My question is- Parental Love falls under which category- Science, Technology or Commerce? And if not, how are we measuring and making the statements- “My Mother loves me more than my father does?” or vice versa?
Fair disclaimer: I am not a relationship expert! But I do have questions coming from what I hear and see every day. And I do analyse opinions and your words on the moral compass.
I recently found myself standing on the edge of a conversation that stopped me in my tracks. A grown-up child (irony!), with the kind of heartbreaking clarity only the young possess, laid bare his truth: ‘My mother always loved me more than my father did,’ he said. ‘Her presence was her sacrifice for me; his absence was the proof that he never truly cared.’
Now I do respect him for his raw honesty. But it also made me question “love” as an abstract feeling. Why are we so obsessed with calibration? I agree that we measure heat in Kelvin, force in Newtons, and distance in Meters. These SI Units are designed to provide a universal language that prevents confusion and chaos. They are reliable. They are objective.
So when someone puts a measurement on love, I can’t help but think every single time- What is the SI Unit of parental love?
Does it fall under Commerce, where we trade hours of presence for units of affection? (Where we often question our father’s presence).
Is it Science, a biological chemical reaction that can be quantified? (Well, your mother is and will always be more emotionally available. We call it biology and evolution.)
Or is it Technology, a tool we use to build a child’s future? (Fathers won here with their tangible earnings!)
And if you argue that we can’t define the unit, then how are we so comfortable making the calculation: “My Mother loves me more than my Father does”?
Are you defining Love with the "Act of Showing Up"?
In his mind, the metric was simple: Love = Presence.
It's an easy equation to follow. If you are there for the bedtime stories, the scraped knees, and the difficult teenage conversations, you are "depositing" love. If you are at the office, in another city, or emotionally distant, you are "withdrawing" from it. To him, absence wasn't just a physical state; it was a moral failure.
This gets me to spin my Moral Compass: Is Love Only an Act of Showing Up?
Don't take me for a heartless person here! I am not saying that showing up doesn't matter. But if we are reducing love strictly to visible presence, are we missing the invisible scaffolding that keeps a child's world upright? Especially when I talk about parenthood.
My understanding goes something like this: Parenthood isn't two people running separate races; it is a cluster. It is a singular unit of caretaking formed by two distinct parts. Often, one parent "shows up" because the other is away, labouring to provide the resources that make that presence possible.
Is the father who works two jobs to pay for a school he never gets to visit "unloving"?
Is the mother who sacrifices her career to be the primary witness to a child's life "loving more," or is she simply playing a different role in the same ecosystem of care?
Do I have a Conclusion?
Not really! I just have questions that feel valid.
Should you have a conclusion? I would ask you not to jump on it.
When you treat love like a finite resource (think of a pie that you can slice and measure the size), you are judging whose sacrifice is tangible (time, hugs, presence). But in my argument, an aspect of Love is also abstract, and sacrifice is often abstract (stability, provision, the burden of being the "absent" one).
So if you are one among those who often make the statement of "who loves more", take a pause. Is it possible that "Love" isn't a single SI unit at all? Perhaps it's more like Light. Sometimes it's a particle (the physical hug, the "showing up"), and sometimes it's a wave (the silent work, the distant protection). Just because you can't see the particle doesn't mean you aren't being touched by the wave.
The Human Reality!
Enough Philosophy! Just because I am good at it doesn't mean I am assuming you are up for it too. So let me put it in Human terms.
As I said in the beginning, I respect the raw honesty of this "grown-up child." His pain sounded real because his need for presence went unmet. But I couldn't resist questioning the morality of our modern judgment.
If we decide that "showing up" is the only metric of love, we inadvertently create a moral hierarchy that favours the parent whose role was more visible. "Showing up" becomes performance. And you can't really ignore the quiet, heavy lifting that happens in the dark. We often forget that a "Parent" is a partnership where the labour is rarely identical, but the intent- the survival and flourishing of the child- is often shared.
Perhaps, we are confusing love with emotional consumption. We claim we were loved 'more' by the person whose time we consumed, while labelling the other's absence as a void. But look at the ground we are standing on. If that absent figure arrived tomorrow with a bag of money to fund your dream or secure your future, would the scale suddenly tip? Would we then say he loved us more? It makes me wonder: Are we actually measuring love, or are we simply measuring who is fulfilling our loudest need at any given moment?
Maybe we shouldn't be looking for an SI Unit to measure who loved us more. Maybe we should be looking for the different ways they tried to love us at all.
And if, after reading this, you feel you are that "grown-up child", well, you know the drill, the neglected parent deserves a hug!