A few years back I was talking with my BIFL (best friend in life), who happens to be female. I don’t recall how we got onto the topic, but we were discussing rape, which happened to be among her greatest fears; she had commented more than once that she’d rather be killed. At any rate, during the conversation I commented that all men have the capacity for rape (which is not what I want to talk about), and my friend commented that she didn’t think that was true. Nevertheless, she said, if I were to commit such a crime on a third party, she would still love me and be my friend.
This struck me as a little odd–and not merely because it was her saying it. Because I, personally, could no longer be friends with, let alone love, one of my brothers if he were to commit such a heinous act. For my money, the knowledge that my brother had done such a thing would signify that he was not at all the person I thought he was, not at all the person I remembered from childhood; I could no longer love him except as a memory. Rape is about the only crime I feel so strongly about. If someone I loved committed a murder, for instance, I could conceivably still feel love and friendship for them, because I can think of half a dozen justifications for killing. But rape? No way. I can’t imagine a justification.
Which brings me to my question: what could a member of your family (or one of your closest friends) do to a third party that would irrevocably damage your feelings for them if you were to know about it?
I don’t use the word “love” to describe my feelings any more. I use the word love as a verb, and in the “agape” sense - to do or desire what is in the best interest of that person. Therefore, my feelings and love don’t have to be mutually exclusive. If a member of my family raped, tortured, killed, robbed, abused, cheated, etc., I could still love them, even though my feelings toward them would most likely be a mass of confusion that included things like hurt, embarrassment, anger, outrage, disgust, pity, betrayal, etc.
Also, I have no problem with the concept that the best thing for a criminal would be to pay the price for their crime. That’s still love, in my book.
I found out some years ago that someone on my husband’s side of the family had molested his stepdaughters and possibly his stepson. He went from someone I didn’t particularly like but could spend an afternoon with to someone I couldn’t even be in the same room with. Fortunately we’ve been totally estranged from him for a long time now.
So far child molestation (Uncle on his step daughter) and child abuse (my mom on me) and unbroken pattern of betrayal (My brother on me) have worked just fine. I wouldn’t waste my time even pissing on those people if they were on fire and begging me to do it. Find a common motivation in there if you care to. Maybe it’s repeated, unnecessary and malicious treatment of others? I don’t think I could ever hold a person’s beliefs against them, nor their own actions against themselves.
Any other condition would be speculation and while it’s easy to say “what you’d do if…” you really never know how you’re going to play the hand until it’s been dealt to you. I still speak to and live with my wife, for example, despite promising myself long ago that I wouldn’t stand for some of the crap she’s pulled.
Then what word do you use to describe an intense emotional investment in the well-being of another person?
I understand your desire to treat “love” as a verb, and I think it has a lot of merit: too many people make utterly ridiculous comments such as “I beat my wife because I love her, and love makes you crazy.” (To which I reply, “Um, no, the emotion of love makes you want to keep your wife safe from harm and pain, dipshit. You’re talking 'bout a whole nohter emotion there.”
I’d say that love is both a feeling and an action, but it is distinct from the emotion of liking. For example, I cannot stand my oldest brother. He’s spent years distancing himself from the family; through several of our mother’s hospitalizations over the past few years, he has not bothered to come visit her, though he lives no great distance away, on the excuse that he cannot get time off work (and given that during much of this time we had the same job, I knew that to be a lie.) I can’t say I feel much LIKING for him any more. But when he was recently in an accident and hospitalized himself, I wanted him to be well and healed as soon as possible. On the other hand, if he had commited a rape or child molestation, the last embers of love I feel for him would likely have died.
If we’re talking about immediate family like Mother, Father, Brothers, and Sister, then very little, if anything. I’m very close with my family and they are all people I genuinely respect, and would even if they weren’t my family.
Regarding my parents: This is a definate nothing. They could never do anything to make me stop loving them. If they did something that I believed to be horrible, there would be a well thought out reason. I might be disappointed in them, but still love them.
