What would it take to lose your love?

My love is conditional.There are certain things one should not do.If they do any of these things,they are done.

having never been in that situation and with love being such a powerful emotion it’s hard to say exactly how I would react. Something like what you described would certainly change the nature of our relationship to say the least, likely landing that person in prison, but I’m not sure if my love for that person would die completely though it would surely be put in it’s place. I guess it would be a function of the maliciousness involved. Unconditional love is usually not as unconditional as we would like to believe. Many people can and do overlook or forgive heinous behavior all the time, abuse, murder, torture, self-destructive cycles, etc. I can’t say for sure I’d stop loving them but I don’t know that I could ever be so blinded as to accept it or allow it to continue.

My love is conditional.

If a family member did something horrendous: killed someone or something, I might still love them in some way, but how I felt about them would be forever changed.

If it was not a family member my love is even more conditional.

I find there are differences between loving someone, and choosing to relate to them in various ways. I might still love someone, ultimately, but not choose to have any communication with them, or be willing to be friendly with them, but not lovers, or not consider them a friend, or not be willing to do business with someone, but still be their friend, or any variation.

When people I love start acting against me or my friends or crossing my boundaries, then I need to look at how to be towards them. Not the same thing as whether I love them or not.

So far, some of you have said you would continue to love in a different way if someone had done something horrendous. What does that look like? Is it just in your heart/mind with no outward affection or communication? Just curious.

when I saw the question, I wondered “What the hell did I do?

@cockswain Nothing….yet. :)

obviously I won’t be talking about all the hitchhikers I’ve dispatched

It would have to be pretty close to being apocolyptic,but yeah there’s a kind of contract that states what you can & can’t get away with.For instance, if I strayed into the arms of another,perish the thought,she would have my balls on a wall mounted platter.

Humans are incapable of giving unconditional love…only animals have the ability to love unconditionally, because they don’t even know what a moral is, or what “right” and “wrong” is in the sense of our beliefs.

It would have to be very extreme, but yes, it can be done. There is a differnce in blowing my trust all to hell, and blowing my love. I can be hurt terribly…..massively…..and still, I will love. But I will love from a distance, because my life with them would then be hollow. I can’t just turn off my love for a person, but I won’t be sharing my life with them, either.

Oddly, movies go on and on about romantic love and how it’s neverending all that, but the only love I have felt that is truly unconditional is toward my children. Mothers of death row inmates have been known to say in interviews, “But I know him. He’s a very loving person” and things to that effect. And it’s the truth. Mothers DO know thier children and are aware that, beneath the horrendous acts, the person within still exists.

humans are not incapable of unconditional love, aparently @Chongalicious has no children. anyone else you can do without.

@slick44 I don’t agree with that. Let’s say your teenage son tortured/murdered the rest of your family. Pretty sure you wouldn’t love him after that.

yes i would. i would want to get him help, but he would still be my child

In that case you’re capable of unconditional love and I’m not.

so be it!

It begs the question: Which of us is more fortunate? I have no idea.

I am, i have someone in my life that is worth everything to me. love tha reat is hard to come by, and it feels wonderful

But that person also has tremendous power over you under all circumstances.

maybe, you can still have controll and love deeply.

I hope we never find out.

@slick44 You’re right, I don’t have kids. But people have disowned their children.

…actually I just thought about something else… If it wasn’t your child, you could easily stop loving them for doing something terrible. Sounds like a condition to me…does this make sense??

sounds like a technicality, but I get your logic

My love is conditional. Infidelity would lose it, verbal abuse would lose it, my partner torturing others would lose it.

@cockswain yeah..thought it may have sounded that way lol

Wow that’s pretty sick. The fact that she’s adopted doens’t make any difference hallo of course.
I love my boyfriend but definetly not onconditionally bc I’f the man cheats on me or something I’d definetly lose my love for him. My love is based on the fact that I can trust him in that area. If I lose that, I’ll have nothing to hold on too.

I too don’t believe in unconditional love but my tolerance, I believe, is more expansive that that of others – I don’t judge as quickly…if he said he’d abused someone and wasn’t remorseful, yes that’d change things..if he was remorseful, it’d still take some time to work out and obviously taking responsibility as well and making things better for the victim…other than rape or murder, nothing they can say would make me leave immediately.

Changing the way you feel about him is not the same thing as you losing your love for him. It doesn’t sound like you truly loved him. Sometimes we have to stay away from someone we love. We have to “decide” what our actions will be. We don’t “decide” who we will love.

@jealoustome I have been treated horribly by women I loved, and I still loved them, but I have never experienced the horror you describe. How awful!

