I dont like you but I sure love you?

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Liking is largely an emotion. Loving–charity–in the Christian sense is an act of the will. This is a really important distinction as most of the world equates loving with emotion. Hence people “fall in” love and “fall out” of love.
Jesus commanded love for one another, and only a fool would command an emotion.
 
Generally it refers to the difference between willing what is good for the person (that can include things that are for the person’s own good and actual benefit, not just their personal pleasure) andaand your current emotional state towards that person.

Someone might not always have positive emotions towards one’s spouse, but true love means they continue to will what’s best for the spouse even so.
 
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St. Thomas Aquainus’s definition of love: To love is to will the good of another.
You can do this without liking the person.
 
Read St. Paul’s description of what love is/is not. He doesn’t mention liking.
 
Yes I’ve heard that liking is just an emotion.
But you know I’d be highly disappointed if God only loved us but didn’t like us.
If I ponder on the story of the Prodigal Son, I sense God liking us and loving us. The wayward son arrives home and is greeted warmly by the Father. The Father is genuinely glad to see His Son home. Thrilled in fact. So much that He asks for a feast to be prepared. I sense a lot of emotion there. Not an act of will.

God loving us includes liking, is my assertion. He is not loving us out of a sense of duty. He likes our idiosyncrasies, our personality. because he created us. We are unique to Him. So for me, if we are to try and imitate God’s love or should I say allow God’s love to shine through us, we need to try to like people, appreciate their strengths. Highlight their good points. And that is hard if we have a natural dislike of them.
 
Oh, I think a careful reading of the OT will show a God who loved Israel, but clearly did not like them…
 
That’s why we need the New Testament to show God’s other side, through Jesus Christ.
 
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I’m estranged from my grown daughter. I’ve tried to patch things up to no avail. After two years I’ve given up, not from lack of patience, but because I’ve realized I actually don’t like her and haven’t for a long time. Even if we buried the hatchet, I would not want to be around her. She is not a good person or a pleasant person to be around in my view.

I’m her Dad. I love her because it is my duty to love her. I would help her if she needed help. But I don’t like her at all and I doubt that will ever change.
 
sorry to hear your story. There must be so many stories like yours out there. I myself find some members of my family difficult to love. But they would say the same about me. I realise I’m a difficult person. But sorry I mean your daughter does probably have a toxic personality and in the end for your own sake, you need to avoid her. Life can be sad.
 
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I sometimes think the challenge for us in life is to discover the meaning of love. To grow spiritually. In my late teens and twenties I thought the meaning of love was to find a pretty girl, marry her and worship her for the rest of my life.
When I finally got married, I discovered my wife wasn’t perfect. At the same time, I gradually noticed all the other people I had on pedestals were imperfect as well.
Real love was much deeper, much less idealised than I thought. Love is realistic and authentic and pragmatic to some extent. We need to learn to love and be grateful for small things everyday like sunshine and rain. And the people close to us who see us warts and all. They see the “real” me which sure aint beautiful quite often. How lucky I am to experience real love in this lifetime.
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Yes, liking and loving are different; you must love all people, but not required to like anyone. I’m pretty sure Jesus didn’t like the Pharisees or those who made fun of Him. but yes, He loved them. Your examples of Hitler’s admirers, serial killers, and pedophiles, must also be loved. since each person is loved by God, then we are required to as well .But not always their actions.
 
To understand love, we must think of it not as a feeling, but as an action.

To love another is to will the good of another. The most perfect good is to conform to the will of God.

Jesus said, “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; even as I have loved you, that you also love one another.” Jesus completely desired nothing more than to bring people into conformity with the will of God, and He commands His followers to share this same mission.

When we encounter people we don’t like, people who have hurt us, people who love their sin more than us… we can still choose to love them; to pray for them, to instruct them, and to help them to conform to God’s will.

Sometimes people caught up in a particular sin will tell their family and friends, “if you loved me, you would support me no matter what!” This way of thinking comes from a distorted view of love.

When we love someone who is caught up in something that is bad for them, it is precisely because of our love for them that we can’t support them.

It is impossible to desire and will the good of another while choosing to ignore the needle marks in their arm…
It is impossible to desire and will the good of another while refusing to tell them that the affair they are having is wrong…
It is impossible to desire and will the good of another while supporting their choice to act out on their SSA…
It is impossible to desire and will the good of another while listening to their gossip and calumniation of someone…
It is impossible to desire and will the good of another while you sit silent in the face of their self destructive behavior…
It is impossible to desire and will the good of another when you don’t want to say anything because it might upset them…
etc…

To love another is HARD. To love another is not to treat them in a way that will result in mutual liking of each other and good feelings. Rather, it is to orient your thoughts, words, and actions towards helping to lead them to conform to the will of God; to charitably say and do the hard things that need to be said and done when no one else is willing to do so because they might cause turmoil.

Jesus loved everyone; they killed Him for it.

He chose to love them anyways…
 
I used to think the word “enemies” pertained to war, and opposite sides on the battlefield. Or imaginary ones that people with some mental illness might have. But when Jesus refers to your own family members as being your “enemies”, I’ve come to see this as people who are not easy to be around at all. And there are many! And that’s how a lot of people see me as well. But we still love and care for each other, as creatures of God. And if it gets harder to love by being around “difficult” people, a spiritual director told me to “love from afar”.

And just as an aside, “even the paranoid have enemies”
 
I think I know where you’re coming from, especially with God. And I might be misunderstanding you. But there are lots of people we never met, in fact most people, and we can still love them, as God wants us to.
 
I think it’s just easier to explain for those of us who are parents. We love our children, but there are lots of times that we don’t like them very much, or at least we don’t like some of the things they do.

Not sure how naturally it comes either.

Maybe think of it as trying to love people simply because they are your fellow humans. Doesn’t mean you have to like the things they do. By loving people simply because they are your fellow humans, it means you don’t intentionally harm them, you would in fact be a good samaritan and help them if you were able and they were in need. Does that make sense?
 
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