Unconditional love is a strange thing to think about.
It’s often held up as the purest, most sincere sort of love – the sort of special love that transcends the pettiness and jealousy associated with most of the flawed relationships that supposedly make up the majority of our everyday connections.
Conversely, conditional love is often lambasted as something that doesn’t even count as actual love. It’s not really love, some might argue, if you have to fit some criteria before it’s given to you.
This is all well and good for the universal sort of love that we should give and feel for each other as members of the human family. But for the specific, personal love that defines our relationships with our friends and significant others, I’m not completely sold.
It’s a pretty bold statement to say that you love someone unconditionally. That literally means that you have no conditions on the love you offer them. There are no circumstances under which you’ll stop offering it, and there is nothing that the recipient of your love can do that will cause you to cut it off.
And that sounds dangerously close to a sort of emotional enslavement – love that’s offered involuntarily and without limitation. Besides, being possibly unfair to yourself and easily abused by the unscrupulous sounds utterly unromantic.
It’s akin to when people say “I need you” as a way of conveying how much they love someone. Necessity is a poor basis for love because, by definition, it can’t be the basis of selfless love; when you feel that you need someone, there’s always something intrinsically self-serving playing some role in the decision to keep that person in your life. And thinking back to the people I’ve loved the most in my life, it’s not that I needed them to be happy, it’s just that there was no one I’d rather share my happiness with than them.
On the other hand, the conditions we set on our love can give it meaning. On the most basic level, it’s a show of self-respect to say that your love is important enough to give it only to those who demonstrate that they value it. Loving someone uniquely, the sort of love that gives the recipient a warm feeling of being appreciated, requires some measure of condition-setting. Knowing that love can be lost provides a reason to take steps to protect it.
But this might be an overly pedantic way of looking at unconditional love.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that many aspects of mainstream culture are conducive to making people feel inadequate. As much as people talk about how overly feel-good we’ve become, it’s not hard to be told, implicitly or otherwise, that we’re not smart, interesting, pretty, funny, put-together or just altogether worthwhile enough to be worthy of consideration. Media messages, TV commercials, cutthroat job interviews and hypercompetitive academia are all more than happy to drive that home.
It’s not hard to see how some stability of love could be appealing. If not unconditional love, then love with some room for error. Or at least love that feels like it’d take some serious scrubbing before it wears off.
Truly unconditional love is just as meaningless as love based on too many conditions. Nobody should have to feel that the love they’re receiving is generic and unearned, nor should anybody feel compelled to jump through hoops and perpetually impress somebody to earn that love.
Ultimately, it’s not really about unconditional love in the strictest sense of the phrase. It’s just about being aware that you’ll find no shortage of people who are willing to tell you, “I’ll love you only if ... ,” and feeling a little appreciative whenever you find someone of sound mind and judgment who’s willing to tell you, “I’ll love you even if ... .”
Joe Dellosa is an advertising senior. His columns appear on Tuesdays.
