I had an ex girlfriend who’s three sisters were just little helliants.
Mean, rude, talked back to mom, no respect, got into trouble blah blah blah.
My ex would constantly say how annoyed she is with them and they never really got along. Even when they were amicable there was still arguing and name calling and stuff, so my ex would say “I love (insert sister here) but I don’t like her”.
Personally I argue against this. I don’t think that you can love something you don’t like. Sure society tells you that you have to love your siblings/parents/children…but at what point are you loving them because everyone tells you to versus actually loving them.
So what say you dopers, am I bad person with no faith in humanity? Or just lucky that I like the things that I love?
I loved and respected my father for all the good things he did for me, starting with my adoption. I loved him for his sacrifices for me, and for the education he gave me. I cried for him when he died.
As a child I liked being with him because he was Dad and I loved him. But as an adult I found there were a lot of things I didn’t like, and that we grew to be very different people. I found to my sorrow that while deep down I loved him, I didn’t like him enough to enjoy spending much time with him. We irritated each other, and I think we each were disappointed in the other.
I’m of the same opinion. I just don’t comprehend how a person can be loved if they’re not even liked. I just assume a person is lying to him/herself if they say something like loving someone without liking them - or rather, they’re living up to society’s expectations by not violating the big taboo of admitting, “You know what? I don’t really love my ______”. It’s something that’s just not said.
Now, I can understand there’s a lot of different complicated feelings that go into things, love and hate can mingle together, obsession can be mistaken for love, etc. But I consider liking someone at least a prerequisite for loving them. A person has to step back and re-evaluate their relationships with people periodically and honestly to make sure that they’re really on the page they think they are. Otherwise it’s easy to mistake true feelings and cover them up.
I don’t think I can sum it up any better than saje has.
To me, love, especially familial love, is a deep abiding (and yes, voluntary) bond that you feel that sustains regardless of bad behavior, disagreements, etc. Underneath everything else this person’s life means as much to you as your own. But, you may not want to spend much time in the day to day with them. I had a relationship with my own mother very much like this. The first half of my life was extremely dysfunctional, nay horrific, due not in a small part to her. Even as an out of control, rotten teen, though, I never said I hated her. I never stopped loving her, I’d just wished she could stop being such a c_ _ _ .
One can feel a strong bond with members of one’s tribe/family that is independent of enjoying that person as an individual. Maybe this bond can be described as love.
In the case of family, children bond with the people they live with. It’s natural to love your parents and siblings before you/they are old enough to really have/understand personalities – “love” comes way before “like.” If you think that your 3-year-old self genuinely knew and liked your mom instead of simply loving her, you’re kidding yourself. Except for some extreme cases (i.e., abuse), those feelings of love don’t simply go away when you discover that you don’t actually like a family member.
Trust me, realizing that you don’t actually like your mother or father isn’t a fun thing to go through. In my case, I love-but-don’t-like my entire immediate family: mom, dad, and brother. I don’t think they like me very much, either. We wouldn’t be friends with each other, and probably would not interact at all if we weren’t family. (As it is, I try to interact with them as little as possible.) They aren’t bad people, and we do love each other in our way, we’re just very different people.
This phenomenon also accounts for how people can remain friends with their childhood BFF when said BFF is a racist, or otherwise objectively unlikeable. The bond was formed before their personalities were, and those feelings don’t always just go away.
When it comes to people you aren’t related to, who you meet as an adult (or older teen) while they are also an adult (or older teen), then I do tend to agree that “like” is a critical component of “love.” Certainly in the case of romantic love: I can’t imagine loving a man who I don’t genuinely like. But family is different…those of you who both love and like your parents and siblings are simply lucky.
This is the sort of thing that makes me wonder if there’s something “wrong” with me, when people are adamant that familial love exists to them. I realized one day as a kid that I didn’t like my father, and my brain immediately asked, “if you don’t like him, how can you even love him? Do you really love him? Really. Do you? Are you just saying it because everyone expects you to?” and I answered myself, “It’s true, I don’t love him, or even like him! He’s awful!” It was kind of a shocking revelation at the time.
I don’t comprehend unconditional love. I’m not sure it exists. It doesn’t exist in my brain. I’m not sure that babies love their parents - they are not developed enough to love, to me. There are people that give them what they want and that is all they care about - how is that love? I don’t know. It’s an odd topic for me.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with loving-before-liking when you love before you can differentiate the terms.
But when you’re at the age to realize that like =/= love, I don’t know how you can be so hurt by family members, not like them at all, but still maintain that you love them
I don’t really get it either, but I’m wondering if maybe it’s not the person they love, but the fond memories they had with that person from back in more nostalgic times.
