I just finished reading a book by a South African, Rian Malan. (Papa...this will be sent to you shortly. It's going to be another of those "father-daughter" books. I'm confidently you'll find it intriguing). To make the long story short (and it really is a long story...350 pages of murder and brutality), the Malan family was key in the construction of South Africa's apartheid policy. That is keeping the races "separate but equal"...but not really equal. Well, Rian is a journalist during the fall of apartheid. He loaths the racism of his fellow white men, but at the same time he is afraid of what the blacks will do to him and his family because of their skin color. His book, My Traitor's Heart: a South African Exile Returns to Face His Country, His Tribe and His Conscience, is really Rian's journay to resolve this conflict within him. I'm going to give away what he resolves in the end. It actually resonates quite strongly with me, for different reasons:

[Quoting a character named Creina. Her husband was murdered by Zulu's he helped]...I felt utterly betrayed by loving. All the things I had ever been told about love just weren't true. It was all full of false promises. I understood that love was
safety and protection, and that if you loved you would be rewarded by someone
loving you back, or at least not wanting to damage you. But is wasn't
true, any of it. I knew that if I stayed [in a Zulu territory in South Africa],
this was how it was going to be: it would never get any better; it would stay
the same, or get worse. I thought, if you're really going to live in
Africa, you have to be able to look at is and say, This is the way of love, down
this road: Look at it hard. This is where it is going to lead you.

I think you will know what I mean if I tell you love is worth nothing until
it has been tested by its own defeat. I felt I was being asked to try to
love enough not to be afraid of consequences. I realize that love, even if
it ends in defeat, gives you a kind of honor; but without love, you have no
honor at all. I think that is what I have misunderstood all my life.
Love is to enable yoiu to transcend defeat.

You said one could be deformed by this country, and yet it seems to me one
can only be deformed by the things one does to oneself. It's not the outside
things that deform you, it's the choices you make. To live anywhere in the
world, you must know how to live in Africa. The only think you can do is
love, because it is the only thing that leaves light inside you, instead of the
total, obliterating darkness."

Grace's Conclusion...
Do you have the Beatle's song "all you need is love" ringing in your head too after reading that? Of course, this analysis of love does not parallel the way God loves. His love is perfect. Man's love for man, though, is not. So, I believe, there really can be no expectations or certainty in loving man. Doesn't mean you shouldn't. It's just painfully hard sometimes. Sometimes it seems impossible.