As explained by therapists, unconditional love is not love which is eternal and unchanging. Mulling over the implications of a brain transplant is missing the point.
"I love you as long as you are rich" is an example of conditional love. It is abusive at worst or shallow at best.
Unconditional love does not mean a promise to love someone forever. That might be impossible: people change over time. It is a statement of "I love you now, as you are, as a person and not anything you do or have or appear to be".
author appears to be mingling eternal love and unconditional love. by adding the time element, author is taking love to the divine dimension. we, humans, can't fathom eternity.
> Unconditional love does not mean a promise to love someone forever. That might be impossible: people change over time. It is a statement of "I love you now, as you are, as a person and not anything you do or have or appear to be".
So how is this different from love? Why prepend "unconditional"?
The post explicitly explains this: it is not conditional on part of their state. Unconditional love is not loving someone because they have a job or because they buy you presents or because they have red hair or whatever.
If A loves money, that doesn't mean A love B for their money, it means A loves B's money and doesn't love B. That is how most people see it.
And even when we talk about more personal state since we allow change with time then the difference isn't meaningful, state only changes if time change.
Example: A loves B. B loses his job, A says A no longer loves B. Did A love B unconditionally? Yes, just that time changed! Or no, B's condition changed! What is the difference?
We can see B losing their job as a part of B's condition. Or we can see it as evidence that B is now a different person. Or maybe the loss of love is totally unrelated, and it was A that changed and A now only want people with a job and money.
So, would "I love you as long as I or you have money, but if we both don't have money I wont love you", be unconditional love? You would probably say yes, it is unconditional as long as the person has money, since then it doesn't depend on the other person. But that doesn't seem like a very meaningful definition, does it? Like, "I love you as long as you have enough money to pay for the stuff I want", that is unconditional love as long as the person doesn't want anything, but then they get older and now they want a large house etc, leading to a divorce. The love then didn't change, but it was no longer unconditional due to the first person changing, not the second person.
Material possessions are not part of you. Your actions are. If you lose money, you are not a different person. If you murder someone (after not previously having done so) you are.
Thus, if you stop loving someone shen their financial state changed you did not love unconditionally. If their actions indicated that they were no longer the same person it's different.
Perhaps you are ascribing a more holistic view to the idea of what someone “does”. I think OP was referring more to a person’s roles or what they are known for.
Loving someone for, e.g., what they believe in, what they stand for, and how they treat people are examples of love that stems from a deeper understanding of a person’s values, habits, and personality than just loving them one-dimensionally for their wealth or a particular thing they’re well known for. I think that’s what they’re getting at.
> Perhaps you are ascribing a more holistic view to the idea of what someone “does”.
I think nothing is left for another person to love if you take away everything they do, have and how they appear. Because that is all you can ever know about another person.
But I now understand what you wrote as "I love you now, as you are, as a person and not just any one particular thing you do" and to that I agree.
Edit: I think I misread "anything" as "everything"
The author misses the point - what people typically mean by "unconditional love" is that their love remains more or less the same even when some qualities about the person change, such as said person becoming handicapped due to an accident, losing their "status" due to unemployment or financial losses, and so on.
If you eliminate all the redundancy, you binary encode it and then LZW compress it. Nobody wants to read that.
More seriously, some redundancy helps with some data corruption. We don't need capital letters; we could let the punctuation show us where the sentence ends. On the other hand, we don't need the punctuation, either; we could let the capital letters show us where the next sentence starts. But having both lets us figure out things like "did the author insert a period there as a typo, or is that really the end of the sentence?"
I found this much harder to read than the average blog post (the "I mean" was where I realized I was in for a stream-of-consciousness post). You can get away without paragraphs too, but I don't think "you can parse a language without it" makes a thing redundant.
I get it for comments or social media statuses, but if you're writing long form text you want somebody over 30 to read, reaching over to the shift key is probably worth it. This was a good read but it was annoying, like a nice book transcribed into Comic Sans.
