You know how they say, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again?” Well, for most endeavors in life, this is usually a fantastic mentality to hold onto — but things are always more complicated when it comes to the abstract matters. Sometimes there are things you can just never accomplish no matter how hard you try and how many attempts you make. When it comes to matters of the heart in particular, everything gained and lost is purely subjective — no matter what you try to plant in someone else’s heart, it just doesn’t matter. It has to be organic and it has to be self-convicted. It’s a hard lesson to learn, but once you know, you just know: No matter how much you want to force someone to feel something, you just can’t. Here are five such things you probably want to force someone to feel but will never be able to:

1. Love

Let’s just get the most obvious one out of the way now… love. Familial, platonic or romantic — it really doesn’t matter, because it’s a hot commodity. Love may be the most sought after and yet most difficult thing to find in life. When it’s readily given, it flows powerfully and endlessly like Niagara Falls, but much like the waterfall, that type of love can’t be found everywhere. People have gone crazy, wasted away and even taken their lives over love — or, more accurately, a lack thereof. Yet humankind seems to be genetically programmed to engage in the same futile behavior of trying to find love where there just isn’t any to be given, refusing to realize that love isn’t meant to be conditional. If you’re lucky enough to have it returned to you, count your blessings, because it doesn’t always happen. And if it’s not being returned, just accept it. Don’t be angry, don’t kick and scream, don’t waste your life away feeling jilted — it won’t waste anyone’s life but your own, and it certainly won’t win you anyone’s love. That’s just how love works: If it’s there, it’s there. If it’s not, there’s nothing you can do about it. Love to love, don’t love to have it returned.

2. Happiness

There was once a fortune on a piece of chocolate wrapper that read, “Happiness is in the heart, not in the circumstance.” Is there any more to say? Happiness isn’t complicated, but it is hard to find if you’re looking for it or trying to make it. Only you can make yourself happy, and you can be happy anywhere, anytime, with anything you have (or don’t have). The power in being able to create happiness for yourself is also a double-edged sword because you can’t make other people happy. You could lay all that the world has to give in front of some people’s feet and they’d still never be happy, and that’s just how it is. Make sure you’re happy with your own life.

3. Strength

One of the sadder things to accept is that strength is something we all try to force on people around us even though we know it’s pointless. Of course, inner strength can be bolstered when someone knows they have others to rely on, but it’s a temporary fix. Everyone needs a shoulder to cry on, an ear to hear them out and just a few encouraging words to let them know that things will be OK, but much like happiness and love, strength has to come from deep within. It’s a quality that grows from a person’s will to be strong. Unfortunately, at the end of the day some people are just stronger when enduring hardship and pain, whether emotional or physical. You can help someone try to be strong, but never try to force it on them.

4. Remorse

When someone is unkind to you or does something to intentionally cause you pain, you first wonder how they could have committed such an act, and then usually you find solace in knowing that person feels remorse for their actions. But sometimes people just don’t feel bad. How is that possible? For most people with good hearts, you’ll never understand because you can’t understand — simply because it’s something you would never do. You could never cheat; you could never steal; you could never kill because you have an active feeling of morality that also drives your sense of remorse if you ever do slip up. But that’s just not the case for some people. Sometimes people spend years waiting for remorse from a wrongdoer, and it’s something that only wears away at them. Remorse, like love, is inherent; if you don’t feel it, you don’t, and you can’t force someone else to give you closure. Closure is something you give yourself, regardless of whether remorse is there or not.

5. Detachment

An all-encompassing feeling of contentment and almost a lack of happiness, detachment is something that any person would be lucky to feel. Released from the endless roller coasters of emotion that take you up and down the foothills of good and bad, detachment is simply a feeling of neutrality — Zen, if you will. It’s not being unhappy, and it’s not necessarily being happy. It’s just being content: content with the good, the bad and the ugly of what life has to offer. Detachment is a mentality that is a dominant underlying theme in many major Eastern theologies and philosophies that teach disciples to aim toward a higher goal rather than finding happiness, simply because happiness is short lived. Contentment, on the other hand, can be everlasting as long as it has materialized out of a deep inner desire to want that sense of release. You can’t force someone not to want things or not to feel things; you can’t get inside someone else’s head or inside their heart. That’s just all there is to it.