Earned Love and Borrowed Love
You don't matter simply because you are connected to somebody. We all have relatives we are not close to. This is perhaps the most universal truth among us. Yet we never stop to ask why we are not close to certain people. What actually draws us toward some and not others.
There is a difference between the love you earn and the love you receive as an extension. Your relatives love you as an extension of their love for your parents. If they resent your parents, they are unlikely to love you. Unless you have spent real time with them and they grew fond of you on their own terms. That is the love you earned. You become a distinct entity to them, not merely an extension.
Your friends love you because you earned it. It is entirely your own doing. When you grow up and marry, you will experience a particular warmth from your in-laws. This is where you make the gravest blunder. You assume they love you for who you are. In truth, they love you as an extension, just like your other relatives do.
They only know their daughter. Everything they know about you came through her. And since they love their daughter, anyone she loves becomes important to them by that same logic. You haven't earned that love. The honest approach is to either earn it over time or step aside and let them have their daughter. You are not the one they love.
The idea sounds strange and deflating. But reality is indifferent to what we find uncomfortable. Love cannot be offered in the absence of genuine feeling. You cannot love someone you barely know. You can only love someone when you have spent time with them, when you have watched them live their life, when you are genuinely drawn to their character or their very presence.
So the next time you feel that quiet pride at being treated warmly, ask yourself one simple question: what did you do to earn this? You cannot be loved simply by existing. If you are, that love is not truly yours. You are an extension.