Q: Has Voldemort or Tom Riddle ever cared for or loved anyone?
JKR: No, never. If he had, he couldn’t possibly be what he is.
The fact that people bring up these quotes as some sort of gotcha only shows how dumb they are.
Yes, she said this, and yet, the way she wrote Voldemort behaving towards Bellatrix can only be explained by attachment, as Christopher E. Bell notes in his essay 'Riddle Me This: The Moral Disengagement of Lord Voldemort'.
Usefulness cannot logically explain it, especially when you consider Bellatrix was more of a liability than useful, in the end, and when you compare his behaviour towards her to his behaviour towards other useful Death Eaters and Nagini. It's certainly not a good explanation considering his behaviour towards her was irrational and the primary source for the reading that Voldemort felt nothing for anyone is Dumbledore, a character Rowling demonstrates is explicitly and repeatedly wrong about Voldemort's inner life.
Clearly, this quote and what JKR wrote exist at the same time, so this isn't a contradiction, but it's easy for certain people to use it to dismiss evidence. A dualistic, simplistic, and superficial reading might take her words at face value but that won't account for all the evidence within the text itself that shows a clear attachment, so instead of subscribing to the simplistic reading, ask yourself what she means by this deliberate contradiction.
When Rowling says 'he never loved,' she's not saying 'he has no attachments, no one matters to him, and he's equally indifferent to everyone.' She's saying he can't love in the way we understand healthy, selfless, sacrificial love. He can't love like Lily loved Harry, but the TEXT shows he clearly has something with Bellatrix that he doesn't have with anyone else, which it shows through his extreme emotional reactions towards her that he has for nobody else, ever. She is clearly the person who's most emotionally important to him, the one human he feels most intensely towards.
His feelings for Bellatrix were introduced even before her own love for him! They share a unique intimacy and she makes him extremely happy. He is strategically completely irrational when it comes to her, as the Ministry rescue shows, which came at an enormous cost. His treatment of her is differential. He trusts her with his soul through a Horcrux in her vault, which is different from the diary which was intended as a weapon. His reaction to her death is the most intense emotional reaction he ever has and it's not at all strategic. The sexual dimension is, of course, obvious. He is clearly attracted to her and they have a daughter the author not only approved but was planning long before Cursed Child, as shown by the foreshadowing in HBP, the Bellatrix-Tonks subplot, and the hieros gamos symbolism in Deathly Hallows. Rowling calls him her male counterpart, essentially her partner. The relationship is shown through literary techniques such as parallelism with the relationship of Voldemort's narrative mirror, and the allegory of their relationship in Tales of Beedle the Bard. Rowling even uses some classic romance tropes, and the Second Wizarding War is structurally bookended by Voldemort's emotional responses to Bellatrix's peril or loss. The relationship demonstrates Rowling's signature use of ring composition, which literary scholar John Granger has identified as a foundational element of her work. Rowling has, in multiple interviews, compared Bellatrix and Voldemort's relationship to Dumbledore and Grindelwald's, stating they have similar themes and motifs, and Grindeldore is another ship she hinted at in the books but wasn't explicit about because it wasn't relevant to Harry's story.
So the question isn't if this qualifies as capital-L Love but what IS this, and why does it exist only with her?
This is where Rowling's 'he never loved anyone' and 'they're counterparts' and the textual evidence all reconcile. He can't love in a healthy way, but he has the closest thing to attachment/connection that someone with his psychology can manage, and it's with Bellatrix. It's not selfless or sacrificial but consuming and possessive (he isolates her from her family, humiliates her in the meeting, has a great deal of power over her) and based on her meeting needs he won't acknowledge he has. It's whatever warped version of intimacy and dependence someone who's split his soul can experience, but it's there and it's unique to her, and it matters enough to provoke reactions we see nowhere else in the series.
A sophisticated reading would reconcile the apparent contradiction.
Notice how she says he couldn't possibly be what he is if he'd loved anyone? Clearly, that refers to a sort of love that's redemptive, which is how love is defined in the series:
“Powerful infatuations can be induced by the skilful potioneer, but never yet has anyone managed to create the truly unbreakable, eternal, unconditional attachment that alone can be called Love.” - Tales of Beedle the Bard
This quote also supports the interpretation that she views love as redemptive:
MA: Oh, here’s one [from our forums] that I’ve really got to ask you. Has Snape ever been loved by anyone?
JKR: Yes, he has, which in some ways makes him more culpable even than Voldemort, who never has. Okay, one more each!
Here she says Voldemort has never been loved by anyone, even though he was loved by Bellatrix. She hesitated to describe her feelings for Voldemort as 'love' in a subsequent interview, but ultimately chose to call it that. Voldemort was the corrupting force in Bellatrix's life and it was precisely through his feelings for her, his acceptance of her darkness, that she was corrupted, so it could never be love in JKR's eyes based on that alone. Bellatrix, on the other hand, was not a major corrupting force in Voldemort's life.
So yes, he never Loved anyone but he loved Bellatrix and was extremely attached to her. Both statements are true, but they're describing different things. One is about what he's incapable of (Lily's kind of love, the magic that defeated him) and the other is about what he is capable of (attachment, need, whatever connection his fractured psyche allows).
Bellatrix is the closest thing to the bandage, the person who offers what his damaged psyche can actually accept: unconditional acceptance of his darkness, witnessing of his vulnerability, and mirroring of his nature.
Simple minds say 'but Rowling said he can't love!' and when they see the text showing unique reactions to Bellatrix, they conclude there is a contradiction and one must be wrong, but a sophisticated mind would ask what 'love' even means here and What IS he capable of. How do these statements reconcile when we understand the terms properly?
Nobody is claiming Voldemort loves Bellatrix in some Disney fairytale sense and I'm not even claiming it's healthy, but clearly, he has the capacity for attachment that exists within his psychological limitations and that attachment is uniquely directed at her.
That reading is nuanced and accounts for all the evidence without requiring us to dismiss either the authorial statement OR the textual moments.
When we apply Occam's Razor to this relationship, something interesting emerges. The usefulness argument, despite seeming simpler on the surface, actually requires an absurd amount of mental gymnastics to account for all the evidence. It requires dozens of separate ad hoc explanations to explain away each piece of differential treatment as somehow strategic or coincidental and still ends up with holes.
Compare that to the single explanation that he's attached to her. This one theory elegantly accounts for everything. It's actually the simpler explanation because it's unified. It's one consistent dynamic that shows itself in many different ways rather than requiring a dozen different special exceptions to explain why this particular 'useful tool' keeps getting treated unlike every other useful tool he's ever had.
