Unconditional Love is Creepy

[pktechgirlbackup]

(between adults. From adults to children is fine, and reciprocal unconditional love is what children are built for)

I really don't get people who think unconditional love is a goal. If someone says they love you unconditionally, then they can't really love you at all, since you could change everything that made you "you" and they'd still love this new person living in a thing that was once your body. They're in love with being in love, or with an image of you untethered from reality. I want someone who values in me the same traits I value in myself: intelligence, critical thinking, sense of humor, dedication to growth, rather specific charitable impulses, stupidly gorgeous hair. Finding out I could lose those and he'd still love me is a lot like finding out all your boyfriend's ex-girlfriends are co-dependent idiots: you start to worry about where your relationship is headed.

And then there's the practical problems. No love (between adults) is truly unconditional, but in pretending it is such you lose the ability to discuss it. Saying "I wouldn't love you if you weren't dependent on me" is bad, but it's better than sabotaging your partners attempts to develop independence, or unexpectedly dumping them when they succeed. Especially because deep down the other partner knows it's not unconditional, and so at some level will be afraid to change anything, because what if that's the important thing?

It also makes it impossible to address even small problems in a relationship. If you've defined your love as unconditional, it's going to cause a lot of anxiety to bring up something small like "please put your socks in the hamper", because that's a criticism and if you've defined your love as without criticism, that's really scary. It occurs to me that other people might find the opposite to be true: it's easier to hear criticism when you are absolutely secure. I understand this intellectually but it's so antithetical to how I operate I don't really grok it.

I'm very much of the school of finding out the absolute worst case scenario as soon as I possibly can, because I find the certainty calming. Hell, I go out and create the worst case scenario, in the form of things like horror video games and (controlled) full contact martial arts*, because it makes me less stressed out overall. In some ways, I think the human capacity for coping with stress is much like our immune system: in the absence of something to do, it assumes its detection mechanism is broken and zooms in on ever more harmless stimuli. This would make anxiety over first world problems the equivalent of pollen allergies.


*You know, despite finding sparring really valuable, I've had/am having a lot of trouble adjusting to the fact that I'm actually being seriously punched for realz and have been sort of waiting to get over that before moving on to the next level, which involves throws and getting punched in the head. Maybe this is not only unrealistic, but undesirable?

Comments

[crystalpyramid]

I think we may disagree on the definition of love.

Why would love be without criticism? You can love someone and want to support them by helping them achieve their goals. Without your love being conditional on anything, without it being the carrot in some kind of unpleasant game. Unconditional love is the opposite of breaking up with someone because they gained 10 pounds.

You can also love someone and be unable to tolerate what they're doing because you love them. I don't think of love as a commitment to supporting someone or having sex with them or living with them or even talking to them regularly (in extreme cases). It's just a statement of an emotion which can be one-sided if it needs to be.

In some ways, I think the human capacity for coping with stress is much like our immune system: in the absence of something to do, it assumes its detection mechanism is broken and zooms in on ever more harmless stimuli. This would make anxiety over first world problems the equivalent of pollen allergies.
This, however, is so spot-on.

[pktechgirl.livejournal.com]

I think we are using different defintions. I'm considering [unconditional love] as a single concept, related to but distinct from love without conditions. I have specifically seen people use it to mean "if you really loved me, you'd ..." tolerate my drug abuse/blow me/move across the country. When I say [unconditional love], I mean what they called love. And while I agree that love shouldn't- can't- be used as a carrot to motivate good behavior, and love that is destroyed by minor changes in appearance wasn't really love, I stand by the belief that love that persists despite fundamental negative changes in who you are isn't love either. I was also pretty specifically thinking about when unconditional romantic love, because that's the only place I've seen the phrase used outside of adult relative -> child love, but you're right, it doesn't have to be.

Something like dementia is a tricky case. I respect the world out of people who care for partners as they lose themselves, but I view that as something one does out of love for the person they were. Which I guess generalizes pretty well: if someone I loved developed a drug habit and I couldn't be with them anymore, the love for who they had been and their potential to be that again could persist. I wouldn't label that loving the person in their current form, but it wouldn't be wildly inaccurate to do so.

[pktechgirl.livejournal.com]

more thoughts: I'm saying love must be conditional on who you are, you're (I think) saying love can't be conditional on what you do. These aren't actually contradictory, it's just the difference between redemption via belief and redemption via good works.

[crystalpyramid]

What about love between adult (non-spouse) family members? That's my main example of unconditional love, and it's not clear whether you think it's real or appropriate.

[pktechgirl.livejournal.com]

In general, I'm fine with an adult relative continuing to unconditionally love a younger relative they met as a child, and mostly okay with two people who met as kids loving each other unconditionally as adults. But I've seen enough people who:
describe their feelings for their parents as love
are really hurt by things their parents do or even say because they either don't love them, or are incapable of expressing it in a healthy manner
do things for their parents motivated by love that hurt them significantly, and ultimately don't help their parents. It's most obvious when my friends give their parents money that they piss away with their own irresponsibility, but there's a pretty analogous thing going on with emotional support.

So I guess if what they wanted to do was love their parents, but from a distance, without giving more of themselves than they can afford, I would be fine with that, but I see an awful lot of stuff labeled love going really badly.

[pktechgirl.livejournal.com]

A follow up point: I've got one friend with a toxic parent who did cut her off, and the expectation that she should unconditionally love her mother and if she were a decent person her mother would love her causes her a lot of pain. And another whose mom did turn herself around, but only after he cut her off emotionally. So what I really want is for a wider range of offspring behavior to be acceptable- if you can love your parents from a healthy distance, fine, but if someone fucks you over repeatedly, it needs to be okay to completely separate.