compost uncovered again!
Now this response doesn’t have to be used to refer to compost in particular. You can adapt it to whatever your chosen domestic pet peeve is.
Does your partner leave the dishes the wrong way around on the dish rack? Do they always neglect that one corner of the living room when they vacuum? Whatever it is, you can insert it right into this response for the same effect.
19. I love you too. Why do you have to be so annoying sometimes?
If your partner saying “I love you” after they have annoyed you is a sign that they feel you have effectively resolved your conflict, you can humorously respond that you love them too.
Then, almost as an aside, ask why they have to be so annoying sometimes. Hopefully, they will fire back a witty response and lessen the irritation you currently feel.
20. I love you too. Just never tell me what to do again or I might injure you.
For many of us, being told what to do is a major sore spot.
If, ever since childhood, someone interfering with your plans has made you want to yell back, “I know what I’m doing!” then you are definitely the type to be annoyed by a partner who likes to instruct you.
For example, if you are cooking and your partner comes over, inspects what you’re doing and suggests using different spices than you are planning to, you may feel your blood start to boil.
If back-seat driving is the source of your current frustration, you can respond to your partner’s “I love you,” by assuring them that you love them too, but that you will hurt them if they tell you what to do again.
They will know you are joking but will still get the message loud and clear.
How to respond to “I love you” when you’re in a bad mood
Sometimes we find it difficult to communicate with our partners even though it is not their fault at all.
If we’ve had a bad day at work or if we are mad at one of our friends, it can be hard to switch off from what’s troubling us and show our partner affection.
While studies have shown that being able to compartmentalize is a key ingredient for risk-taking, compartmentalizing is also crucial for maintaining romantic relationships. It is not fair to take out your everyday frustrations on your significant other if they have nothing to do with why you feel them.
Here are a few ways to deal with responding to “I love you” when you’re in a bad mood and it isn’t your partner’s fault.
21. I love you 3000. I’m just in a foul mood right now, so for your own good, maybe stay away from me for a few hours.
Now this response can be tailored to whatever it is that you and your partner enjoy doing together. You should only make your partner think about how to respond to “I love you 3000,” if this is an inside joke they will understand.
“I love you 3000” is a reference to a line from the Marvel Avengers film franchise.
However, there are plenty of other films, books, and TV shows that contain famous lines about love. Choose one from something that you and your partner watched together and that your partner will recognize.
Referencing a happier time will remind your partner of how good your relationship can be, despite the fact that you are currently irritated at each other.
22. I know that I love you too, even though I hate everyone right now.
Humor is the best balm for a bad mood.
So, when you feel supremely irritable and your partner tries to cheer you up by telling you they love you, you can joke that you know you love them too, even though what you currently feel is an almost universal hatred of everything.
Using hyperbole in this funny way will be sure to make your partner crack a smile.
23. I love you too, but I’m so distracted by my terrible day that I can’t give you affection right now.
Being blunt about what you’re feeling in the moment can be a source of humor in itself.
Often, the things that we feel deeply and that cause us a lot of anguish can appear funny as soon as we say them out loud to another person.
So, if your partner tells you they love you and you are not happy, you can simply express exactly what is going on in your mind, while keeping a humorous tone.
24. I love you too, but I’m warning you that I’m in a terrible mood right now.
Truthfully, as long as you return the “I love you,” your partner will probably not mind what you say afterwards.
Warning someone that you are in a bad mood instead of demonstrating that you are in a bad mood by being snappy is also always a good idea.
Your partner will know to give you a wide berth until you come to them and indicate that you are happy to talk again.
25. I love you too. Can you fix my bad mood for me?
Asking someone to fix your bad mood for you in a jokey way will surely lift the tone of your conversation, and you may find yourself becoming less irritated by the second.
Hopefully your partner will pick up on your desire to get out of your funk and will suggest doing something fun.
26. I love you too, even though I feel murderous towards every other person in the world right now.
This one probably speaks for itself.
27. Thanks for trying to cheer me up! I love you too. My terrible mood will pass soon enough, I promise.
If you feel like you owe it to your partner not to turn your bad mood into a joke but rather to express yourself more articulately, you can thank them for trying to make you feel better and tell them that you’re sure your mood will pass relatively soon.
A response like this will have your boyfriend wanting to read about what to say when your girlfriend is sad.
How to respond to “I love you” when you’re mad and falling out of love
It is one thing to respond to “I love you” when you’re mad but still very much in love with your partner. It is a whole other story when you’re mad and aren’t sure you still love your partner the way you used to.
If you find yourself questioning whether you actually feel the same way when your partner says, “I love you,” it’s probably time to have a serious think about what you want your future to look like.
Do you really see yourself staying with your current partner forever? If not, it may be time to think about ending things.
Here are a few ways you can respond to “I love you” when you are angry at your partner and aren’t sure your relationship is worth fighting for.
28. That’s nice of you to say. I’m just not sure love is going to be enough to save our relationship.
If you aren’t sure you still love someone, it is important that you don’t tell them you do. Instead, you can acknowledge that it was nice of them to tell you they love you.
However, if you feel that there are so many disagreements and diverging views in your relationship and that love isn’t enough to overcome all the obstacles in your path, you can express this honestly.
29. What good is saying I love you if you don’t actually want to put in the hard work?
In your state of anger, you may feel exasperated with your partner’s tendency to say the right things but do none of them.
If they frequently tell you they love you but don’t demonstrate this in their behavior, you can call them out.
Ask them what good their words are if they can’t deliver on them.
30. If you’re going to tell me you love me, why can’t you show me you love me?
This response to “I love you” addresses the same problem as the previous response. If someone is all talk, you may find yourself being continually disappointed by them.
It may be better to cut and run and avoid a lifetime of being let down than to continue to take heart from someone’s words and then feel sad when they don’t deliver.
31. I’m too mad to think about love right now.
If your partner has made you so angry that you’re questioning the future of your relationship, you may be in no mood to talk about it.
After all, you’re dealing with some pretty major dilemmas.
Make sure you’re putting yourself first and that you give it to your partner straight about what you’re feeling.
If you know you aren’t going to be able to reciprocate their “I love you,” tell them you are too upset to think about love.
32. I’m too angry to talk through things right now. Give me a bit of space and I’ll get in touch when I’m ready to talk.
Clarity is key in any difficult situation where communication threatens to break down. This response allows you to lay all your cards out on the table and avoids your partner asking follow-up questions such as, “What’s wrong?” or “Are you mad at me?”
33. Talk is cheap. If you really loved me, you would not behave the way you do.
There is a difference between rudeness and calling things the way you see them.
This response to “I love you” falls squarely within the latter category. You’re entitled to express what your partner has made you feel, and they deserve to know the extent of your hurt.
Hey, it’s me, Steven. Dating and relationships have always fascinated me. On Dategosu, you will find my best tips to make sure your next date is a great success!