Can we really control who we love?

Absolutely. It’s your choice. There is no fate.

All “love” means is deep caring, nothing mystical about that. You either care or you don’t to one degree or another. As “they” say, and it is true, the opposite of love is not hate, it is indifference. Love is a choice, we can all choose to work on our relationships and create more of what we want or abandon them and move on.

If you start to see that the person is not a good person or they’re not good for you, you can absolutely make a conscientious decision to stay away from them, not be open to their advances, not be receptive to their attempts at contact. If that is not effective you can tell them that you are not interested any longer.

I can control my actions, I can’t control my feelings, especially if they are strong. I have as much control of them as I do the weather.

I don’t think so. Love is a mish mash of biological factors. I love people who I hate.

Love is more of a thing than a doing, I think.

I also think that the original fundamental natural state of people is to be loving, or at least curious. But then experience adds many layers and complexities, and these things often obstruct our ability to love.

So if your ego then decides it wants to love someone, where there are blocks, it will need to overcome those blocks somehow. And if you find you are loving someone and your ego decides it wants to stop loving them, it can’t make the love not exist by force of will, but it can come up with things to do to sabotage the love, and add blocks to it.

So no you can’t directly control it, but you can do things to block or unblock your flow of love towards certain people. However, it might be so hard in many cases as to seem impossible. Some Buddhists spend multiple lifetimes working out blocks…

I agree with you. I don’t think we can control who we’re attracted to. We can control what we do with that attraction. It may take a while for the feelings to diminish.

Can you make yourself hate your parents? If you spent enough time focusing on the things they’ve done wrong and convinced yourself they did those things deliberately to hurt you, you might end up hating them. I don’t think it would be healthy for you to do that though. Better would be to evaluate whether the relationship is healthy for you and to decide on a course of action based on that rational evaluation. You will have to communicate that decision to them and you may suffer guilt, loneliness and pain as you become accustomed to them not being in your life. So you can decide to disengage from your relationship with that person/people and in time, the effects of that decision will lesson.

How about turning love of the attraction sort to more platonic/friendship love? I say it can be done, and hsve done so. You have to be determined to do the right thing, but I now have a budding friendship with someone that strengthens everyday.

No. If you try to control it, you make it what it is not and not what you really want it to be. It (and you) becomes a lie, a deception, an illusion. It hurts.

I consider Love to be a noun and a verb. The noun – love as an emotion, where we highly value that person and want the best for them – is beyond our control. The verb – the actions we choose as a result of our loving feelings – are what we can control.

I’ve been in situations where people I loved were emotionally unstable, mentally ill, and/or dealing with substance abuse/addiction. My love for them wanted me to rescue them from themselves. My knowledge of human nature, mostly learned from experience, realizes that this is not possible. In such cases, we have to choose to put our own sanity and self-respect first, and have boundaries for which behaviors we will and will not tolerate from those who are struggling with their own sanity and self-respect.

When it comes to new romance, I’ve allowed myself to get swept away in the emotions that accompany love and sometimes impersonate it: lust, desire, attraction, infatuation, etc. But moving too fast was a mistake, and I didn’t really get to know the individual well enough to allow myself to determine whether they were stable or trustworthy for building a relationship with. When my current relationship started, we met as friends and spent time together and got to know each other. I felt a strong bond, but wanted to be sure that we would be compatible as partners before introducing the concept of romance. I wanted to get this one right. That was 5 years ago, and we’re still very happy together.

Sometimes the Love that wants what is best for the person has to over-ride the lust and infatuation, because acting on those feelings could be bad for the object of our desire or for ourselves—self-love is a crucial component to happiness. Sometimes loving someone really does mean having the strength to let them go. This is something that one must learn to do as a parent, as well – we teach our children to be responsible and self-reliant so that we can let them go. If we’ve done it well, they come back and we wind up very close friends.

As for “family”, my experience has led me to believe that relatives are people with whom you are bound by circumstance. The people who have hurt me most in my life share DNA with me, so I hold no emotional obligation to them. Friends are the family we choose. In either case, the people we care about and would do anything for today may not be the same in the future, and there may be some point at which we have to draw the line and put our self-love first – whether that person is our parent, child, oldest friend, etc.

Sometimes I wish I could control the feeling. Have a long distance lover, that makes me as stupid as a 16 year old.

“I can control my actions, I can’t control my feelings, especially if they are strong. I have as much control of them as I do the weather.” @Adirondackwannabe is right.

But you know, your actions can make a big difference. If it’s a beautiful day, you can clear your schedule, pack a picnic lunch, and spend the day at a nature park. If it’s a crappy winter day, you can wake up early, dress warm, and keep emergency supplies in your car.

If we’re talking about love, that means be open to loving the right person. If you love someone who’s wrong for you, maybe you can’t choose to make that go away. But you can spend lots of time with friends and family, pick up a new hobby, take some interesting classes, get lots of exercise, plan a great vacation, meet new people, and generally live a full and happy life to the best of your ability. Then you find yourself thinking of that person less and less.

Ya in some amount you can control the person you love but if it become excess it can also spoil the relation between you and your love one.