Agreed, it's well established that deviating for the normal rules of grammar makes writing harder to read. Breaking it in a deliberate fashion can work, but I don't think this is that. A lot of language is technically redundant but we do it because it aids in comprehension and readability.
super casual, laid back. not really into conflict, just good vibes. somewhat popular because they're disarming and can be empathetic - sometimes faked empathy though by the lowercase vibe they are trying to wear as a social mask. secretly a real people-pleaser and wants to be liked but tries hard not to show it. has those moments at parties where they are really doing well socially, but also a bit of an introvert who has an artistic bent. usually that kind of person.
also occasionally can be a younger college woman who tries to act super chill and friendly with everyone, may behave somewhat like a bro she likes and often thinks that doing fratty things is cool. like omg can u believe we pounded so much tequila last night and we blacked out at sig epi chi and audrey fell into a bush while i peed on the side of the house. totally ripped my skirt in half, im such a hot mess. like guys are we going to the delta chi social tonight, i literally cant stand chad but still think i might hookup w him again
I saw someone on the bus trying to write that way on their phone and they were fighting autocorrect the whole time. Made me laugh because you're right, he was going for the laid back vibe and it was actually more difficult for him than typing normally.
> What is this “aesthetic” where you don’t capitalize sentences but still follow every other grammar rule?
People with little talent and unimportant messages want to write like Alan Paton[1].
The point they miss is that it worked for Alan Paton because he had a lot of talent and very important messages.
I've seen talentless hacks do something similar, copying the narrative quality of Doctor Manhatten from the Watchmen novel, not realising that it worked for him because he was a being who lived outside of time, but it just makes them look stupid.
[1] "Cry, The Beloved Country", which is one of the more powerful books I've read in my life thus far, next to 1984 and similar. People who virtue signal (you know who you are) should read this; the struggle was real, human grief knows no race boundaries.
People can have unconditional love and be healthy.
However you need to have a proper mindset to do it well.
You might want to look at codependence. This can happen in any relationship.
It can happen with a partner, but it also frequently happens with a child.
Codependence is when people accept too much responsibility for someone and things can quickly go south. (really too much to get into here)
The way out of this is to understand that everyone is responsible for him or her self. Obviously not infants, but remember the airline "oxygen mask over your face before you help someone else".
This seems to imply that 'loving' someone means continuing to treat them in a particular way or taking everything they do in stride. A person might love their partner, but still decide that they need to break up with them for one reason or another. You might say that they didn't really love them, but does love have to be overpowering?
That's an attitude I've definitely seen. It's rather strange to hear people say that "love" means being unconditionally supportive of whatever someone decides to do, particularly when it comes up in context of someone being blatantly self-destructive.
These days the topic falls under "Secure attachment" as part of "Attachment theory." The phrase "unconditional love" proved thorny and IMHO ill-judged, misleading.
My experience raising children is that you're golden if the child knows you're on their side, putting their interests above your own. Helping them learn, not putting any moral puzzles in front of them that they can't easily solve, together with lots of misbehavior play so they can learn boundaries without actually misbehaving.
I believe in unconditional love, but I feel like there's a lot of context to that which has to be explained to even respond to what this author is saying.
First, if love is extended to someone based on who they are, that's a condition, it's not unconditional. Unconditional love doesn't make sense if it's only extended to one or a few people--it has to be extended to everyone, universally. So talk of switching brains or bodies makes little sense: if you love unconditionally, you love both people, and switching their brain/body configurations is irrelevant to that.
In that context, I think what actions you take based on unconditional love are more nuanced. I do think love necessarily affects your actions, but unconditional love for one person needs to be balanced with unconditional love for other people. Typically you don't kill someone if you love them, but I think it would be possible to both love Hitler and kill Hitler, because your love of Hitler has to be balanced with love for the victims of the holocaust. People who do horrible things are the hardest to love I think--but loving those people is important, because without love people only become worse. It seems plausible to me that if Hitler had experienced more love, the Holocaust might have been prevented. Daryl Davis talking over 200 KKK members into giving up their robes[1] comes to mind as an example of how loving people who do terrible things can be extremely powerful.
And critically, "everyone" includes yourself, so unconditional love means loving yourself. So the "to what i am able to do with or to this person" thing isn't true: loving someone unconditionally doesn't mean you let them walk all over you, because your unconditional love for that person is balanced with unconditional love for yourself.
