Everybody doesn’t have to (Like) Love you

In our culture, we so used to hearing you must love everyone we rarely give it a second thought let alone question the basis of such an assumption.

We cannot like or love everyone, nor should we, love is not an equal opportunity construct, so be realistic, some people will dislike you for whatever reason and that is just the way things are.

It may because of superficialities like the way you look, speak, walk or your views on just about anything and what is more some do not even need a reason.

Love is a lofty word that stumps too many people who don’t understand its meaning, even the irreligious throw the line ‘love your neighbor’ out in a vacuum, when it’s really just the golden rule of treat others the way you want to be treated that goes hand-in-hand with keeping the commandments, something else that’s rarely mentioned.

One woman summed up ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself’ on the question of women filling clerical positions in Church as: allowing everyone to realize their full potential(s) and career desires, rationalizing it okay to interpret that verse anyway she chooses, and she wasn’t joking either.

Her premise is something along the lines of because something is misunderstood or not proved true; therefore, it is false so just improvise.

As a progressive, she believes theology should match with the culture of the times, as should the 14th amendment with its ill-defined right to the pursuit of happiness.

Love has nothing to do with agreeing with someone or even accepting people ‘for what they are’ as so many think.

Directives to love everybody are nothing other than calls to comply and strong-arm tactics as we need to remember love is a choice not an imperative, if we have to love everybody, we can in fact love nobody, which rather defeats the object.

Only in Orwell’s world could love as a concept and an emotion cease to exist, at least in ways we have always understood, while the meaning of hate remains unchanged.

The question of what is love is a tough one; we can only love what is lovely, said Plato in his Symposium.

What we can’t do is look upon deformity or disorder in any form and believes that we must accept it in order to love.

A baby could be born with Downs Syndrome and the parent will still love their child, hopefully, it is not essential to accept the disorder to love the child: the parent loves their offspring regardless, in spite of not because of any deformity.

If you love someone before he or she was disfigured in an accident, could you still love that person afterwards?

Well, maybe, but the point is you love them or you don’t.

So to the question is acceptance essential to love the answer is no, they are two different things.

When it comes to other people the bottom line is we still love noble qualities, love is both a choice and a preference, we love some more than others and there others we don’t love at all, and that’s the gist of it.

The meanings of words have been lost because they politicized and democratized with everything affected by this phenomenon and that’s the problem.