One of the things that I wish I was told when I was younger, is that it is ok to not love your family.
Many of us feel too pressured to love our family. We are so pressured that if we don't love our family, we will become stricken with guilt. We will feel like we are a bad person for not loving our family. To avoid feeling guilt, we will then force ourselves to love our family, by suppressing our experience of them or artificially inducing a love for them, not only in our heart and mind, but also through our expressions or actions towards them.
Suppression and artificial inducements are like a drug - it works well in the short run, but in the long run, it will backfire. If you sometimes resort to suppression of experience or artificial inducements to compensate for your lack of love towards your family, that is natural, but if you become dependent on it, then the cure will be worse than the problem.
Love is something that is tied to knowledge - you can only love something to the degree that you know it.
It is not strange for you to not know, and thus not love, your family. There are many reasons for it.
One is because you simply didn't have the time. Knowing things takes time, and if you have a large number of family members who have an active lifestyle, you might simply not have enough time to know some of them enough to love them.
Two is because you were not paying attention. Other than spending a lot of time, you also have to give something your attention to know it. If you have many things you have to pay attention to, then you might not pay enough attention to your family members to know and love them.
Three is because you or some of your family member might not want to be known. Sometimes people are broken or damaged. When we are broken or damaged, we might deliberately prevent anyone from knowing us well enough to love us, so that they might not see our flaws.
Four is because you can't understand your family . Sometimes, even if you spend time, pay attention and be open to others, you might still not be able to know or love them, because they might be too different from you, for you to be able to understand them sufficiently .
Five is because you might erroneously believe that youn already love your family although you don't in reality. When you think you have something that you don't , you will never have it, because you will never look for it.
To feel that you have to automatically love your family or friends simply because they are around you or maybe because you are indebted to them, is actually a wrong view that will not stand the test of reality and cause you a lot of distress.
If you feel indebted to people, you should just aim to pay them back - not love them.
To people around you, it is enough that you act in a way that is agreed upon or customary.
Love is something that comes at the end, not from the beginning.
It is synonymous with knowledge, and it requires time, attention, sincerity and effort.
If you think that you will automatically love someone from the beginning , you will not put in the time, sincerity , attention and effort necessary, to bring it about.
It is actually not uncommon to find people that don't know or love their family, although they lie in close proximity to each other and have a lot of activity together.
If you don't love your family - you won't miss them when they are not around - you might even feel relieved by their absence, but if you are conditioned to feel that you must love them, you might feel guilty for feeling relieved.
Although you are often together and participate in a lot of activity with them, you might still feel alone and disconnected when you are with them. You won't know their joys and pains, and you won't be able to meaningfully be a part of it.
If you want to love your family, rather just force yourself to do things with them or be together with them, you should aim to know them better.
Rather than aim to feel love for them automatically, you should give it time. It is ok to not love the people you are with from the start - even if they are your own parents or children or siblings . You will only love them the more you know them, and this will only happen naturally and gradually, rather than forcefully or immediately .
Young people should know this. It is ok if you don't love your friends or family. It is natural and quite common.
When I was 16, I thought everybody loved their family. Now that I am 46, I realise that no one loves all of their family members. No one. So don't feel bad if you don't love your family members.. it is a truth that you are someday going to realise anyway, when you are older.
TheRealNehruism (nehru.sathiamoorthy@gmail.com) is a content creator under the Newswav Creator programme, where you get to express yourself, be a citizen journalist, and at the same time monetize your content & reach millions of users on Newswav. Log in to creator.newswav.com and become a Newswav Creator now!
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