‘Unconditional Love’ Makes a Mockery of Love
How many times have you been told that you should love your parents, spouse, or even complete strangers “unconditionally”?
Influential figures from Gandhi to the Dalai Lama have advocated practicing “unconditional love,” claiming that we should love others without expecting anything in return. Sometimes, people interpret this idea as meaning that we should “love” a particular person (such as a family member) without regard for his or her flaws, value to us, or behavior. Other times, people take it to mean that we should “love” all people equally, as in the biblical command to “love thy neighbor as thyself.” But is such a thing even possible, let alone desirable?
To see if this concept makes any sense, we first need to be clear on what love is. Many people regard love as a feeling—one that somehow defies rational explanation. But we know that we experience strong feelings of affection for certain people, so what happens if we probe into why we experience those feelings?
Ultimately, our emotions serve a purpose—we feel positive emotions when we think we’re experiencing or are about to experience something good for our lives, and we feel negative emotions when we think we’re experiencing or are about to experience something bad for our lives. So it follows that the positive emotions we feel when we are in love indicate that we think we’ve identified a positive value for our life.
But love is more than just a feeling. It’s a multifaceted response to someone based on our conscious and subconscious evaluations of that person’s character and nature. We can feel affection, care, desire, and other “love-like” feelings for people because we’ve evaluated their value to us in different ways. For example, we may have judged that the person will be a source of pleasure and fulfillment that we cannot survive without. This would not be love, but obsession or infatuation. Or we may have judged that the person is morally worthy of our high esteem, which would be respect or admiration.
Love, however, is a more personal and all-encompassing evaluation than these. Love is based on the evaluation that a person embodies our deepest, most important values. It is the evaluation that a person is a manifestation of those values that define who we are as an individual—both in his or her chosen values and in his or her general orientation toward life. It is the admiration of our own values and our own sense of life (or the sense of life that we are trying to achieve) in another person.
What, then, would it mean to love unconditionally? It would mean to evaluate a person as embodying our deepest values without requiring that person to embody those values. In other words, it’s a complete self-contradiction. Indeed, any attempt to define love in such a way that it ever could be unconditional reduces it to a meaningless sense of good will toward others, divorced from our own values, our own judgment, and the recipient’s moral worth and choices. For example, a forced “love” for an abusive family member whose ideas and values you despise would not be a response to any rational values. To treat this kind of “love” and the deep affection you feel for someone whose character you fundamentally admire and whose company enriches your life on every level as one and the same thing would be absurd and would destroy your ability to understand the true nature of both relationships.
It’s a damning indictment of our culture that “unconditional love” is still held up as a virtue. In reality, it’s a vicious idea that destroys the true meaning of love. It demands that we disregard our deepest values when evaluating others. It makes a mockery of love, sundering it from the thing that gives it meaning—our values and the evaluations we make based on them.
Any time you hear someone referring to “unconditional love,” stop them and ask what the phrase is supposed to mean. Ask also what “love” means if it can be unconditional. You may find that some people are genuinely confused about these concepts, and, by asking such questions, you will help them achieve better clarity that will enhance their understanding and experience of love going forward. You may also find that some people know with perfect clarity that they are demanding the abandonment of what our survival and happiness depend upon—the ability to choose and pursue our own values in all areas of life.
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