I'll also add that unconditional love for yourself also means having reasonable expectations for yourself and prioritizing what love you take action upon. Talking KKK members into leaving the KKK is admirable, but it's beyond what can reasonable be expected of people. And if love of Hitler is something that comes up for you often, you might be better served exerting that loving energy toward someone who isn't a dead genocidal dictator.
OP should read The Four Loves by CS Lewis. Unconditional love seems irrational if love is mainly a kind of feeling, but that's not the highest kind of love.
People generally have no idea what love is. They think it is a feeling. What a dreadful world this would be if that were so! Volatile and shallow. Sure, we may experience feelings for a loved one, but that itself is not the love.
At bottom, what is love? It is a rational orientation of the will toward a good (you cannot love what you do not know). We can, therefore, desire another for our own good, and we can will the good of another for their sake. The first is eros, the second agape (it also falls under charity or benevolence). Different human relations involve different mixtures and manifestations of these two basic loves. Both are good.
However, agape is the selfless form of love. This is giving love and something we can choose and decide to have. It is not subject to the volatility of emotion. Indeed, when we say that perfect love (benevolence) casts out all fear, it is precisely because we have placed the good of another above our own desires.
Apage is the basis for successful marriages, and all good friendships, in general. This is why marriages of convenience are often more successful than those that begin in romance. This isn't because the latter is bad or that romance is opposed to having a good marriage. Not at all. Romance is good. It is only that very often the expectations of the latter are more likely to be rooted in emotion, while the former has no such expectation. The latter is more prone to confusing love with romance. Love involves suffering and sacrifice, and so those who view love in terms of pleasant emotions are in for a world of disappointment.
Getting major Thomas Aquinas vibes from your comment! Are you by any chance aware of his works? The idea of a choice, of love as selfless "willing the good of the other" is a central definition for Aquinas.
Well, the problem is that people use the word 'love' to refer to all sorts of things from sexual desire, to attachment, to kindness, compassion, and benevolence.
The Pali word 'mettā' means something quite similar to 'agape'. In Buddhist traditions, mettā (or loving-kindess) meditation is all about cultivating this sort of sentiment by conscious effort. From the very little I've practiced this, I can confirm your point about how benevolence, for some reason, reduces fear and anxiety (often we aren't even aware that it's there).
> you can't expect to feel the same about someone no matter what because if that person you once had is gone, what is left to love? it is merely your imagination, your memory. it simply turns to grief.
You can still love the good moments, the good memories and all the happiness comes with it.
One of the thing that I grown to accept very early in my life, is the fact people change, so as their promises. Love is not a contract, it's more of an emotional statement, a statement which only applies to a specific context (sometime very narrow).
If love needs to be dissolved, make sure to do that in a fair manner so nobody gets hurt (at least not too badly), so the good moments in the past will always be good moments instead of painful memories.
I am ambivalent about this statement after recalling stories about dogs eating their owners’ corpses after they unexpectedly died alone in their homes locked with their dogs without anyone knowing. This myth about dog’s unconditional love is even worse than “unconditional love” spoken like a Sith i.e. in the absolute.
Love to me, is trust (Owner trusts the dog never fake, cheat or lie to them), happiness (dogs bring you happiness in a pure way), and responsibility (they don't leave you in any circumstances)
> what you're saying is you love someone for who they are as opposed to for what they are doing at any particular moment? but then what if they change? what if they become someone other than who they were when you decided to offer them "unconditional love"? (does no one question this?)
No, loving someone for what kind of person they are, would still be conditional.
> you can't expect to feel the same about someone no matter what [...]
Love is not a feeling.
Well, okay, "love" is perhaps an overloaded word. It means many different things in many different contexts. "I love pizza" means something a little different than "I love you".
Many will say that love is really an action. I love you, by feeding you or taking you to the hospital when you need to, and so on. Of course, that doesn't quite capture it either, because if your mother told you "I love you and will do anything for you, but I don't really feel anything towards you," well, that would feel cold indeed.
Many will say that love is an act of the will, but falling in love is independent of the will and sometimes even contrary to it, like when someone falls in love with someone who is already married --- even married to a friend. And so you don't act on that feeling, because the loving thing to do is to sacrifice yourself in that case.