Regarding my siblings: I’m the oldest and therefore should have done my part to instill what I believe to be good values. If my brothers and sister were to do something truly horrible, I would look at it as a failure on my part and I couldn’t stop loving them for that.
Grandparents - see parents.
Cousins, Aunts, Uncles - As horrible as this may sound, it really depends on which aunt, uncle, or cousin. Most nothing, a few something (see below).
Regarding the worst crime: In my opinion it is the corruption of a child (in all of it’s forms, not just the obvious). This would be tough to get over but answers don’t change. (It would cause me to stop loving a few of them, as mentioned)
Even though I wouldnt stop loving my family (immediate), I would still expect them to pay for their crime.
You know, I’m not sure. It was a pretty visceral response and and that was before I had young children of my own. I suppose it’s possble to feel love for someone, even if you can’t ever trust them again. It would be a very different kind of love, though.
Child abuse. I remember not “loving” my father anymore when I was six. After I escaped from home at 16, I never talked to him again up until his death.
A 180 degree personality shift. My next-youngest brother and I used to be great pals. We’re both musicians, and we had a psychic bond when playing that you rarely get with another person. Then I moved 1200 miles away and got married. Since then, our relationship has deteriorated to the point of non-existence. All I’ve got from him since moving away and making a decent life for my wife and me, is hostility. In those years, his life has taken a giant crap, caused by something he could totally have prevented. He made a long string of extremely poor decisions and is paying the price. Now he’s bitter and angry and has become the kind of person I couldn’t be in a room with. After the last response I got to a simple enquiry by e-mail, I severed contact with him for good. He has become completely unlikable as a person, and I don’t have any room in my life for putting up with that bullshit from anybody, even if he was my brother.
Well, I don’t have any of those that don’t also encompass the definition I posted above. Maybe if I did, I could understand. Otherwise, it’s exactly the kind of examples you gave, and/or use of the word to describe lust, romantic fantasy, extremely insecure possesiveness, etc., that caused me to change the way I use the word.
Anyway, I wish we did use different words to describe the different “meanings” we all ascribe to the word “love.”
But, back on topic, the love I have for my family isn’t really an emotion. It’s more like a sense of duty, obligation, concern, responsibility, etc. Sometimes I enjoy their company, sometimes I don’t. I definitely want what’s best for them. And if they suffer, I’m truly sorry. And that’s similar to what you said, but the emotional parts of it are more about me (like, my loss, my pride, my embarrassment, etc.) than about them, so I don’t call the emotional parts of it “love.” And if I like them, it’s for the same reasons I would like anyone else, so that shouldn’t be “different.”
I’m not sure I’m articulating what I mean very well, but I tried my best to answer your question.
I have an older cousin who, I suppose, I used to love in the way one loves and looks up to an older cousin.
I didn’t mind when she messed up her own life. That was her prerogative. But then she went and had four children, now living sometimes at and sometimes below the poverty line, undisciplined, uneducated, uncontrolled–left all day with the deadbeat father of some of them, who most of the time can’t be bothered to get them to school or pick them up at the end of the day (and who definitely can’t be bothered to get his GED or even a job). They move three or four times a year, usually living in cheap hotels between their cheap apartments. The older boy is six, can’t really talk, is only barely potty-trained, and his parents just can’t be bothered to get him special help. They couldn’t bother to enroll him in preschool or Head Start. They just can’t bother.
For what she’s done to those four kids, and for the way she manipulates and takes advantage of her mother, my aunt, who I really do love, I just can’t stand her anymore. She grew up in a very nice middle-class home, had piano lessons, played sports, had her own room and her own car when she turned 16, could have gone to college for free. But no. She didn’t want any of it. So she definitely doesn’t deserve anything more.
