Love has two
forms. One is accepting, and the other a striving sort of love. The first is
more unconditional, while the second has its conditions and demands. The first face of love shows us a steady
attachment and a wish for the benefit and happiness of the other, not for the
sake of the lover, but for the sake of the beloved. The lover wishes that the beloved's desires are fulfilled, and counts the beloved's desiring them as a prima facie reason to wish those things for
that person. If I love you in this way,
then your desire to go to Tibet, learn Sanskrit, volunteer time at a soup
kitchen, or what have you, is also a reason for me to wish for these things for
you, too, whether I should want to do any of them or not. It is not being jealous of the other, or the
other's friends, interests or passions, even if they take the person we
love away from us, temporarily or permanently, the way parents love their
children who leave and go out into the world.
Maternal,
paternal or familial love gives us our first examples of unconditional
love. It is unconditional because there
is nothing the beloved has to do obtain it or keep it. It is enough that the
person exists and is loved for him or herself.
The love of parents for their children is present from the beginning,
because the other is part of you or your family. Even the mothers of mass murderer sons may
continue to love them, without condoning what they did. This is possible for a
truly unconditional love.
Our second
sets of examples come from deep friendships. One of the wonderful things about
having true friends is that they no longer judge you on appearances. They knew
you when your faults were exposed, and they did not abandon you. You are loved
for yourself and not what you can do for them.
You can say what you like, behave as you like, in the knowledge that if
you start to go wrong, your friends will give you the criticism that, perhaps,
no one else will.
The ideal of
unconditional love describes a mutual and positively sustaining
relationship. It is good to think of the
wishes of the beloved as one's own, and not to make too many demands, or lay down too many rules,
as conditions that must be met for continued affection to be assured. However, it may be easier with friends than
with lovers to move toward unconditional love, since so much of one's ego, self-esteem, emotional and physical needs are bound up in a
romantic and sexual love relationship.
It is perhaps too much to ask that a romantic relationship should
terminate in a purely unconditional love.
Conditional
or demanding love is intense and changeable and seems to involve an aura of
exclusivity. The striving love makes
demands on the other to be an acceptable partner in love, and to become one
with the beloved in ever more inclusive ways.
There are dangers here. The self is vulnerable to the other, needs and
wants the other, to the point of possessiveness and jealously. This sort of love dies more easily than
unconditional love. For example, it is very hard to grant a beloved perfect
sexual freedom and continue to have the same intense relationship. Infidelity hurts romantic relationships, because
the partners had agreed to limit their sexual freedom to each other. A
relationship may survive such shocks, but infidelity shows a basic disrespect
for the relationship and weakens the bonds of the two. Once broken, the bonds
of love are hard to repair.
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