In fact all love will eventually entail some kind of sacrifice. Else it has never been tested, and that is no sure love at all.
> what if the person you grew up with becomes a monster, with little left of their former self? how can you love someone who no longer gives you reason to love them?
You can love someone who has gone wrong. It is the hardest kind of love, because loving them in action is always doing the opposite of what they want, of what they ask you to do for them. Imagine your child becomes addicted to crack. To love them would be to not give them crack.
In sum, love is something that can start on its own through no act of the will but at times, even in happy relationships, you have to downshift into doing it out of sheer will, to keep it alive throughout the years. It more than a feeling, but also more than a cold action. Sometimes the feeling motivates the action, and sometimes the action motivates the feeling. It's weird.
How can you love someone you don't even like? I just remembered that C. S. Lewis addressed this in one of his books (was it Mere Christianity or The Four Loves?). He said, there is one person you have been loving your whole life even when you don't like them, and that is yourself. Often we do things that we detest, and we berate ourselves over how terrible a person we are or were. Yet we keep on loving ourselves, by feeding ourselves, tending our bodies, etc.
I think unconditional love is a misnomer. You can love someone but its in your and their best interest to leave if your relationship is destructive. What most people truly desire is to be loved unconditionally while taking on the challenge of life whatever that might be for you.
For me, I think about "unconditional love" for someone else as trying to always believe that they are a good person, no matter what happens.
In other words, I see it as unconditionally loving their essence (or soul, core, or some deep immovable part of them) and at the same time, conditionally liking their behaviors or other extensions of their essence.
In this way, I can commit to trying my hardest to believe in your good intentions, no matter what happens, while at the same time, letting myself dislike your actions. E.g., a woman I had dated I believe lied to me about being pregnant with a child of mine after we had broken up. While I was furious at the time, after reflection, I thought that if she were to lie about something as deep as that, she may have been hurting so deeply and that I may have contributed to her pain. So by reflecting, I got myself back to thinking that she may have been trying her best and may not have really known what she was doing. At the same time, I didn't like that she lied about that and didn't trust her word or want to get back into a romantic relationship with her.
So this is the approach I like to take: dig deep to try to get back to loving one's essence, while allowing myself to like or dislike what someone does, says, has, etc.
I really appreciate MLK's perspective on this that he delivers in his Loving Your Enemies speech [0]:
> And this is what Jesus means, I think, in this very passage when he says, “Love your enemy.” And it’s significant that he does not say, “Like your enemy.” Like is a sentimental something, an affectionate something. There are a lot of people that I find it difficult to like. I don’t like what they do to me. I don’t like what they say about me and other people. I don’t like their attitudes. I don’t like some of the things they’re doing. I don’t like them. But Jesus says love them. And love is greater than like. Love is understanding, redemptive goodwill for all men, so that you love everybody, because God loves them. You refuse to do anything that will defeat an individual, because you have agape in your soul. And here you come to the point that you love the individual who does the evil deed, while hating the deed that the person does. This is what Jesus means when he says, "Love your enemy." This is the way to do it. When the opportunity presents itself when you can defeat your enemy, you must not do it.
And I highly recommend you listen to MLK deliver the full speech via audio[1]—it frequently shakes me to my core.
As the incomparable Elizabeth Fraser once told us:
Love… love is a verb
Love is a doing word
Unconditional love isn’t a promise to love someone forever (although that’s somewhat baked into the deal when you have kids). It’s a promise to show love without demanding anything back from someone. It’s not a feeling it’s an act.
This is unthinking and uses fallacy of edge cases. Brain transplants. Reality is generally a core of you remains. Yes some people completely change. But that is an edge case. This tries to be profound, but ain’t.
Even if it is an edge case, it's still proving that eternal love is unrealistic, no? You cannot properly love someone if they do not embody the things that you loved them for anymore. If you love someone for the core of them, that is still conditional; if they do not have those core traits that make them up, then how can you truly love them if they no longer possess that core? Like OP says you are merely loving a memory or an idea of who that person was, not the actual person presented in front of you anymore.
