Unconditional Love is Creepy
Aug. 7th, 2011 11:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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?
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?
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no subject
Date: 2011-08-07 10:41 pm (UTC)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.