Day 177: What is Unconditional Love? (Part 1)

That is a question I contemplate often. Love comes in so many packages and in different forms in those packages. There is family love, parental love, friendship love, romantic love, friendship love that you want to be romantic love, love without reciprocations, love after a beating, love at first sight, love for animals, love for strangers, love for food, and love for yourself. Love is a broad term that we give to an encompassing feeling. It shoots out and retracts within moments. It lasts a lifetime. There are so many ways to describe this one word or feeling, but no real definition that includes all forms. It is arguably the glue that holds us all spiritually together. But to whomever or whatever we feel this feeling for, there always seems to be conditions.

If I peel away the layers of a relationship with a person, I can see the reasons that I still love or like someone. I can see when they made me happy and when they made me mad. I can see the hurt feelings still lingering in the scar tissue and I can remember the laughter we shared to heal the wounds. Friendships are conditional. We typically wouldn’t form a real friendship with someone that treated us poorly. Yet, when family members and romantic lovers treat us poorly we find ways to forgive them, at least on the surface. If a friendship is strong enough, we find ways to forgive those people as well. But with enough abuse there always seems to be a breaking point.

When building relationships, we are creating this dependency in some form of another with this person. Not that you need them, but there are certain expectations that form through the consistent patterns of communications and interactions. Though, romantic love can heighten that feeling to a point of physical need, similar to a drug. And when that consistency or dependency is perceived to be damaged or broken then we feel hurt. At that point, we can choose to forgive the other person and stay friends, not forgive the other person and not communicate anymore, and not forgive the person but stay in the relationship (the most toxic of all).

There seems to be a labyrinth of communication and interactions that are formed through society. We get caught up in the norms and expectations of everything that we forget about love or depend too much on it.

In fifth grade, I gave up a long-standing friendship because he and his brother decided to prank call my house relentlessly one day. The act stemmed from a small argument that we had before departing ways after school. I never talked to him after that. He tried to reach out a couple of times. He got me a Valentine's Day card (along with the rest of the class) and I refused to accept it. Deep down I just wanted him to apologize for being a dick to me, but I wasn’t mature enough to say that. And really, it didn’t matter. What we fought about was petty and his prank was petty. I should have forgiven him and continued the friendship. But I forgot about the love in the friendship and he moved away before the next school year started.

I’ve also been in unhealthy relationships for far too long because I was clinging to the fact that I loved the other person. Love was supposed to be this bond that couldn’t be broken and if I gave it up then I gave up on love. I was going against my word. One way or another I was lying to myself and to the other person. Until, inevitably, the relationship was over.

But the reality of all of it is that feelings change. Love changes and morphs into something else. Romantic love changes. Friendship love changes. Family love changes. Food love changes. We are constantly evolving in our small ways that add up to big ways in our lifetime. How much we let that change occur is up to us. But I feel that it is necessary to let those feelings guild my decisions sometimes.

The brain is like a paddle, but the heart is the river.

So, to the question: What is unconditional love? Does such a thing exist? The Buddhists think so, along with several other religions and spiritual figures. Jesus, one could argue, had unconditionally love. But what does that mean? Should I take an infinite amount of abuse from someone and still find a way to love them? It is easy to argue that the answer is no. If there are rapids on the river, we will naturally paddle away from them to make the journey easier. Water always follows the path of least resistance, and we are 60% water.

For the sake of finding a reasonable conclusion, let’s assume we are removing outliers from the scenario: extreme physical and verbal abuse, theft, threats to family or other loved ones, etc. Let’s look through the lens of unconditional love with ~90% of the world in mind. That includes people we love, have loved, people we don’t care one way or another about, complete strangers in the street, strangers we will never meet, and the infinite number of animals and organisms on this planet. All of those creatures that do not threaten our lives, can we feel unconditional love? Can we love strangers? Can we love enemies?

Let’s start small. Your parents or children. Do you love them unconditionally? Meaning that you would love them no matter what they did or said. Many people, I think, could say yes. There is such a strong bond with parents and children that it would be very difficult to not love them on some preternatural level. Does that mean supporting the other person forever? No. There could be a large enough rift in the relationship that could cause people to not speak with each other. That doesn’t mean that love is gone. Contrarily, the pain is heightened in close relationships because there is so much love. Think about breaking up with a significant other. If you still love the other person but know that you need to break up, it still hurts. And that doesn’t mean that love is gone; it just means it changes.

When I peel back everything, I find that I get to choose who I love and who I treat with love. Loving unconditionally, to me, means being able to forgive the ones we love indefinitely so that when we do communicate there is no hostility or anger. We communicate with love in front so that we express the positive emotions that we want to have reciprocated and want to see in the world. Unconditional love is finding a way to constantly brush away the ashes of the past and learning to live in the moment with a person as the best person you know them to be. No resentment or rubbing the scars they caused. Unconditional love means understanding that those people want to love and be loved too, that they have been hurt too and found a way to forgive, and being able to live for the joy of the moment.

All that is easier said than done. An interesting observation: I have found myself treating strangers much kinder than I treated my family members or significant other. I have witnessed other people following that pattern. Why is that? Simply put, strangers have yet to hurt us. There is no need to forgive or ignore any pain. We choose to treat those strangers with love because deep down that is how we want to treat everyone. Unfortunately, actions do speak tremendously louder than words. I have to remember that when I speak to the people that have hurt me. I have to remember to wipe the slate clean because that is the only way to express unconditional love.

I’m sitting on a raft. While I’m floating down the river, other people are constantly getting on the same raft with me. Anyone floating in my radius is automatically on my raft and I am on theirs. I don’t want to be the one to rock the raft and I don’t want the raft to tip because then I have to paddle hard to get back on. And if I succeed, there’s no telling if that person will ever get back on to help me paddle past the rocks and rapids. Unconditional love is letting people back on your raft, even if they've tipped it over a few times. And, even better, not at all.

Unconditional love is not something we can achieve and then hold onto the rest of our lives. It is constantly changing, like us. Every moment is unique, and I have to remember that every person out there wants love and wants to be love. Every person wants to be treated kindly. So, I think that’s a start.

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Author's Note #1: I think this should be a three-parter because great things come in threes. But the next ones will have to wait.