Those might be the reasons, not the conditions, especially point 2 which can't possibly change. You could find different reasons to love them, even if those points were to change.
I think most people believe conditional love to be dependent on a statement like "if, and only as long as ...".
To me there’s 3 kinds of love
-conditional love: give only what you get
-masochist love: give no matter what, even if you are abused
-unconditional love: give freely, trust in the relationship. But maintain your boundaries - separate when you need to, temporarily or permanently.
The author mixes up the latter two. Unconditional means no conditions before you try to love the person. It means focusing on how things are going overall vs any individual day or moment. It doesn’t mean to keep loving them if they don’t return it.
I have uncoditional love for the woman that bore my son, and it's not by choice, and it hurts so much you wouldn't believe. My life is a mess. She lied about my son and said he wasnt mine for years and she knew he was. She became a heroin addict with one of my friends. She got back together with me and i got addicted trying to get her clean.
Oh, she lied and got me arrested, used all my savings, income, and business for drug money, married me for 2 months, sold the engagement ring for more drug money, then left me to rot in jail. She sued for an anullment while I was in jail. She lied in court and did everything to keep me and our son separated. And she succeeded. She and I haven't talked in 10 years. And I love her more than ever. I get excited when someone says her name. I get giddy just thinking about her. Her smile makes me blush and that's just pictures of her. I am like a puppy. I can't stop and it drives me crazy. I can't stop loving her. I wish I could so much. It hurts. I don't need unconditional love from her. I would be okay just being noticed by her. I wish she would know or care that I'm alive. Our son grew up without a father. Soon he won't need need child support anymore. I can't wait to end it all. I can't do this anymore, and I don't want to ask anything of her. I am excited. I want to end my life for her. It's so amazing that I can end my life for the woman who I love with all my heart. It's the one thing I look forward to in life.
I think Wittgenstein would say that the question of whether unconditional love is possible is a semantic game.
The critics would see from the perspective of “absolutely unconditional love” where the absolute aspect of this idea will provide the source of all the counter examples.
For this next part of the discussion, love is defined as to give or the act of giving attention, care, protection, and other benefits for something deemed worthy of loving or love. Yes, this is a recursive/self-referential definition. Deal with it. The proponents will be those who intuitively understand the need for a phrase to describe a feeling of depersonalization or a loss of one’s sense of strict individuality when one’s sense of self begins to merge with the subject of love. In a sense, it is like a self-love but where the self has now expanded to encapsulate another individual. It is self-evident that self-love is unconditional because we have to assume a non-pathological case. Self-preservation which is a form of self-love is in all living organism. The unconditional here is used as an emphasis for the strength of the love. An example of unconditional love is a parent being willing to give their life to save their child. Will all parents have unconditional love for their children? No and no one has ever claimed that. Only the Sith said parent-child love is unconditional because he is unable to equivocate and use a qualifier.
In this way both groups are using the same term to talk pass each other about different things. This is actually quite a boring discussion.
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 111 ms ] thread"I love you as long as you are rich" is an example of conditional love. It is abusive at worst or shallow at best.
Unconditional love does not mean a promise to love someone forever. That might be impossible: people change over time. It is a statement of "I love you now, as you are, as a person and not anything you do or have or appear to be".
author appears to be mingling eternal love and unconditional love. by adding the time element, author is taking love to the divine dimension. we, humans, can't fathom eternity.
You are the poster which did not intentionally misunderstand the idea I'm representing.
I want to be very clear: It's not my idea! I am just trying to help people understand what phrases mean in the proper context.
So how is this different from love? Why prepend "unconditional"?
If A loves money, that doesn't mean A love B for their money, it means A loves B's money and doesn't love B. That is how most people see it.
And even when we talk about more personal state since we allow change with time then the difference isn't meaningful, state only changes if time change.
Example: A loves B. B loses his job, A says A no longer loves B. Did A love B unconditionally? Yes, just that time changed! Or no, B's condition changed! What is the difference?
We can see B losing their job as a part of B's condition. Or we can see it as evidence that B is now a different person. Or maybe the loss of love is totally unrelated, and it was A that changed and A now only want people with a job and money.
