Sometimes, “love” means “you are a critical relationship in my life that is part of what shaped me and who will always be a factor, regardless of how I feel about you as an individual in the past, now or in the future.”
In other words, Love = Enduring Connection, regardless of the status of the actual relationship.
If you don’t use the word that way, it makes sense that you would be 
Macca, your descriptions sound very cold to me, but that’s my brain.
My sister and I didn’t get along very well as children. She resented me as the little brother, I got annoyed very easily with her. We were at each others throats a lot. As we got older, we got closer, and we get along mostly now. If we were choosing friends, we probably wouldn’t be friends, but we have similar personalities and some common interests.
However, I love her tremendously and would be devastated if she died. Even when we were kids, I would have been devastated. We have a bond of family, and while I really only like being around her in short stretches (we quickly annoy one another after about 3-4 days), I very much care about her, care about what happens to her and care how her life is. Just because we didn’t hang out very much as kids doesn’t mean I don’t care what happens to her. I have lots of friends that I very much enjoy spending time with and hanging out with, but if I lost them, I’d be upset, sure…but not nearly as broken up as if I lost my sister. It’s something different.
So what this all comes down to is symantics.
Sounds like it. I wouldn’t use the word love the way WordMan does and wouldn’t think to either. I always ascribe the word love to a feeling. It’s too important to me to use in a different fashion. My word for what WordMan describes is “family”, but I don’t think of it as an enduring connection either. The past is the past. A person needs to stay involved in my life to be an enduring connection.
And yes, I am described as a cold person by others. It’s a fact and doesn’t bother me as the people I do love and friendships I do have are plenty fulfilling.
Indeed. The Ancient Greeks identified 4 forms of love. Most of us know about eros (romantic or erotic love), and agape (self emptying love). Some of us also know of philia (friendship love). But the 4th is storge, which is kinship or familial love. All these things were considered love, so those that love their family, but don’t like her are exercising a solely storge love, without philia attached to it.
It was all summed up in 1940.
Groucho: “You love your brother, don’t you?”
Chico: “No, but I’m used to him.”
I think you misunderstand the meanings of the word “love” and “like.” The former is not simply a more intense version of the latter. In fact I’d say that the two emotions have little to do with one another.
As mentioned in another thread, my oldest brother died recently. I didn’t like him even a little bit, but I was nevertheless unexpectedly affected by his death. I grieved (I’m probably still grieving), I wept–not just in front of my wife, but in public. I couldn’t make it through my bit at his funeral without breaking down. And yet my disapproval of, oh, practically everything about him remained. I couldn’t keep myself from thinking “What utter bullshit”’ when people were singing his praises at his memorial service. I was actively annoyed at him when we were cleaning out his apartment because of all the stupid crap he was into.
And yet I love him.
Liking a person is simply enjoying that person’s company; it’s finding him or her amusing or entertaining. Love is the state of mind in which the well-being of the beloved is necessary to the lover’s peace of mind; it’s got nothing to do with liking.
That very well could be true, it’s a bit why I started the thread and wanted other people’s opinion…and I have found that some do agree with me.
Taking your example to a bit more of an extreme, if you sit at a funeral of a loved one, but call bullshit whenever anyone says something nice about said loved one because you know s/he was a terrible person and had little to like about them, how is the love you feel for them genuine?
The different greek loves are a great reference to this point, but if you can’t find something to like about someone, family or not, and the question to you is “You loved them? Tell me why?” I don’t see how “well…they’re my family member” suffices
Actually, I don’t 'cause I neither love NOR like my sister. We never got along all that great when we were kids and that hasn’t really changed much now that we’re adults. She seems very insecure, makes snide comments all the time, and almost 100% of the time when she opens her mouth I disagree with what she says. But she has good company - I don’t care much for her husband or either of our parents, either. So be it.
Because, as I said, love and like are not the same thing. They are not different degrees of the same emotion.
Consider this. I like my friend Sean. She’s a good woman, funny and smart and reliable. I like hanging out with her. If she recommends a book I’m likely to read it, because our tastes mesh, and because she understands my tastes. But I’m not giving her a kidney. If she moves to, I dunno, Beijing, I’m not going to make double-sure I always know her address.
I didn’t like my brother. If he gave me a book I was likely to ignore it, because our tastes didn’t mesh and he didn’t understand mine (he gave me one of the Left Behind Series once, for Athena’s sake!). I’d never hang out with him. But if he’d needed a kidney I’d have given him one; I always kept track of his address; and his death broke my heart.
For someone like me, it’d be the opposite. In that situation I would definitely keep in touch with Sean, consider giving her a kidney in a grave situation, and grieve over her death. The brother as described, nah, not really. The fact that he’s related “by blood” to me doesn’t mean squat over a person that I care for and who also cares for me.
Now, I will probably feel emotion at a funeral even for someone I don’t like because someone I do like is there and if they’re upset that will affect me. I’d basically be crying over the emotions of the person I like rather than the person who died.
So yeah, to me, like and love are aspects of the same thing.
