Nope. At least for me, it goes like this:
Unconditional love:
Nobody. I don’t care if you’re my kid, if you turn out to be Pol Pot, I’m going to stop loving you.
Nearly unconditional (dependent on not being a monster):
Slightly More conditional (dependent on not being a dick):
Take them or leave them:
In A Completely Separate Category Where The Word Love Doesn’t Apply:
Pets.
This doesn’t really resemble my thought processes or feelings. I don’t believe in a ranking system for love, nor do I believe there’s anyone that couldn’t perform some action to lose my love.
The very idea that someone wrote this sentence sincerely and then made a list and not as a joke makes me feel queasy.
Let’s not talk about love. Let’s talk about *responsibility *- it’s easier to quantify. The people whose welfare I am responsible for, in order of preference, are my child first, then my wife, then my parents, siblings and their children all equally (although my parents would probably insist I look after my siblings before I worry about them), then my in-laws, then my best friends, and then my more distant relatives. My pets come last because they’re just fucking animals.
My ranking is:
We just had a similar conversation over in the thread where the guy was having trouble with his kids, and I came to the stunning realization that some people do love their children unconditionally.
Mine certainly didn’t. It was understood that if I didn’t do well in school, if I didn’t get married as they wished, they would withdraw their love and support.
And they did.
In addition, like others, I have no one on my “unconditional love” list. There is no one I love without conditions. Think about it. I don’t have children, but even if I did, there are heinous crimes my child could commit that would make me stop loving them. Same with my SO. Hell, I might stop loving my SO if he systematically and deliberately hurt me.
No, I wouldn’t agree.
I love my cat much less than I love my father, wife, most of my siblings, any of my friends, my two favorite cousins, or mother-in-law. Note that I’m fussy about whom I’ll call a RL friend. Mrs. Which is not a person.
My wife and our kids are tied in my affection. If I lost them all I’m not sure I’d see a reason to keep on living.
As fond as I am of my favorite niece, the love I have for my kids & wife is an order of magnitude higher.
I have three nephews and two nieces on my side, and my husband has two nephews and four nieces on his side.
On my side I know two nephews. If I saw the other one I would recognize him from Facebook pictures, and wouldn’t have a problem going over and talking to him. My nieces I wouldn’t know.
On my husband’s side we are close to one niece, and know her kids. Her grandchildren are still quite small. The other ones I haven’t seen or heard from in years.
Unconditional love is for dogs. Everything is conditional - sure, the conditions can be as low as “if you don’t become a rapist and serial killer, torture toddlers, and try to stab me, I’ll love you,” but it’s still not unconditional. If you actually have unconditional love for your spouse, that’s a very dangerous and unhealthy thing; saying something like “I love my spouse unconditionally, as long as he doesn’t do anything horrible, of course” means your love is conditional. I honestly don’t think humans are programmed to love unconditionally. The closest thing I can think of is the feelings some parents have for their kids, but there’s probably a few horrible scenarios that could cause them to lose that love.
Thank you! This.
And I’ll take it a step further and say “Unconditional Love” is stupid concept.
There’s the “friends” that for some may rate higher. In the military and some other highly dangerous professions where the willingness to risk life and limb for a peer exists it’s hard to not put that in or near unconditional. Admittedly that’s a small subset of the population.
I have no kids and overwhelmingly no spouse in my lifetime so that sort of takes a couple chunks in the ranking most have. I come from a big extended family so there’s a wide divergence at the same level of relationships from relatively close to wouldn’t recognize them outside a family function where I at least had a hint they were related.
My stepfather treats my son just like his own grandson-- but then, my father is deceased, and my son never knew him, so my stepfather is the only “grandpap” he’s had on my side of the family. He’s a great guy, and I love him very much too-- he didn’t come into my life until I was in my 30s, so he’s more like a friend than a father, but he’s really a great guy.
Thank goodness the woman my father’s brother married didn’t feel that way. Of course, she took care of me a lot from the time I was a toddler, because my mother was finishing her Ph.D. I’m sure my parents paid her something, but there were also lots of weekends I stayed with them, and I’m not really sure what the arrangement was when I was a teenager, and I lived with them in another state. My whole family-- grandparents, aunts, cousins, got together for Shabbes on many weekends, and you got parented by whatever adult was closest when you needed something, whether it was discipline or a hug.
But my aunt and I have always been especially close, and in a lot of ways, she feels like my real mother.
Biology doesn’t dictate “rankings”. Relationships do. For example, I have near-unconditional love for my cousin, and unconditional love for her son. My cats are way, way above her nasty, weirdo of a mother. I think hers would be, too.
The OP says “expendable/easy to disown” but those are two different things. I could easily disown my wife if she cheated on me or tried to kill me or something. I couldn’t “expend” her, though.
On the other hand, I would easily give my life for brother #2 or my nephews, and I know brother #1 would, too. But neither I nor brother #1 would give our lives for each other. That’s because brother #2 and my nephews are children, while my first brother and I are grown men. We’d save the kids, no question, but each other, probably not.
Then there’s my mother. With each passing year, she gets closer and closer to the grave, so it gets easier and easier to “expend” her. But she’s also growing infirm, so to abandon or “disown” her is getting harder and harder.
So I’m not really sure I can rank any loved ones without knowing if I’m saving them, leaving them to die, kicking them out of my life, cutting off their inheritance, giving them a kidney, or what. It depends.
Exactly. I define unconditional as meaning you’d love them even if they hypothetically killed somebody, or committed a severe sex crime. Otherwise it’s still conditional and qualified, even if only barely.
That’s exactly what I mean. I’m just saying that most people would probably still love their kids or nieces and nephews if they killed someone or were a child molester or a war criminal or something else horrible, but would disown their parents or spouse for the exact same behavior. IMO that DOES mean they love them a little bit more.
For the record I DON’T agree with this list. I love everyone i love on an individual basis and how they’re related to me doesn’t really matter. I’m just trying to guess how people, Americans in particular, generally rank it based on talking to people and reading forum posts. It seems like people almost always love children more than adults and sometimes even pets too.
I think there’s actually empirical evidence for unconditional love. Ted Bundy’s mother still loved him for example, so did Jeffrey Dahmer’s father. And I’m pretty sure Hitler’s sister still loved him though of course she may have been cut from the same cloth.
How old are you? Do you have kids if your own, by which I mean ones you are raising or have raised? Because it seems very odd that you’re equating children of one’s own with nieces and nephews. I’m fond of my siblings’ kids, but I don’t love them half as much as I love my wife, daughter, and sons. For that matter, I love my favorite sister more than any of my nieces and nephew.
I’m 25 and no I don’t have children nor am I an uncle.