Like, when I think my siblings, I don’t necessarily think of how they are right now. I “see” them back when we were kids, back when they were innocent. However angry they may make me in the present, I will always remember how my brother helped me go down the slide that one time on the playground, or how my older sister wiped my tears that one time after I got a parental spanking, or that magical moment when my twin sister taught me how to tie my shoes. Or the times we all cracked up at the dinner table or in front of the TV. Those simple memories make me feel love for them today.
But I still like to think that if it came down to cutting them off to save my sanity or life, I would be able to do so. I think “loving memories” only have so much currency. Eventually one should realize that the person who is driving them nuts today is NOT the same person they originally bonded with. But I suppose love really isn’t supposed to make sense.
I do love my parents even though they hurt me. I don’t know why. I didn’t like my mom at all, but when she died I wept like a child. I mean, she was still my mom. She wasn’t very good at it, but she wasn’t 100% bad, either.
I would do anything I could to help out my sister if she was in trouble. But I don’t voluntarily spend much time around her. She’s flaky, she’s not very smart, and she’s kind of shallow. She is a kind-hearted and generous person, but if we weren’t related, I’d never have anything to do with her. I’ve never understood people who say “My sister is my best friend.” She and I shared a bedroom from the time she was born, so 18 years, and it was so nice when I left home, even if it meant living in an open-bay barracks with 50+ strangers!
I get along OK with my other 2 sisters, but I wouldn’t choose either of them as friends. Our lives and interests have been much too different, especially since I lived away from them for the better part of 30 years. That’s not an indictment or a criticism, just a fact of life.
Exactly this (and what saje said). I don’t like my brother. He’s hypersensitive to perceived slights (he thinks everyone thinks less of him be cause he’s “just” blue-collar, when the whole family thinks he’s really amazing at what he does!). He is a bully and a blowhard. Seriously unpleasant to me on a regular basis. One of those people who mooches off family and claims to be a free-market libertarian who doesn’t believe in welfare.
But at the end of the day we’re family. I love him. We’ve shared some stuff that no one else will get. And I see his good points – He’s good to his kid and loves his kid unconditionally. He helps my mom with stuff like fixing fences and other heavy work. He does stuff at my dad’s house that my dad can no longer do.
As my mom said once, “He’s an asshole, but he’s our asshole.”
We tend to say “I love YOU, but I don’t like your actions” - my sister and I do not speak anymore, after being very close for many years. I still love her, but her actions? I cannot be okay with decisions she’s made and how it’s impacted the rest of our family. For me, that holds me back from wanting to be anywhere near her. I still love her, though.
Wait a minute. I thought we were talking about loving people, not loving things.
If by “love” you just mean “like a whole lot,” then of course you can’t love someone (or something) without liking them; but that’s not what someone means when they say “I love _____ but I don’t like them.” Caring about someone, wanting the best for them, even feeling affection for them, can all coexist with not liking them very much.
See, that’s where I don’t get it. If I don’t like a person very much then by default I don’t care for them, I don’t want the best for them, and I don’t feel any positive feelings for them. They are the equivalent of a stranger or acquaintance. To me it’s impossible to feel that list of things without first liking a person. I can’t love without liking first and my brain just isn’t wired to comprehend how people claim to care about people they also claim to not care about.
ETA: My definition of “care” is, “I want to talk to you, I want to know you, I want to be around you, I care about what you are feeling”, so whenever someone says “I don’t want to be around this person or talk to them” that translates to “I don’t care about them” to me.
I felt so very sad for my father as he was struggling with dementia, I hated that he he was so sad and confused at not being able to be home. A few years earlier when my mom died it broke my heart to see how much he missed her, and I don’t mean in a generic “oh how sad” kind of way. I’d leave from my visits with him in tears, he was so lost and lonely.
And what added insult to injury was that I could not fill that gap for him. Yes I was his daughter and yes he loved me and I him, but we didn’t connect in a way that was comforting to either of us. It’s hard to describe - though I loved him he was not someone to whom I’d run for comfort, he was not someone I’d choose to spend a relaxing day with. Our chemistry was wrong or something, and we were always on edge around each other.
When he was dying in the hospital I (along w/ my sister) did everything in my power to see that he was as comfortable as possible, and not just because it was my filial duty. It tore me apart to see him like that. But all the same, before he got so bad I just really didn’t like being around him much.
<shrug> Maybe it’s just me and I’m a cold bitch, who knows…
saje, from what I can gather your father did a lot for you when you were growing up and it was only when you became an adult that you realized there were things about him that annoyed you/frustrated you/maybe didn’t like about him, but growing up you loved and liked him all the same.
If that’s true then you were in love with him as (wow, that sounds weird) but eventually found things you didn’t like about him, but you still loved him. I don’t think this exactly applies to my given situation because, I mean, there’s no one in this world that has doesn’t have at least SOME stuff about them we don’t like, that’s just people being people.
But there was a point in time where you did both like and love your father, and the carryover from those feelings is what drives you to want to take care of him, why you miss him, etc.
