| | Ted, I could easily defend my online statements in court, though I do not anticipate ever divorcing.
All, this is a language issue. What I meant is that I love myself most highly and rank others based on that ultimate value. So even though I have aspects of myself I want to improve, I still hold myself as my ultimate value, thus setting it as the 100% standard against which to measure others in my values hierarchy.
I do not consider this man's battle worth fighting the way he has chosen to fight it, but I can understand why he does what he does. He feels angry for having been made into a cuckold and wants to strike back -- perfectly understandable. I have to wonder, had the genders reversed in this story, would reaction here be different? Certainly I would respect a woman who made such a gutsy demand in divorce court of her adulterous husband.
TSI wrote:
Love isn't conditional on its return.
Bullshit. Of course human love is conditional. It is born, it grows, it withers, it dies, just as a living organism is goal-directed and conditional.
He should have just let the mother of his children die a slow death, as they watched.
Is this emotional blackmail? If they had "trouble" then is he saving her life because he loves her or the children? She now has custody of the children. How does that benefit him?
Change the circumstances a bit. What if he were single and his niece needed a kidney and he matched? What if he couldn't get along with his brother and sister-in-law? So he forfeits a kidney so the niece can live only to have the whole family sh*t on him later ... or he lets her die and they sh*t on him anyway.
I really have to wonder about this thread. I have made no "clumsy" claims but have evidently hit some latent altruistic nerves here. Obviously my concept of "love" differs from that of other posters.
Are we adults here? Can we be honest? Life is both precious and cheap -- precious because each human being is unique, cheap because any fool who copulates can spawn and become a parent. So my valuing of any particular life has limits because there are so many with whom I know I could cultivate a bond. I apply this principle across all four of the five major human bonds -- storge, philia, agape, eros. The fifth, philautos or love of self, has its own limits. Struggling to stay alive in the face of overwhelming and incurable pain offers one such instance of rapidly diminishing returns on effort.
If he had conditions on giving her the kidney, "I expect you to love me completely and forever and ever, or until I say it's okay not to love me anymore," he should have stated them plainly so she fully understood his rules.
Given the standard marriage vows of loving "until death" and the fact that he did in fact save her life, it sounds quite reasonable as an implied expectation.
Steve wrote:
Self-acceptance's relation to feeling lovable reflects onto our reactions to others - that is, I can love someone while accepting their flaws. In fact, if I don't accept their shortcomings, my love isn't real (isn't of them).
I support the idea of loving people despite their flaws, then loving them even more as they overcome those flaws. In other words, love is not binary but graduated over a scale of, say, 0 to 100 for the least possible to the most possible. "Of course I love you. I'd love you even more if you'd clean your junk out of the garage, but I still love you."
This thread reminds me of Harry Browne's book How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World in which he talks about labels like "love" and how they come with a lot of baggage to tie you into "duty" through unearned guilt, etc., thus robbing you of freedom.
(Edited by Luke Setzer on 1/17, 12:52am)
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