You know, upon reflection, regarding the situation with my brother, I sort of feel compelled to explain that it’s not as cold as it comes off in print. I am still attached to my brother, and you can’t take away our experiences together. But as adults, we have changed. He is going through a bad time and I’m not. Not too many years ago, the opposite was true. But he has become increasingly difficult to communicate with, and it got to the point where I had to admit defeat. I’d like to have a relationship with him like we used to have, but it can’t be like it used to. He is going to need to have an attitude adjustment before any reconciliation can happen.
I will really miss him. He’s my bro. Well, he was, anyway.
Uncle who sued my parents after his wife died (wife was Dad’s sister) for negligance, because she drunkenly fell and broke her leg (BAC>.2). No, she didn’t die due to the broken leg, she died of cancer several years later. He waited till she died to sue. He lost the suit and the family. I haven’t talked to him since.
Brother1 who wrongfully, maliciously, and viciously accused brother2 of sleeping with the wife of brother3, while brother3 was dying of cancer. This happened in my prescence. I can’t quite bring myself to forgive brother1 who also didn’t attend brother3’s funeral. I have to talk to him, but I don’t have to like him.
One of my uncles was discovered to have molested several of my cousins. I have not spoken to him or seen him since, nor do I ever intend to do so. I don’t know if it’s worse because he was one of my favorite people in the world–I could tell him things I wouldn’t dare tell my parents and though he is a teasing person in general, he never treated the confidences I entrusted him with with anything but secrecy and respect. That doesn’t really matter anymore. He’s not the man I thought he was.
Unfortunately for me, this isnt an entirely hypoethetical thread.
Waking up hearing loud noises and wlking in on my dad whaling on my mom in the middle of the night. This was abt 18 or 19 years ago, so I mustve been 7 or 8. I tried stopping him physically, so he started whaling on me. With anything he cd get his hands on.
A couple of weeks later, mom wasnt home. My report card came in the mail, and I’d stood 7th in a class of abt 45 people. Wasnt good enough for Daddy. No. He called me into his den, locked the door, and whaled on me again with this steel ruler he had. My kid sister somehow managed to get the door open from the outside and dragged me away.
It got progressivle worse in the years after that, right until the time he died in 2000. Trust me, the kind of shit he pulled… I stopped loving him before I hit ten.
My mother went out of her way to screw my father over in the divorce. She got everything she wanted, but that wasn’t enough. She had to be vicious and vengeful.
I stopped talking to her about 13 years ago. Haven’t regretted a second of it. And in the end, my dad won, because he’s got the grandkids, and she has no relationship with my children or my nephew (that’s due to distance, and her whining that she has no money to come visit. AFAIK, she still talks to my sister.)
The opposite of love is not hate but apathy. I don’t wish her ill. I don’t wish her anything. She’s not a part of my life.
Not quite the same, but how about never starting to love a member of the family?
I’ve got a brother who was verbally and emotionally abusive my entire life. Occasionally physically (as in hitting, not molesting) too. I have disliked him since I was old enough to know better.
Still could have put up with him, but his behavior toward our parents as an adult went far beyond the pale, and his verbal abuse to them, and to the rest of his siblings, particular during and after our mother’s final illness, have given me no reason to wish to maintain contact.
I don’t hate him. I wish him no ill. If I saw he was about to step off the curb into the path of a speeding bus, I wouldn’t push him into harm’s way. I might not grab him and pull him back either, though, and if I did, it would be for my conscience (could I do less for him than I would for a stranger?). So I’m with ivylass on the apathy thing.
More to the point of the OP: I think that it would take a massive betrayal, to myself or another innocent person, to actually terminate love. As in, discovering the person was a serial killer.
Human beings are somewhat complex and it’s entirely possible to feel a lot of conflicting emotions all at once. If someone I love does something terrible, even to me, I don’t think I could suddenly stop loving them. I’d sure feel conflicted if I love/hate someone simultaneously and it’d likely be a source of stress.
I’m not sure what would cause me to abandon all love for a family member in favor of hatred. I’m sure it could happen and I’m convinced that it would be the most bitter of hatreds.
