Unconditional Love
Love can only make sense contextually. When there are seemingly infinite ways that it’s represented, we consign love—one of the fundamental aspects of what it means to be human—to a delicate game of presentation and interpretation. We do not accept love fairly, nor as it is. We do not give away love fairly, nor as it is. We perform all manner of mental calculus to determine what type of love we give out, what type of love we receive, if someone is worthy of our love, and if someone is capable of loving us back.
What is the premise of our relationship with this person? A stranger? An acquaintance? A classmate? A coworker? A teacher? A family member? A friend of a friend? A potential romantic partner? What kind of person do they seem like? How do they dress? How do they carry themselves? Am I proud or ashamed to be around this person? How much time do we spend with this person? How often do we spend time? How do we spend that time? What do we have to gain from this other person? How do they make us feel? What form of love do we express? Do we love with emotional distance and reverence? Or do we love with intimacy and connection? What constitutes the nature of these interactions? A sporadic text exchange every three months? Playful joking and lively conversations? The silent comfort of one another’s presence?
Burdened by the weight of circumstances, tainted by subconscious desire, and perverted by conscious rationalization, it can seem as if our love for one another is selfishly selective, lined with ulterior motives, and temperamental—far from anything we might define as unconditional.
In some way it is discouraging, but perhaps we just have to recognize that our yearning for a pure, unconditional love is all a delusion. Perhaps this kind of love is reserved for the divine and the incomprehensible. Perhaps, as mere humans, we cannot even begin to fully comprehend a concept of love in a vacuum, of a completely pure love unchained by the sins of human consciousness, of a love infinitely. After all, if we could momentarily perceive just a modicum of the profundity of Jesus’ love for humanity—if all at once, we caught a glimpse of all the sacrifice and emotional burden, all the tears shed and every palpitation of the heart, every agonizing moment when he perished on the cross, the boundless thoughtfulness and concern for each and every one of us—I’m fully convinced there would not be a single nonbeliever on Earth thereafter.
But if humanity was touched by such a divine truth, truly converted by the potency of an irrefutable unconditional love, the entire narrative begins to fall apart. There would be no more stories to tell. There would exist no such impetus for us to discover, to learn, to understand, and to overcome if we already were given the answer. Indeed, love may only make sense contextually, but, perhaps, that is the point of it all. Perhaps the essence of human love is constituted by—not abstracted from—the social dynamics that surround the expression and interpretation of it. The very notion of love between human beings is fundamentally about an internalization of our shared journeys; it is about each and every step along the way, the context by which we can familiarize ourselves with one another by disentangling the mystery of human identity—the webs of our foibles and idiosyncrasies, the abyssal caverns of our past trauma and present fear, the vast, seemingly limitless expanse of our hopes and dreams, and the confounding space of everything in between. We can only love or be loved if we have a story to tell—if we can recall those moments, in spite of the fleeting nature and whim of our circumstances, of lamentation and celebration, of ambivalence and determination, of regret and reminiscence, of unity and discordance, of indignation and justice, of shame and confidence, of anger and forgiveness, of conflict and resolution, of frustration and catharsis, of life and death.
Unlike Jesus, we do not have infinite time and energy; our commitment to one another is finite and thus our capacity to form the deep emotional attachment to engender true love is finite. Yet some still attempt to emulate this unconditional love. While I wouldn’t necessarily define it as a futile endeavor, because it can bring about positive change in the world, I would assert that it’s a grave misjudgment of our capabilities as human beings. No one can claim to love literally everyone and everything equally, with just the right amount of thought, consideration, concern, and degree of interaction to constitute a perfect relationship between two entities. It’s simply not in congruence with how our brains are wired and certainly unfeasible while fighting the perpetual uphill battle against time, space, and ourselves. We have to recognize that divine love and human love are completely disparate concepts, and that there’s nothing wrong with this distinction.
This is not to say that there is no value in the belief in a divine form of love; in fact, quite the opposite. It seems to me that those more inclined to apply this concept of unconditional love to strangers already have an implicit understanding of this compulsion to write stories; it’s not that there is already a story before interaction, but they are able to connect and extend the stories of a perfect divine love or of those shared with existing friends or family, conjoining the elements of these stories with the desire to create new stories. And this desire is not insignificant; it has proven itself to be one of the most powerful forces of change in our world. Despite the compelling nature of these stories, we have to remember that extending the story of love does not mean that it replicates it, and that it might look nothing like we idealize it to be in our minds.
We must avoid the trap of confusing the intimate love we share with our loved ones with the kind of blind compassion, generosity, or admiration one would share with strangers, and covering it with the blanket term of unconditional love, when it isn’t in any way. It could be that we could extricate the conditions and the context from love to produce something we might define as unconditional love, but this version of love is so far-fetched from our standard mode of fostering intimacy and affection with our close friends or family. Perhaps, due to the constraints of the human psyche, to extend this kind of intimate love unconditionally, in a manner that defiantly supersedes context and narrative, is nearly impossible to do with consistency and universality, so much so that we might avoid assigning it at all to any form of human action.
It may be that all that is left for us to do is present and interpret. It may be that the only way we can inch ever closer to this concept of unconditional love is to practice conditional love—to hone our ability to discern context, circumstance, need, and desire imbued in the acts of love we give and receive. In the end—for everyone that will be a part of our lives, for all the reasons that brought us together in this very time and place, for all that we seek to derive from this fateful existence—these will be the stories that we write, and the journeys that we will take.
For there is no story without conditions,
no journey worth taking without a story,
and no love without a journey.
