love is shapeless and priceless. we can blame nobody when captured by it. love can not be forced, nor can it be pretended. sympathy is not love, neither is gratitude. love must be generated from the heart, and expressed in actions. it can not be called love without passions and a deep longing from the bottom of the heart. there's no impassable gulf between family love and fraternal love. some family love may turn into friendship. at the same time, natural barriers doesn't exist either between fraternal love and amatory love. some friendship may develop into amatory love. the same is true with amatory love which may change into family love after a long time of mutual grinding and polishing.the closer the relationship, and the higher the expectations are, the more difficult it is to get along with each other. family love, fraternal love and amatory love are three main human feelings. if handled well, they can bring us extreme happiness, while handled improperly, will bring us great sufferings.
the present society is a world of dazzling money and dwindling human feeling contacts. most people hold a snobbish attitude. they only make friends with people of wealth and of high social status. just as zhen shiyen said in his expounding of the song “all good things must end” in a dream of the red mansions “while men with gold and silver by the chest, turn beggars scorned by all and dispossessed”.frankly speaking, however, if we regard money the first thing in whichever one of the three kinds of loves, it will depreciate and even become worthless.
love can not pretend, nor can it tolerate too much selfish motives. it is reported that an old man in jiangsu province left his million yuan heritage to his young housekeeper instead of his own children, because his own children didn't take care of him while the young housekeeper accompanied him through his last lonely and helpless years.
ever since the dawning of the history of mankind, there have been myriads of diversifed inventions, discoveries, and even explorations of the mysteries of the universe. in fact, the human beings are so intelligent that we have solved almost all kinds of problems we have confronted with.
however, nobody has ever made out what the word “love” really connotes, not even the most famous people such as great politicians, saints and philosophers can clarify the meaning of “love”， neither can they deal with the various affairs concerning love. love is like a huge boundless net that shrouds us all in. we can neither break away from it nor escape from it. like it or not, we are always entangled in it. it is an invisible net without any form, that shrouds in different people from different angels; it is a merciless net that upsets us or even tortures us to death. it is also a supreme net which almost no human can surpass. even if they are heroes, emperors, wise men or saints, they can do nothing but show their helplessness in its face. those who can breathe through the holes of the net should be regarded beyond commonness and vulgarity. love can bring us temporary comfort and happiness, but mostly they bring about annoyance and sufferings. maybe this is the reason why many people have seen through the illusions of the mortal world. however it is not so easy to break away from this boundless, ever-existing and indifferent net of love.
love is varied and changeable, but roughly it can be divided into three categories: family love, fraternal love and amatory love. not like monkey king who jumped out of the rocks, we were all born after mother's pregnancy of about nine months, hence we have countless relatives without any choice: parents, grand-parents, and grand-parents-in-law, uncles and aunties, brothers and sisters, etc. and once looking at the genealogical tree, we'll see no end. family love is what everyone longs for, but the warmth and support from our beloved ones are what everyone yearns for the most. but how many of us are determined to contribute to our beloved one? and how many don't expect repayment and relaxed. conscience even if they have the desire and preparation to contribute to their beloved. the distance between relatives is different and so are their expectations. but since it's very difficult to know how much we should expect, a lot of worries and distresses emerge.
parents always expect their children to show their filial obedience, or at least pay them frequent visits after they have got married. if the children fail to do this, they feel hurt and upset, and they'll even complain about their children, because they just can't understand why their children don't care about them after what they have done for the children for so many years to bring them up. nevertheless, one's experience determines his ideology. young children are naturally attached to their parents, but when they grow up, specially when they have made their own friends, and got married, what they need most is independence and freedom, and parents sometimes might become their burden. once there is generation gap, it becomes more difficult to communicate and this keeps them away from their parents. objectively speaking, they need more independence in order to achieve success. in the present society, what the children want to have most is the economic support from their parents, not their moral support or guidance. they would complain if your economic support is not up to their expectations. the love from uncles and aunties would naturally dwindle after they have had their own children. only the love from grand-parents and grand parents-in-law is pure and demands no repayment, and they are also too old to wait for any repayment. as for the distant relatives, their love depends on their needs, just as the old saying goes “the poor have no friends even if they live in downtown while the rich have distant relatives even if they live in deep mountains”。 granny liu, a distant kinsfolk, in a dream of the red mansions , claims kinship with the wealthy jia family, thinking that she may benefit from it in some ways. liu might have run away without any traces if the jia family had been a poor one. another saying goes “close neighbors are better than distant relatives.” the most difficult is to manage the relatives when doing business together, just as what the tv series program liu laogen discloses. it is all right to stay poor together, but as soon as the business grows prosperous, the group will become estranged and even dissolve because of the unfair distribution. family love is like a maze which we shouldn't go too far into it, otherwise, we'll surely get lost. love is a bilateral matter and unilateral love can only lead you to nowhere in spite of your good intentions. family love is, sometimes, like an arranged marriage, leaving no choices to you. due to the different experiences and tastes, staying together temporarily can be entertaining, while living together for a long time can only be boring due to the lack of common interest and understanding. how can we communicate with each other without understanding? parents have the duty to support the children who are not yet economically independent, and children have the responsibility to provide for the elderly parents who are lack of economic abilities to support themselves. except these two kinds of duties which we must fulfill, other kinds of love become conventional formalities such as paying visit to the sick or the dead and giving presents to the newly-born etc.
no love among relatives has become a normal phenomenon which needn't to be fussed about. what's worse is when love is contaminated by money. sooner or later we will get hurt. the sooner we get out of this net of love, the more we can preserve beautiful memories.