I don't believe this is love or anything remotely like it. I think the bastard is using Suri as a weapon to get at Katie. Everything kind and rational that she does to her daughter he will deliberately undo the next time he gets a chance.
Well, now, I didn't say that the spoiling was love. Or, at least, I didn't mean to make it look as if I thought it were.
You and I don't know if he loves, doesn't love or whatever. We don't know cuz we're not Tom. As my Mom would have said, we don't know what's in his heart.
Here's what I have observed in life- in general, not specific to TC:
People can be pretty fucked up and still love.
Love is sometimes expressed in dubious ways.
Love is sometimes accompanied by utter blithering idiocy-or worse. The idiocy and bad shit don't make it love, it's just crap that goes with it.
(I don't know if you saw my posts about my dad. Let's just say it was pretty bad sometimes and yet there was true love there. The bad shit wasn't love but it was in there, too.)
And here's something I will present as opinion and not observation:
I have read about people who use religion, ideology, political views, personal standards, etc- as criteria for love, family, morality. These sometimes present conundrums. I'm speaking of things like honor killings, murder of children who do not do what one wants, shunning, disconnection, all sorts of things. I've read Ayaan Hirsi Ali's books with great interest. Her parents were traditiional Muslims. If you really step out of line in a family like that, you can end up shunned. You can end up married to someone you cannot stand and nobody cares. Yet Ayaan, despite the differences between her and her folks always loved them and always will and also feels love. But she has been wary of the constrictions and strictures and rightly recognizes those things as bad.
I find this fascinating and appalling. I think I have to go with Ayaan on this one. Just because there's this hideous fucking shit there doesn't mean no one felt love.
I think that love gets mixed up with really bad shit sometimes and that it can be expressed irrationally. Again, I say that this doesn't make the underlying feeling of love irrational or bad. But it gets combined.
Again, that we don't know if Tom loves or does not love Suri because we are not Tom. But, of course, we can observe things he is doing that are not positive, and we have been doing so.
at Tom though for what APPEARS to be him being a prick and trying to buy his daughter.