So, would "I love you as long as I or you have money, but if we both don't have money I wont love you", be unconditional love? You would probably say yes, it is unconditional as long as the person has money, since then it doesn't depend on the other person. But that doesn't seem like a very meaningful definition, does it? Like, "I love you as long as you have enough money to pay for the stuff I want", that is unconditional love as long as the person doesn't want anything, but then they get older and now they want a large house etc, leading to a divorce. The love then didn't change, but it was no longer unconditional due to the first person changing, not the second person.
Thus, if you stop loving someone shen their financial state changed you did not love unconditionally. If their actions indicated that they were no longer the same person it's different.
What is left of a "person" to me if excluding those?
Loving someone for, e.g., what they believe in, what they stand for, and how they treat people are examples of love that stems from a deeper understanding of a person’s values, habits, and personality than just loving them one-dimensionally for their wealth or a particular thing they’re well known for. I think that’s what they’re getting at.
Share your perspective.
> Perhaps you are ascribing a more holistic view to the idea of what someone “does”.
I think nothing is left for another person to love if you take away everything they do, have and how they appear. Because that is all you can ever know about another person.
But I now understand what you wrote as "I love you now, as you are, as a person and not just any one particular thing you do" and to that I agree.
Edit: I think I misread "anything" as "everything"
More seriously, some redundancy helps with some data corruption. We don't need capital letters; we could let the punctuation show us where the sentence ends. On the other hand, we don't need the punctuation, either; we could let the capital letters show us where the next sentence starts. But having both lets us figure out things like "did the author insert a period there as a typo, or is that really the end of the sentence?"
I get it for comments or social media statuses, but if you're writing long form text you want somebody over 30 to read, reaching over to the shift key is probably worth it. This was a good read but it was annoying, like a nice book transcribed into Comic Sans.
also occasionally can be a younger college woman who tries to act super chill and friendly with everyone, may behave somewhat like a bro she likes and often thinks that doing fratty things is cool. like omg can u believe we pounded so much tequila last night and we blacked out at sig epi chi and audrey fell into a bush while i peed on the side of the house. totally ripped my skirt in half, im such a hot mess. like guys are we going to the delta chi social tonight, i literally cant stand chad but still think i might hookup w him again
basically that aesthetic.
People with little talent and unimportant messages want to write like Alan Paton[1].
The point they miss is that it worked for Alan Paton because he had a lot of talent and very important messages.
I've seen talentless hacks do something similar, copying the narrative quality of Doctor Manhatten from the Watchmen novel, not realising that it worked for him because he was a being who lived outside of time, but it just makes them look stupid.
[1] "Cry, The Beloved Country", which is one of the more powerful books I've read in my life thus far, next to 1984 and similar. People who virtue signal (you know who you are) should read this; the struggle was real, human grief knows no race boundaries.
I think the gist of it is being wanted is romantic, being needed is not romantic at all. Being wanted is actually very much conditional.
Unconditional love is more like parent-child love, you didn't choose the person, it's not a romantic process.
You didn't but the parent did. That's still a condition.
However you need to have a proper mindset to do it well.
You might want to look at codependence. This can happen in any relationship. It can happen with a partner, but it also frequently happens with a child.
Codependence is when people accept too much responsibility for someone and things can quickly go south. (really too much to get into here)
The way out of this is to understand that everyone is responsible for him or her self. Obviously not infants, but remember the airline "oxygen mask over your face before you help someone else".
The answer is to have a healthy neutrality.
https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-attachment-theory-27953...
My experience raising children is that you're golden if the child knows you're on their side, putting their interests above your own. Helping them learn, not putting any moral puzzles in front of them that they can't easily solve, together with lots of misbehavior play so they can learn boundaries without actually misbehaving.
"Unconditional love" was just bad philosophy.
First, if love is extended to someone based on who they are, that's a condition, it's not unconditional. Unconditional love doesn't make sense if it's only extended to one or a few people--it has to be extended to everyone, universally. So talk of switching brains or bodies makes little sense: if you love unconditionally, you love both people, and switching their brain/body configurations is irrelevant to that.
