mislove

English

Etymology

From mis- +‎ love.

Verb

mislove (third-person singular simple present misloves, present participle misloving, simple past and past participle misloved)

1. (transitive) To love wrongly, insufficiently, inadequately, or imperfectly.
   • 1979, Explorations in Ethnic Studies, page 42:

     Milkman "want(s) to get rich" on his own accord, so he misloves a woman (treats her like a whore) and gets an old car to ramble through ancestral homelands in search of gold.

   • 1992, Mid-American Review - Volume 13, page 20:

     I often yelled these words like a mad man at those I thought were guilty of my guilt: “the stabbing dagger of half-baked feeling," I would shriek in their faces, and in pain — "Love indeed!"— at those beings who had misloved me so, even though they had probably tried their best.

   • 1994, Roy Wesley Battenhouse, Marian Battenhouse, Shakespeare's Christian Dimension: An Anthology of Commentary, page 46:

     Goods such as bodily pleasure, or worldly fame and honor, or even human souls themselves are misloved unless loved for the sake of God .

   • 1995, David James Duncan, River Teeth: Stories and Writings, page 63:

     The way my parents and I believed and disbelieved in each other when I was little, the way we created and confused, encouraged and thwarted, loved and misloved each other, is a sad story.

   • 2002, Charles Burdett, Derek Duncan, Cultural Encounters: European Travel Writing in the 1930s, page 150:

     The motif of writing a dead woman into text is, of course, far from new in 1939: it is a staple of the French récit (from Manon Lescaut via Adolphe, Carmen, Sylvie, up to and beyond Gide's own four récits), in which a young man confesses how he loved, misloved, was misloved and lost.

   • 2003, Rebecca Shannonhouse, Under the Influence:

     I do this because as a girl I learned that sex is love from my father, the first dangerous man who sexually misloved me.

   • 2011, Maryse Conde, Crossing the Mangrove:

     We shall greet the new face of tomorrow and I shall say to this daughter of mine: "I gave birth to you, but I misloved you."

Noun

mislove (countable and uncountable, plural misloves)

1. Inadequate, imperfect, or misdirected love.
   • 1902, Lilian Bell, “Why Men Remain Bachelors”, in Harper's Bazaar, page 32:

     To a large extent, the mislove of the world is caused by lack of imagination. Your mother cannot recall her own youth, and so fails to project her personality into your later-generation thoughts and ambitions.

   • 1969, Francis Scarfe, Auden and After: The Liberation of Poetry, 1930-1941, page 122:

     Triple-lipped Apollo, I consign Your visitation to the night, When, amid cavernous mislove, your orbs Large with anticipate lust must diminish As, beneath my smothering embrace, The shocks your nine limbs striving to impart Shudder into the gentle heaving of sleeping.

   • 2017, James C. Howell, Worshipful: Living Sunday Morning All Week:

     Our worship, in fact our daily relationship of a life offered to God, converts our misloves of money into proper love.

2. The act or object of misloving.
   • 1904, Good Housekeeping - Volume 38, page 12:

     " […] their friendships, their loves, their “misloves," that the world instantly set her down as a spinster, a clever woman, but a double-twisted old maid.

   • 1981, Talking Book Topics, page 35:

     The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis RC 14567 by Max Shulman narrated by Roy Avers 2 cassettes Eleven humorous short stories about the adventures and misadventures, loves and misloves of Dobie Gillis on the University of Minneapolis campus.