<p>True, most of us are fortunate not to find out whether there is a breaking point or what that might be and when it takes “tough love” to help a loved one. Is enabling love? Is being a doormat love? Is “tough love” love? Agree with the above post that it can be hard to know.</p>
<p>I will just say blood is thicker than water. I find it easier loving my own children unconditional than any other human being. </p>
<p>Dh is conditional love. Such as if he ever cheater on me or hurt my children, he would be gone. There are conditions for him. Now my girls will always be my girls and I would do anything for them.</p>
<p>I would not go so far as to say I’d do “anything” for my children. However, there is nothing they could do that would make me stop loving them. That’s the unconditional part. There is no feeling of “I will always love you unless you ____________.”</p>
<p>Someone I knew said that once you lay eyes on your child (I don’t think adopted or born to you matter much) that it is instant love, that the child now becomes a part of you and for me there is nothing I wouldn’t do for my child barring stuff that I as a parent believed I needed to do to protect him from harm or whatnot or simply couldn’t do for physical or other reasons (like the story of the little girl in one of the fairly tales, who wants the moon…and gets sicks because she doesn’t get it. in the fairly tale the jester kinds of gets around it, he gives her a medallion made to look like the moon at the size the girl thinks it is, like thumbnail size , and she accepts it (he does this at the new moon)…when the moon of course rises again, the girl isn’t sad, because she figures if you take the moon, like cutting hair, a new one grows in its place:)</p>
<p>It raises honest questions about what love truly means, can you really love a child you have, rejected, no longer want to see? The parents who threw their child out because she had had sex, or the child who is gay, do they truly still love them at that point? I realize philosophers have been fighting over this one for years, but can you say the parent truly loves the child who in effect throws them away?</p>