In that context, I think what actions you take based on unconditional love are more nuanced. I do think love necessarily affects your actions, but unconditional love for one person needs to be balanced with unconditional love for other people. Typically you don't kill someone if you love them, but I think it would be possible to both love Hitler and kill Hitler, because your love of Hitler has to be balanced with love for the victims of the holocaust. People who do horrible things are the hardest to love I think--but loving those people is important, because without love people only become worse. It seems plausible to me that if Hitler had experienced more love, the Holocaust might have been prevented. Daryl Davis talking over 200 KKK members into giving up their robes[1] comes to mind as an example of how loving people who do terrible things can be extremely powerful.
And critically, "everyone" includes yourself, so unconditional love means loving yourself. So the "to what i am able to do with or to this person" thing isn't true: loving someone unconditionally doesn't mean you let them walk all over you, because your unconditional love for that person is balanced with unconditional love for yourself.
I'll also add that unconditional love for yourself also means having reasonable expectations for yourself and prioritizing what love you take action upon. Talking KKK members into leaving the KKK is admirable, but it's beyond what can reasonable be expected of people. And if love of Hitler is something that comes up for you often, you might be better served exerting that loving energy toward someone who isn't a dead genocidal dictator.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2017/08/20/544861933/how-one-man-convinc...
At bottom, what is love? It is a rational orientation of the will toward a good (you cannot love what you do not know). We can, therefore, desire another for our own good, and we can will the good of another for their sake. The first is eros, the second agape (it also falls under charity or benevolence). Different human relations involve different mixtures and manifestations of these two basic loves. Both are good.
However, agape is the selfless form of love. This is giving love and something we can choose and decide to have. It is not subject to the volatility of emotion. Indeed, when we say that perfect love (benevolence) casts out all fear, it is precisely because we have placed the good of another above our own desires.
Apage is the basis for successful marriages, and all good friendships, in general. This is why marriages of convenience are often more successful than those that begin in romance. This isn't because the latter is bad or that romance is opposed to having a good marriage. Not at all. Romance is good. It is only that very often the expectations of the latter are more likely to be rooted in emotion, while the former has no such expectation. The latter is more prone to confusing love with romance. Love involves suffering and sacrifice, and so those who view love in terms of pleasant emotions are in for a world of disappointment.
The Pali word 'mettā' means something quite similar to 'agape'. In Buddhist traditions, mettā (or loving-kindess) meditation is all about cultivating this sort of sentiment by conscious effort. From the very little I've practiced this, I can confirm your point about how benevolence, for some reason, reduces fear and anxiety (often we aren't even aware that it's there).
You can still love the good moments, the good memories and all the happiness comes with it.
One of the thing that I grown to accept very early in my life, is the fact people change, so as their promises. Love is not a contract, it's more of an emotional statement, a statement which only applies to a specific context (sometime very narrow).
If love needs to be dissolved, make sure to do that in a fair manner so nobody gets hurt (at least not too badly), so the good moments in the past will always be good moments instead of painful memories.
Love to me, is trust (Owner trusts the dog never fake, cheat or lie to them), happiness (dogs bring you happiness in a pure way), and responsibility (they don't leave you in any circumstances)
No, loving someone for what kind of person they are, would still be conditional.
> you can't expect to feel the same about someone no matter what [...]
Love is not a feeling.
Well, okay, "love" is perhaps an overloaded word. It means many different things in many different contexts. "I love pizza" means something a little different than "I love you".
Many will say that love is really an action. I love you, by feeding you or taking you to the hospital when you need to, and so on. Of course, that doesn't quite capture it either, because if your mother told you "I love you and will do anything for you, but I don't really feel anything towards you," well, that would feel cold indeed.
Many will say that love is an act of the will, but falling in love is independent of the will and sometimes even contrary to it, like when someone falls in love with someone who is already married --- even married to a friend. And so you don't act on that feeling, because the loving thing to do is to sacrifice yourself in that case.
In fact all love will eventually entail some kind of sacrifice. Else it has never been tested, and that is no sure love at all.
> what if the person you grew up with becomes a monster, with little left of their former self? how can you love someone who no longer gives you reason to love them?
You can love someone who has gone wrong. It is the hardest kind of love, because loving them in action is always doing the opposite of what they want, of what they ask you to do for them. Imagine your child becomes addicted to crack. To love them would be to not give them crack.