No, you wouldn’t, in my situation, because the Sean-Skald relationship is entirely superficial. We both like The Walking Dead and baking; we have the same employer. Every conversation we have is about one of those three subjects. But there’s no deep emotional connection. I’m not giving her a kidney because I only have two, and I might need to give one to my baby sister one day.
Never did I say that my love for my deceased brother stemmed from our being related by blood. I love my work wife and my best friend from college much more than I love him, despite their being unrelated to me. Both came to the funeral, without being asked and despite barely knowing him, because they wanted to support me and didn’t want to delegate doing so; they love and like me, as I love and like them. I only loved my brother.
Well OK. I’m just saying that I have friends I would consider giving a kidney to long before I considered giving one to a family member that demonstrated they did not care about me.
My question would be, if your love for him is not due to “they’re family, that’s what you do for family” and not because you harbor good feelings for him, where does it come from then? Shared past experience/development as described by WordMan?
I never said my brother didn’t care about me. I said I didn’t like him.
Anyway, I consider the aforementioned work wife and college friend my sisters. In the zombie apocalypse I’m saving either of them before any of my cousins, but after my wife and kids and dad and baby bio sister.
At the risk of being flamed, I have to say that this is me too. My brain puts people into three categories: 1) People I like enough that I don’t want anything bad to happen to them, 2) People who I feel indifferent about, whose safety and well-being aren’t ever in my thoughts, and 3) People I wouldn’t mind falling off the face of the Earth because I just don’t like them. The vast majority of people I meet fall into the second camp, but at any given moment, I’ve got several names on the shit list. I have to say that the minority are people in the first group. There aren’t a whole bunch of people in the world who I can say I truly care about.
So I can’t imagine loving someone while fantasizing about their demise. That’s what I would be doing (fantasizing about their demise) if I didn’t like them. If I’m not fantasizing about their demise, then that means I either like them or feel neutral towards them.
Maybe I come across as a derp for admitting asmuch, but I don’t understand how love could be anything more than an intense form of “like”. I do understand that I’m unusual in this regard, though. Maybe one day I’ll get it.
I’ll agree that if you’re fantasizing about someone’s demise, you don’t feel even agape for them.
But consider this. My surviving brother, “James,” has a baby daughter, born coincidentally within days of my twin brothers. James and his family live in another state, so I’ve spent less than 96 hours total, say, with his baby. But I love her. Loved her from the moment she was born (though nowhere near as much as I love my three bio kids and stepdaughter). If she ever needs help that I can provide, she can have it. Yes, my love for her is based on the fact that she’s my brother’s kid, but that makes it no less real. And it’s different from liking; I don’t know her well enough to like her or dislike her. (Hell, I dislike one of my nieces who grew up here in Memphis, but I was stll tempted to kick the crap out of her boss for making her cry the other day.)
No, you described the exact opposite. Even though being around him was unpleasant, you continued to care about him. You put others first–the opposite of being a cold bitch.
From the descriptions here, Macca would not. Because she didn’t like him, as he would not be pleasant to be around, she wouldn’t love him, and thus wouldn’t care about them.
To be frank, they are just describing garden-variety selfishness.
The weird thing is that monsto is agreeing with Macca. I don’t know Macca, but I do know Monstro seems to care about other people in general. Yet she’s describing herself as being unable to love someone she doesn’t like.
That gives me hope that this all just a semantics issue, and the people having trouble with this aren’t truly selfish.
It really is that simple: liking someone means finding them pleasant to be around. Love means caring about their wellbeing. If you truly cannot love someone you don’t like, you’re saying you can’t care about people you don’t enjoy being around.
Right here really seems to be a semantic issue. You say that, if you don’t like someone, you must be fantasizing about their demise. Yet in this very paragraph you describe a situation where you feel neutral towards someone, meaning you don’t like them. You recognize three states: like, neutral, and hate. And yet you think “don’t like” means hate.
Also, are there really only three categories for you? You’ve never wanted to hurt someone but not kill them? You know, make them feel the pain you are currently feeling, but not enough to want them to stop existing? (There are other categories, too, but that’s one I thought was universal.)
I call these “Irish families” (sorry if that offends Irish). But these families will fight each other tooth and nail but dont dare get involved or go after one of them because they will all fight off outsiders.
In my universe, “don’t like” = “dislike”. The OP is talking about someone who dislikes their sister. Not someone who just feels neutral towards her. I don’t think my definition is that idiosyncratic.
Yes, there are only three categories for me. Piss me off enough, and I’ll think about unpleasant things happening to you (not necessarily death. That’s not creative enough for me). Piss me off just a little or don’t do anything to me at all and I’ll feel neutral towards you. Impress me with your humanity and I’ll care deeply about your well-being. I don’t know if I’m unusual or not, but my schema isn’t that hard to grok IMHO.
I was exaggerating when I said “demise”. I’m really not that cold hearted enough to long for someone’s death. If I’ve got an annoying jerkface as a coworker, my immediate thought is, “I hope this jerkface gets fired!” Not, “I hope someone kills this mutherfucka before I do!” A person really has to work my nerve before I start daydreaming about their funeral.