Unconditional Love

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Have you ever experienced this?

Unconditional love is a term that means to love someone regardless of one's actions or beliefs.

Did your parents love you unconditionally?
Do you love yourself unconditionally?
Have you ever loved anyone unconditionally?

Looking around it seems like people place conditions on love all the time. When people decide who they are going to marry they seem to seek out attributes and measure intelligence, appearances, looks, social status, ethnicity, etc.

Even if that person meets someone who meets all the requirements then what happens if the person gets into an accident and loses the attributes which caused the person to select him/her in the first place? I don't see many people really loving people unconditionally.

As for the question of whether you love yourself unconditionally, I see that people who least feel this way cover up for it by "loving" their facade. They have more of a narcissistic love for their acquired traits, but I wonder how they would feel about themselves if they lost an arm or suffered brain damage, or became disfigured.

Relationships are conditional. Love is not conditional.

well, romantic love is conditional, and, probably the love for one's own children and families may be the only aproximate way of unconditional love, but for any type of love in general terms, there are some requirements to fill and circumstances in order for love to develop, I would say that would make love, conditional.

How so? What is romantic love?

Last edited by claire-333 on 22 May 2009, 5:58 pm, edited 1 time in total.

well, pretty much as I stated above



Actually, I don't know.

I can agree that when these requirements are no longer met, a relationship can end. How does love end?

Me neither.

well, if these requirements are never met, love can't begin I presume, and if they are no longer met, can love end or be limited (therefore non- unconditional)? I mean, wouldn't divorce mean that love isn't there anymore, that if existed before, and if it was, it became limited thereafter? Not to mention that perhaps love is just an illusion.

How can love be unconditional if one partner place a limit to what the other partner can do? e.g. extramarital sex or just sex with a third person without consent for non-married couples.


well, how does love start would be another question, though I don't even know for certain if love does actually exist, it doesn't seems so that much.

Certain conditions have to be met for anything to happen, so in that sense...yes, love would be conditional just as anything. But the notion of unconditional love is understood to be unending love. I would say divorce means the relationship has ended. Perhaps, but I will assume it is something real for the sake of this conversation, or else Sand will have to come in and start making me laugh about mental stenches or something of that sort. Again, I would call these things conditions to a relationship.
Good point.

How about love at first sight? Maybe that is a projection of familial unconditional love?

No one loves themselves unconditionally here?

I have not experienced love at first sight, so I cannot comment.

I did not vote, as I am rather agnostic on the concept of my own self love.

I think it actually takes being a parent to have loved anyone unconditionally. As for love of self - people are stuck and if they're willing to live on they're forced to realize, regardless of whether they like what they are that the only way they can remotely be happy is by being in their own corner - maybe being their own parent or comforting figure to themselves as necessary.



It depends on chemistry though and how well they know themselves. Sometimes being that discriminatory is a very good thing - keeps something from happening in the first place rather than an almost fit with irreconcilable differences that blows up in a divorce. Reliability, whether you can have someone's back and they can have yours, all those things are important and chemistry is the motivational bonding glue that's variable in people - some people can strike it up, some people need it instantly and its not their choice - they're just built like that (I speak the later from experience). Marriage - very tough decision.



That's a difficult one as its different for everyone. Some people would stick with them and have no change in how they felt toward them, some would lose their interest but still out of sense of duty stay with them, some would almost involuntarily cheat, some might give up and file divorce if they realized that they didn't have it in them - the later routes are tragic, kind of why you want to make sure that the person your talking to is someone who could lose those attributes and you'd still be able to hold it down with them.



Lol, as an aspie my facade is what holds me down - I look cold, dorky, asocial, at least until I can break the ice with someone. I love myself now but didn't always in the past, largely though because I couldn't tell the difference (in my teen years and younger) between my outward and my inward - I figured that whatever stamps the outside world jammed down on me were true on the inside as well; had to nuance the heck out of that one but thankfully got it squared away.

I don't think unconditional love generally happens though. Parents - closest thing to it. The love of self can be obliterated for a lot of people if some tragic accident happens where they hit a small child driving, not be able to save someone who needed help, or at worst not to save one's family - a person can easily have a voice something like that guy from No Country For Old Men ripping them down and highly recommending suicide for their complete loss of honor; people of course have that voice because - they've often enough needed it to survive in the first place.

