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Watch this video or scan the QR code to learn ways to cope with your parents or in laws becoming to involved in your relationship.

The train case points out an interesting flaw, however, in my analysis of love as it is stated. My criteria is that for a relationship to be one of reciprocal love, it must be that both people are good for each other; and how good could it be for one to cause a train to run over his or her spouse? How good were the British officials being to their spouses when, if the story is true, they did not warn them to leave Coventry before the bombing? Yet we might, and I would, still want to say that the officials did love their families and would be loved by them even though they allowed harm to come to them, or allowed potential, yet avoidable, harm to befall them.

I wish to insert a necessary modification into my analysis of the ethical component or dimension of love, one which now can be understood without making the criteria seem difficult, unwieldy, or unnatural. The clause would exclude (from being unworthy of love) cases of causing or allowing harm (including even relatively minor things such as inconvenience or disappointment) to the loved or loving one if such harm is the result of overriding ethical obligations to others, or to self, when such overriding obligations are not unnecessarily brought on in the first place by the one doing the harm. For example, the Coventry case found those officials in that position; it was not as if they had known about it ahead of time and intentionally put their families in jeopardy. Consider the classic antagonistic mother-in-law, daughter-in-law conflict where each demands mutually exclusive behavior of the son/husband. A man, of course, does have obligations to his mother even after he is married, though he also has obligations to his wife as well. In the best of situations those obligations will not be mutually exclusive too often, and both women will understand the cases when the husband feels obligated to opt for the other, understanding that he has treated them both as fairly as possible overall in such situations. Love will not be the worse for it. The worst situation is when both make mutually exclusive demands often and one or both do not understand ever being denied. In this case, probably neither will feel loving for very long even though it is not the man’s fault. But consider a slightly different case. Suppose a man continually places himself in such conflict by promising his mother things he does not have to promise, and which he would have no obligation to do if he did not make such promises. And suppose he continually hurts his wife’s feelings by keeping his promises to his mother and thus fulfilling his unnecessary and self-imposed obligations to his mother while thereby neglecting what would otherwise be his obligations to his wife. I think there is a point in saying that such a man is not as good to his wife as he could be and as he should be since he himself keeps unnecessarily bringing about the very conditions under which he is obligated to disappoint her or let her down. This would also be like the train case if the spouse at the switch had also been the one who first tied the other to the track.