So I knew a guy this happened to. How you think this ought to go, what you think the right thing is, you won’t understand it until it happens to you. When it’s no longer a story on the internet, when it’s your life, whatever you choose to do is going to be one of the hardest things you’ve ever done.
Ok, but when you spend a third to a half of your life loving someone like your child and then you just drop them for something that isn’t at all their fault, do you really love any of your children? Do you really love anyone when you can drop a bond like a father to a child just like that?
All that kind of move does is send the message to everyone else in his life that his love is conditional and you might be dropped at any point for something that isn’t your fault.
All love is conditional, the feeling may not be hut the action is, and that’s what counts. If you think there’s a love that isn’t in your life it’s because you can’t imagine what the conditions are.
Someone that goes through that, and I’ve known a man who did, you really can’t understand it. In this situation I’d say people deal with it the ebst way they can and I don’t fault anyone from taking either route.
My man, that’s not even close to true. The only person who chooses to love conditionally is the one doing the loving. A parent’s love for a child is the last kind of love that should be conditional. And if that parent’s condition after 20 years is that that child came from his seed, then he doesn’t really love his child. Love means accepting someone for who they are, not judging their worthiness based on their circumstances.
I’d say, based on how convinced you are to make a statement that all love is conditional, you probably need to see a therapist.
I’d like to give this guy the benefit of the doubt and say that trauma is a bitch, but he really just said “I discovered you were conceived in an affair so you don’t matter to me”. It’s pretty difficult to reconcile that opinion from the standpoint of a father.
So if you had a son that was a serial child rapist murderer (or a Nazi, you decide) you’d still show them affection and care for them? You might love them in your heart, but you wouldn’t love them in your actions. All love is conditional, and if you don’t believe that it’s because the conditions for you are unfathomable. I love my children, if one were a serial child rapist murderer I’d help try to get them on death row. I have conditions on which they will receive my support and care, and honestly kids need expectations. It’s not like I’d stop loving them if they called me a meanie butthead. There are serious conditions that they’re unlikely to not meet, but if they don’t, I’m not there for them.
Someone spends their youth caring for a child, all the resources, dedicated, and their heart gets ripped out and torn to shreds. Their life was a lie, their life was stolen from them. How they react to that is very personal. It may not even be that they don’t love the kid, just that they can’t cope with seeing their face without breaking down. I won’t judge someone for either leaving or staying. You don’t understand it, hopefully you never have to. This is one of those things where we have no right to judge someone’s reaction, unless of course it’s murder or something like that.
Putting forth the most extreme example you can think of is the opposite of proving your point. You’re just demonstrating where your line is, and doing so also showing that you can’t fathom love deeper than that, not proving it doesn’t exist. It’s also a little sad you think that parents out there don’t love their children in the face of crimes they committed is the rule and not the exception.
I understand deep pain and not being able to face the kid after that kind of betrayal by the mother. Taking away that kid’s ticket to life because of it is absolutely worth judging someone over. This is not just being unable to cope with pain. This is lashing out at someone who doesn’t deserve it.
Look bud, I’m sorry about what happened to your mate, and I won’t pretend to understand the personal nature of the decision he had to make. But I’m also not going to sit here and let you justify what is clearly an act of spite by saying all love is conditional because a mother doesn’t love a murderer. That’s a pretty ridiculous jump, and that you had to jump that far in the first place really only shows that you think love should be conditional.
You should probably reevaluate the place in yourself where that notion comes from, because that’s not really the kind of statement a stable person makes.
Anyway, you’re not going to convince someone who defines love differently than you that there is a limit to what that love should be. Less so that the specific circumstances of this situation in particular are justified.
People who think love is unconditional think it is a feeling. It is not, it is an action. I generally find that people that think love is a feeling justify all sorts of bad actions towards people because they have a feeling called love for those people and that makes up for it. People that understand that it is an action generally treat those they claim to love better, but they understand their limits. I don’t think you understand the depth you can love someone when you have mental clarity about what it entails and still do it anyway, every day, with the risk of heartbreak that comes along with that.
Insisting on your own definition doesn’t really do anything other than show (again, for the third time now) that you believe love has limitations as to who deserves it.
You love differently. I’ve already made my points. You’re free to love or not love your children as you wish, but stating something as broad as ‘all love is conditional’ is getting into the territory of deciding what love is for everybody. If you can’t grasp why that’s ridiculous, I can’t help you.
I’m not interested in continuing this increasingly circular argument. Agree to disagree.
Regardless of what either of us defines love as, it’s pretty hard to argue that what that man did to a child he spent years raising was justified. Even if love is conditional, there’s still a line where it turns from simply not loving that person into active spite. That girl did nothing to lose his love except discover at the same time he did that they weren’t related. If that’s his condition for loving her, as I said to begin with, he didn’t actually love her.
In any case, I try to make it a point to not say the same things over and over when arguing on the internet, because it just leads to a lot of wasted time. So if you’ve got nothing more to add than insisting on the same points you’ve made multiple times now, you’ll forgive me if this is where I stop responding.
I’m tired of words being put into my mouth. I could clarify my stance again, but I don’t think I care enough.
I didn’t say boundaries shouldn’t exist. I’m was actively arguing that we are not all the same. I understand perfectly what he meant by the difference between love as a feeling and as an action, and feel that the distinction is irrelevant in the context. You don’t have to agree with me, I’m not looking for approval.
Besides all that, none of it has to do with the original purpose of this thread before it went off on a tangent, which is that the situation in question is fucked. No interpretation of boundaries or conditional love fits into the fact that he rescinded a life changing gift upon learning she wasn’t his, after he loved her like a father for 19 years.
I sympathize with his situation. What he did was misdirect his pain at his kid, which is shitty either way.
Ok, I understand this now. The reddit post this post is based on came on the heels of another post where an actual father disowned his actual daughter and then took the money he promised her for college and left her out to dry, while giving all of her siblings the same amount. There are several people discussing that incident on the linked post, but this is not that. It’s just a post about fathers disowning their children.
I guess that’s my bad. That guy was an asshole. I’m not trying to say all dads who do that are assholes. I guess based on the first two comments on this thread chain, I thought we were talking about that guy.
There’s honestly no reason not to, the lab cost is so low.
Actually, I don’t know what the false negative chance is, but it might just be that the raw number of families getting tests would produce a problematic number of false negative results? Which could generate a bunch of drama.
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