Is love unconditional? Is it conditional? Should love have conditions? These are questions not often considered but are important to explore, since love is such a profound part of the human experience. I often ask clients if they love themselves. Most will say they do, but there's some aspect they don't love about themselves. If I ask them to quantify their self love, I often get numbers like 70/30 or 80/20, indicating that there's a small part of themselves they either dislike or can't find a way to love. My follow up question in this scenario is, "Does love have conditions?”, which allows them to explore how they define love and if they put conditions on their love for self.
My wife, B.A. Crisp, has authored two self-help books and, as you might imagine, we often have philosophical discussions about topics pertaining to love, relationships and healing. She believes love is a state of mind as much as it is a feeling. She likens it to a particle wave in physics. The theory being that love is dynamic and as soon as you stop and observe the feeling, it can change and not be what it was at the same moment you made the observation. Interesting stuff to ponder, for sure. We dug into whether love should, or shouldn’t have conditions. At face value, most people would believe love should be unconditional. I mean, why shouldn’t it be?
We concluded that this question isn’t as simple as choosing one or the other. Strangely, if you try to decide whether love is conditional, or not, it puts conditions on the love by default! A better approach is to understand that conditional love and unconditional love stand at two separate end-points like poles of a spectrum, thus giving rise to the dynamic nature of love my wife described. Our discussion led us to the belief that love is meant to be unconditional but the second one party puts conditions on the love, then both are operating in conditional love. An example would be if a couple were married and one party was unfaithful (the unfaithful party has not put a condition on the love) the other half has to also then put conditions on the love in response. The love is no longer unconditional.
In conclusion, I’ll circle back to self love. In the spirit of attempting to seek and obtain unconditional love, we should also feel worthy of giving this gift to ourselves. Ask yourself if you love yourself, wholly? If not, why not? If you feel the need to put conditions on loving yourself there may be reasons to dig deeper and see what gives rise to this personal restriction on self. Remember, the goal is self love. When we strive for love, we never want it to be in some partial way. If we don’t want conditional love in our relationships, we must first learn to not have it with ourselves……
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