cruel to be kind

"I might, indeed, have learned, even from the poets that Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness: that even the love between the sexes is, as in Dante, 'a lord of terrible aspect'. There is kindness in Love: but Love and kindness are not coterminous, and when kindness is separated from the other elements of Loves, it involves a certain fundamental indifference to its object, and even something like contempt of it....Kindness merely as such, cares not whether its object becomes good or bad, provided that it escapes suffering...It is for people whom we care nothing about that we demand happiness on any terms: with our friends, our lovers, our children, we are exacting and would rather see them suffer much than be happy in contemptible and estranging modes. If God is Love, He is, by definition, something more than mere kindness."

"Love, in its own nature, demands the perfecting of the beloved; that the mere 'kindness' which tolerates anything except suffering in its object is, in that respect, at the opposite pole from Love. When we fall in love with a woman, do we cease to care whether she is clean or dirty, fair or foul? Do we not rather then first begin to care?...Love may, indeed, love the beloved when her beauty is lost: but not because it is lost. Love may forgive all infirmities and loves still in spite of them: but Love cannot cease to will their removal. Love is more sensitive to hatred itself to every blemish in the beloved...Of all powers he forgives most, but he condones least: he is pleased with little, but demands all."

C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, p33; 38

I still haven't got my head around this one yet.