Hope I didn't go off on too much of a bizarre rant (or at least not too much more than usual) - the Henessey's kicking in a bit .

By facade I meant ego. But, I'm tired of hearing the word ego for some reason. What I meant is that people who don't love themselves unconditionally love things they have like talents or they identify themselves with the job they hold. Does that make more sense? If they lost all of this, then they would be left with themselves and if they don't love themselves unconditionally it would be very hard to deal with. Same goes if they fell in love with someone in a similar way and that person lost what drew that person to him/her in the first place. It seems pointless to have relationships if it's not real and love that is not unconditional is an illusion.

That's a great observation. The only question is how its solved. I personally think that even if there is no solution and that our absolute value, even to ourselves, is more often the net of our achievements or failures (as society beats into us from day one) - I think its altruism that closes the dissonance between the hope that love is unconditional vs. human frailties. What I've learned is just not to be bitter toward other people for much of anything - there is a lot that people can't help, when I empathetically put myself in their shoes usually I realize that they're primary battle is with themselves. Its why I think we also strive so much to be happy single first before we enter a relationship - we can cross our fingers and hope for the best but there are so many ways that things can blow apart, enough of which are inherently neither party's fault.

The guy I've mentioned before to you likely - Dennis Prager - mentions that its probably best that we leave unconditional love in childhood because, there are certain things particularly that adults owe eachother to make a relationship work to where...if a guy is beating his wife...should she love him unconditionally? If a man's wife berates him constantly or spends both their bank accounts dry - should he lover her unconditionally? His argument in the end is that people need to have character, that character tends not to be encouraged by environments where anything is just there gratus (ie. it gets taken advantage of), and while people should do everything they can to love each other in relationships that its something that they need to get their heads around - unconditional love is something that's ok for children but really not something adults should even want to aim for (maybe from themselves, or a pet, that's it though) because there are far too many practical problems with the concept and, idealism when it comes down to it usually makes idealists far more unhappy than pragmatism does pragmatists.

Just becuase someone removes themself from a caustic relationship does not mean they stop loving. I have heard the expressions 'fell out of love' and 'no longer in love' but have never heard someone say they actually stopped loving someone. The say...I still love them, but I am no longer in love...whater the heck that means. Maybe someone could come in here and attest to no longer loving someone?

I like this conversation. I feel that I'd have to define "love" in order to contribute much though. That's always quite a challenge.

I will say that the Prager quote makes good sense to me. We owe our children our care and affection while they are young, no matter how they behave. It's especially important that we ensure that they experience our love as unconditional, as their experience is more significant than our intent. To adults, we owe very little without conditions attached. There's no adult in my life to whom I would remain loyal and affectionate regardless of how I am treated.

Here, too, it depends on what "love" means. In the case of my worst relationship, I never admired the man much. I cared about his welfare and felt tenderly toward him at first, but those tender feelings vanished when I came to know him as he truly is and he tried to destroy everything I care about. I've honestly at some points grappled with whether or not I believe he deserves to live. I can't say with certainty that I wouldn't be glad if the opportunity to kill him in self-defense someday presents itself. I think I would not, but I can't be sure. I would definitely be relieved if I learned he were dead. I have compassion for the innocent little boy he once was, and sorrow over everything that was done to him to make him the way he is. But I feel only disgust for what he is now.

Those I have genuinely known and admired, on the other hand, can always count on a special place in my heart. I won't necessarily trust them or even want to be around them, but I will at the very least continue to think fondly of them.

But how is love defined in that sense then? Shared memories? Remembering what you had with the person but no longer have? It seems like our society's definition of love (properly thought out love at least) is at its core a social contract rather than the feelings that accompany it as the feelings are transient. That contract though can lead to two people greatly enhancing and complimenting each others' lives. Its something that, at least in the relationship sense starts with what some might choose to call limmerance, sexual attraction, infatuation, but that seems to be what's there to start the structure of it rather than keep it going or be its essence. I would imagine that you'll still love a person as a human being if you split up with them (as long as it doesn't go too awry) falling out of love is usually indicative of the person just saying that the contract of husband/wife didn't work out or, they may have sincerely just never untangled love and infatuation conceptually speaking.