In sum, love is something that can start on its own through no act of the will but at times, even in happy relationships, you have to downshift into doing it out of sheer will, to keep it alive throughout the years. It more than a feeling, but also more than a cold action. Sometimes the feeling motivates the action, and sometimes the action motivates the feeling. It's weird.
How can you love someone you don't even like? I just remembered that C. S. Lewis addressed this in one of his books (was it Mere Christianity or The Four Loves?). He said, there is one person you have been loving your whole life even when you don't like them, and that is yourself. Often we do things that we detest, and we berate ourselves over how terrible a person we are or were. Yet we keep on loving ourselves, by feeding ourselves, tending our bodies, etc.
In other words, I see it as unconditionally loving their essence (or soul, core, or some deep immovable part of them) and at the same time, conditionally liking their behaviors or other extensions of their essence.
In this way, I can commit to trying my hardest to believe in your good intentions, no matter what happens, while at the same time, letting myself dislike your actions. E.g., a woman I had dated I believe lied to me about being pregnant with a child of mine after we had broken up. While I was furious at the time, after reflection, I thought that if she were to lie about something as deep as that, she may have been hurting so deeply and that I may have contributed to her pain. So by reflecting, I got myself back to thinking that she may have been trying her best and may not have really known what she was doing. At the same time, I didn't like that she lied about that and didn't trust her word or want to get back into a romantic relationship with her.
So this is the approach I like to take: dig deep to try to get back to loving one's essence, while allowing myself to like or dislike what someone does, says, has, etc.
I really appreciate MLK's perspective on this that he delivers in his Loving Your Enemies speech [0]:
> And this is what Jesus means, I think, in this very passage when he says, “Love your enemy.” And it’s significant that he does not say, “Like your enemy.” Like is a sentimental something, an affectionate something. There are a lot of people that I find it difficult to like. I don’t like what they do to me. I don’t like what they say about me and other people. I don’t like their attitudes. I don’t like some of the things they’re doing. I don’t like them. But Jesus says love them. And love is greater than like. Love is understanding, redemptive goodwill for all men, so that you love everybody, because God loves them. You refuse to do anything that will defeat an individual, because you have agape in your soul. And here you come to the point that you love the individual who does the evil deed, while hating the deed that the person does. This is what Jesus means when he says, "Love your enemy." This is the way to do it. When the opportunity presents itself when you can defeat your enemy, you must not do it.
And I highly recommend you listen to MLK deliver the full speech via audio[1]—it frequently shakes me to my core.
[0]: https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/lov...
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=522wcqUlS0Y&pp=ygUTbG92aW5nI...
Mostly because 1. I am grateful for them. 2. It is not an equal relationship 3. I am the caretaker.
And then I realized that those were the conditions.
The author mixes up the latter two. Unconditional means no conditions before you try to love the person. It means focusing on how things are going overall vs any individual day or moment. It doesn’t mean to keep loving them if they don’t return it.
the way you describe both lends well to the idea both are definitely not distinct things. I'm not sure how you've seem to convince yourself otherwise
The critics would see from the perspective of “absolutely unconditional love” where the absolute aspect of this idea will provide the source of all the counter examples.
For this next part of the discussion, love is defined as to give or the act of giving attention, care, protection, and other benefits for something deemed worthy of loving or love. Yes, this is a recursive/self-referential definition. Deal with it. The proponents will be those who intuitively understand the need for a phrase to describe a feeling of depersonalization or a loss of one’s sense of strict individuality when one’s sense of self begins to merge with the subject of love. In a sense, it is like a self-love but where the self has now expanded to encapsulate another individual. It is self-evident that self-love is unconditional because we have to assume a non-pathological case. Self-preservation which is a form of self-love is in all living organism. The unconditional here is used as an emphasis for the strength of the love. An example of unconditional love is a parent being willing to give their life to save their child. Will all parents have unconditional love for their children? No and no one has ever claimed that. Only the Sith said parent-child love is unconditional because he is unable to equivocate and use a qualifier.
In this way both groups are using the same term to talk pass each other about different things. This is actually quite a boring discussion.