Can You Truly Love Someone Without Liking Their Family?
Love is a wonderful thing, as two people join together in a passionate romance that is unique to them. However, with any relationship, you need to interact and spend some time with each other’s families if you become serious.
You might like each other’s families and get along great with them, but what if you don’t? Can you truly love someone without liking their family?
It could be argued that to fully love someone, you need to love everything about them and if anything doesn’t quite match up to your expectations, it could lead to your falling out of love with them or never being in love with them at all. That’s why being able to get along with their family can be seen as a huge thing for some people and make them question their relationship if it’s not ideal.
This article will delve deeper into this dilemma and figure out if you can truly love someone within liking their family. We will touch on different issues that might arise and if there are any possible solutions.
Related: Can you ever stop loving someone?
How Do You Know If You Love Someone?
Before we have a clear look at whether you can love someone without liking their family, we first need to understand how you know if you love someone.
The psychologist, Zick Rubin, has claimed that love is made up of three elements:
● Intimacy: sharing feelings and desires with a person that you couldn’t possibly tell anyone else.
● Attachment: finding yourself wanting to be around a person more often and desiring physical contact with them.
● Caring: wanting to make the other person feel as happy as possible and value their needs as much as your own.
Liking someone generally means that you find them pleasant to be around, but it doesn’t evolve to a deeper level. Whereas love can be pin-pointed as being somewhat of an obsession with someone, as you feel devoted to them. There’s a fine line between the two, which often confuses how we truly feel about someone.
Do You Need to Like Your Partner’s Family?
Being able to get along with your partner’s family can be a big deal for people, as you might find yourself falling in love with someone before meeting their family, which can put a lot of pressure on you.
Additionally, getting along with your partner’s family could also mean a lot to your partner, so if you don’t like them, it could be a relationship end.
Understanding the expectations of meeting your potential future in-laws and how much time you are expected to spend with them can help you prepare yourself.
If, upon meeting the family, you don’t particularly like them, you might no longer see yourself being with your partner, as they might want you to always be around their family.
This can make it crucial for your relationship and raise whether you can truly love someone without liking their family.
Reasons You Might Not Like Your Partner’s Family
There might be different reasons why you might not like your partner’s family, with each reason having different connotations whether you love them. Let’s take a look at some of the potential reasons:
1. Family Values
They might be genuinely nice people, but if your partner’s family has different values from yours, it can be irritating and put you off them.
This is quite a common reason why people might not like the family of the person they love, so it’s an area that a lot of people relate to.
In this instance, you might not like your partner’s family due to their values but you can still forge some kind of relationship with them, whether it’s fake or not.
You can still love your partner despite this issue, as they might not necessarily have the same values as the rest of their family, which can make you further rate just how special they are. You can pardon your partner regarding this issue.
2. Family Gathering Exclusion
Being excluded from any kind of gathering or party can be upsetting. This is especially true if you are excluded from your partner’s family gatherings.
There might be no malicious intent behind this, but it can make you feel as though you are not liked by your partner’s family, which can make you feel the same way about them.
Discussing this could be a potential solution and negate any stress you may have.
This can make you fall out of love with your partner or make you question the relationship, as it could make you believe that they might not be worth it if they are letting their family exclude you from events and gatherings.
3. Don’t Agree With Your Life Decisions
You will have to make many life decisions that others won’t necessarily agree with. This can be frustrating, especially if it’s your partner’s family that disagrees with your decisions and judges you for it.
One of the big things that gets a lot of judgment in the modern era is cosmetic surgery, as making changes to your physical appearance can turn a lot of heads.
If you’ve undergone a procedure, such as piezo rhinoplasty, and your partner’s family doesn’t agree with your decision, it could lead to you not liking them.
In this instance, it should all depend on your partner’s opinions and whether they are supportive of you or backing their family. Therefore, you can still love your partner, even if their family doesn’t agree with your life decisions.
4. Family Conflict
If you find the interactions with your partner’s family always ending in conflict, it can lead to you not liking them. Conflict with anyone can be a cause for concern, but this is especially the case when it comes to the family of the person you love.
It can make you dread attending family functions on your partner’s side, and this could lead to your partner getting frustrated with your attitude towards the situation.
You can still love someone despite having conflicts with their family, but it’s far from ideal and could dampen your relationship.
Realistically, it will all come down to whether you feel as though your partner is being supportive of you in these situations.
Final Thoughts
Not liking your partner’s family can be a big deal, as it can put a strain on your relationship. However, does this mean that you can’t truly love someone without liking their family?
Not necessarily. You can still love someone and everything about them without liking their family, as that’s not the issue. The actual issue would be whether you can still be in a relationship with someone without liking their family.
You can still love someone but realize that there is no long-term future with them due to your issues with their family. Building a strong family unit creates a lasting support system. While it may be impossible for you to become best friends with your partner’s family, it is possible to be respectful of one another.
At the end of the day, it’s all about balance and whether your love is strong enough with your partner to be able to put up with the negatives surrounding their family.
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