I believe it is possible to love someone and still not be able to condone unacceptable behavior. If you are wanting to know what a deal-breaker would be, I would have to agree that child molesting w/o remorse would be something I could not get past. Hurting others without remorse would be one of those things. Everybody makes mistakes and if they realize it was a mistake an tries to make amends, that is understandable, but to make a mistake and not be able to accept it was wrong, take responsiblity and suffer consequences would be something hard to get past in another person, even someone I loved dearly.

I have unconditional love.

@neverawake .. amen

@jealoustome In the cases I can think of, it’s usually that the other person is being really selfish and aggressive and it starts to seriously impact me and others, at which point I draw lines, they cross them, and then I have to cancel the old relationship (has been friendship, professional, romantic), and see what if any new relationship we can have, backing up until something works for me. It usually does change my affection for them too, but sometimes I can have love for people but not want to have anything to do with them.

In a very few cases though, I basically don’t like them any more too. Generally cases of betrayal or demonstrations that they are ways I can’t abide.

hey you no who else had unconditional love? Jesus

@Zaku When you love someone, but don’t want to have contact with them, how do you know you still love them? Is it really nostalgia for the person you thought they were? I’m asking this seriously, not just to be contrary. I’m very curious about this aspect of love. I’ve said the same thing before. I’ve always thought that once I loved someone that love was always in my heart and whether or not I could have that person in my life, I would still love them in my heart. But, now I wonder if that’s just a delusion we feed ourselves, so we can feel better.

One of my many siblings got into drugs. He stole from me. He forged my name on things, put things in my name without permission. He called from jail whenever he got arrested. He would beg me to bail him out. Sometimes I cried it was so hard not to go bail him out.

My problem with him was minimal compared to the problems I developed with the people he’d drag to my house with him. I had to ask him to stop bringing his party friends over unannounced. Do I love him? I love him like crazy. But I also never go to his house. Not ever. I refuse to bail him out of jail. I refuse to lie for him, be an alibi, or a fake job reference or help in any of his con games. I also had to put a foot down on using my address to have shady items shipped to, or using my property to store questionably obtained items that I suspected may be stolen. I also had to stop allowing him to use my car.

Family is important to me. He still calls me. He still comes by sometimes but I really try to keep him at arms length. I know someday he might grow up, or go to rehab, or have a change of heart. He wasn’t always this way. I remember him as a little boy with freckles still. I know he is not that little boy anymore. I can’t stop loving him because family is very important to me. Friends and lovers go by the wayside but family is different. I just have to use a whole lot of boundaries, knowing he has an addiction, he’s impulsive, and is in with a crowd of people I want no association with.

Sometimes we have to love people from afar.

@thriftymaid I didn’t go into more detail about the relationship because I did not want to divulge this person’s identity. I can tell you that I did love him, deeply, before the revelations about his sister. I think the only thing I might be delusional about is whether I actually stopped loving him or just wanted to. As I was saying to @Zaku, I’m not sure whether we want to believe we can’t stop loving someone because it makes us feel better, or if we want to believe we can because it makes us feel better.

@escapedone7 I’m sorry you’ve had to go through that terrible situation.

I just have to know, if your brother harmed your child because of his irresponsibility or one day encouraged them to become a drug addict also, would you still love him? I’m not asking to be contrary. Really, I just want to know if there is a limit to familial love. I can’t imagine that I would ever stop loving one of my siblings, but I also can’t imagine them doing anything awful to my daughter.

I don’t have children so it is hard to really know. That would be really hard. I don’t want to believe he would do that on purpose. I can imagine an accident due to his irresponsibility (such as drunk driving crash) but that is why I set such firm boundaries in the first place. I guess I don’t know the answer to that. I probably would never speak to him again and sever all contact, but still think of him and weep. I think of two hims though, like Dr. Jeckyll and Mister Hyde. There is the boy he was, and then the person he became.

@escapedone7 Thanks. I really do feel bad that you have to go through such a terrible situation. I can’t imagine how hard it must be.

If I feel that I will end up loving someone, I ask them up front within the first three days, the brutally honest questions about the things I would not tolerate. I get all the ugly stuff on the table about myself too, and If they pass the test, and still want to be around me after that, then nothing will ever stop me from loving them.

I do not trust easily at all, and I have always had this method as a protection mechanism

@MrsDufresne That’s so smart.. I do the same sort of but a milder version of that.

@jealoustome Most of what we perceive as truth and actual experience, of anything, including other people, our relationships with them, even who we are ourselves, is just ideas and feelings in ourselves. When the person isn’t present at the moment, what are we relating to? Even when they are present, mostly, it’s probably mostly to our own ideas and feelings and projections, imaginations, models of them, rather than an actual present existing connection. So when we talk of loving someone, it is mostly something that exists inside of us. Yes, when we aren’t having anything to do with them, one might say it is even less accurate, because we have no recent actual information about them – we’re relating to what we have as representations from the past. But it’s mostly an illusion to think that we ever have a whole lot more than that, except perhaps in present moments of profound connection with someone.