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.

Cruelty, kindness and consequences

Sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind.

It's one of those truisms that I instinctively distrust (right up there with 'you make your own happiness' and 'honesty is the best policy'), even as I broadly agree with it. Yes, it's usually true, but I find myself wondering what your agenda is when you bring it up...

It is an easy and available excuse for all sorts of casually cruel or ungenerous behaviour.

On the other hand, sometimes you DO have to be cruel to be kind. I do deem it a kindness to allow those we love to experience the consequences of their actions. If we always protect them from negative consequences, we insulate them from learning anything, we also teach them need.

I recently overheard a woman at a cafe, talking about one of her adult offspring*. The offspring is now (temporarily) back at home due to an unfortunate financial reverse. Based on what she said, this woman is keen to get her offspring back on its feet, but at the same time be self-responsible, so she demanded living expenses - partly out of her own financial necessity, and partly to demonstrate there are no free rides. Her friend was just congratulating her on her great parenting when she added that if the offspring ran out of money between pay days, she put up the difference.

Um.... wait, what? It's possible I missed something - after all, I was involuntarily eavesdropping - but it sounded like this woman was bank rolling an adult, and totally removing the pain of running out of money before next pay day. Which, back 'when I were a lad' was the only thing that taught us feckless young uns to live within our means.

If you drank your bus fare, you had to walk. If you bought clothes with your food money, you ate tinned soup (if you had any) or had the humiliation of going home to the folks for dinner six nights running. If you parents were like mine, they cooked generous meals, but were quietly deeply disappointed in you and you quickly decided it wasn't worth it for a cheap top that wasn't quite the right colour, and didn't make the chap of the moment look twice at you, and shrank in the wash: multiple consequences from one bad decision and a world of learning to be had. Plus, your friends laughed at you if you tried to 'poor me' to them.

These consequences, while painful at the time, are appropriate to the financial behaviour that created them.

What happens to this woman's offspring? Er... apparently nothing whatsoever. In fact, I suspect that her insistence that she is being a financial hard-ass may even dilute any appreciation or embarrassment her offspring might feel about battening off good old Mum. (If you apologise to me and I deny there is anything to apologise for, because no transgression occurred, what are you to think? How do you deal with that?)

Kindnesses that lead children - even adult children - to have an unrealistic expectation of how life works are not really very kind. In those cases, the cruelty of letting a child experience harsh cold reality might really be the kindest thing to do...

* The gender is not germane to the story.

This is post 2 of the non-challenge challenge.

Loving and caring

You can care for something without loving it. You can love something without caring for it. The most satisfying relationships are both loving and caring. I say relationships, even though I include some inanimate objects. We can have a relationship with a house, a car, a garden, even with a process.

You can love your first car while you give it no care whatsoever. A friend of mine was a committed 'non-materialist' and even during those first heady days of car ownership he refused to service his beloved alfa-romeo, what he called 'being materially invested in things'. The car was always breaking down - and not just because it was a late 70s alfa!

I've head some jobbing gardeners don't actually love gardening or plants - they just care for them. My inner romantic suspects that the plants don't grow as well if they're not loved, but it's true that love without care doesn't work on most plants.

When I have a massage, especially with a new masseur, I find it interesting and relaxing to be comforted by the competent care I'm receiving, care which is totally divorced from love. This care is also totally divorced from how good you are at your day job, how charming or good-looking you are, and how much you earn. You receive the care because you paid for it, that's the only essential qualification.

Baking bread is a process, as you mix the dough and knead it and watch it rise, and punch it down, and watch it rise again, then bake it. It's a process you can have a relationship with. You have to care (a bit) for it to work, and I think it's possible to feel a sort of love for the alchemy of it all.

Yet when it comes to our most precious personal relationships, I think we find it easy to focus on the love we feel. We feel caring, but we don't always take care. Giving care is, ultimately, about the needs of those we love. It is not necessarily caring to encourage others to depend on us to solve all their problems. It is not necessarily caring to indulge the poor choices our loved ones make. The impulses of our affection too often inspire us to give the care which is easiest or most obvious, the care that suits our own agenda. We give love, and we give the care we want to give, rather than the care those we love really need.

This is post 41 of 100 posts in 100 days.