I can name a few movies that make the notion of unconditional love seem very real and appealing. Every now and then I hear someone say that they want to love someone unconditionally, and that they also expect to be loved unconditionally. They don’t like to hear me say that I don’t believe in the very concept of unconditional love.
And I really don’t. I believe that all love comes with conditions and caveats for a very simple reason: there is a reason why we become attracted and fall in love with someone. Sometimes that reason is physical; at other times it’s intellectual, and ideally it’s both. You may argue that love based on physical attraction alone is not real love, but I beg to differ. There is more to sex than just penetration. There is holding each other, touching, stroking, looking into each other’s eyes, whispering into each other’s ears and simply being near each other. A collection of these physical elements can make the two people fall in love with each other.
Sometimes, we know exactly why we like or love someone and want to be around them as much as possible. At other times, we have no idea what it is that makes him/her so desirable and irresistible for us to be with. But just because we don’t know what the reason is we want someone, doesn’t mean that there isn’t one, and this alone doesn’t make an unconditional love.
There are reasons why we like or dislike someone or something, whether we can articulate it or not. There are reasons why we fall in love, stay in love, and fall out of love. Once some or all of the reasons are gone, our love will likely subside or vanish. Or, it might be partially replaced with other strong feelings such as familial affection, friendship, commitment, etc… as it often happens in long marriages.
This is why we hear these stories all the time about women having affairs after being married for a few years. They often justify having those affairs by pointing at the fact that their husband is not the guy they met. “He gained 20 pounds, stopped having sex with me abandoned his exciting hobbies and interests, stopped paying attention to his wife, and just wants to sit on the couch all day. I then met a guy who made me feel like a woman again. He was exciting and adventurous. He wanted to do things and he worshiped me sexually.” This is a typical story. It’s not mean for us to decide who to blame, but to only remind us that our love has reasons, and so does our falling out of love. These reasons may be fair or unfair, and they maybe overriding the higher value of commitment, but it doesn’t change the fact that love comes with strings attached.
When I hear someone say that they want to be loved unconditionally, I find that desire, if taken literally, to be both logically unsound and unrealistic. This might be different between parents and their children, but even in that case, there are major obviously reasons why a parent would love his child. However, parental love is conditional too. The only differences are that it just takes more bad things for a child to do in order for his parent to stop loving him. Also, a parent is more likely to forgive a child and let go of anything that made the parent stop loving his child or love the child less.
