Situational love

I'm a little suspicious of some kinds of love. Especially love that isn't specific and individual.

I understand that many - most - motheres and fathers love their children. Most children love their pareents. Some of us continue to love partners who mistreat us, or who no longer love us. I wonder though, where that leaves parents who don't like or even respect the children they've raised to adulthood. Or children who don't like or respect the parents who raised them? Or the men and women who continue to love an abusive partner?

Such love seems to me to be somewhat allied to ego. We love the object of our affection because it is ours, because of his/her/it's relationship to us. "What can I do? She or he is my _______ (insert relationship here)". It's situational love, and it centers on us.

Sometimes we can't help loving, in spite of a lack of reciprocity, because we love, understand and even admire the individual we so helplessly love. Or even because of habit. But where it's situational without individual specificity, I don't trust it. As Billy Connelly says, it's of use to no bugger. It doesn't help the beloved, and I'm suspect it doesn't help us.

Love is not love that alters when it alteration finds, sure. But love is not love that fixes on structural relevance rather than on the human being caught inside that matrix.