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A friend of mine received a Christmas card from her daughter that said, “Unconditional love is every child’s birth right. I did not receive it from you, therefore you should not expect it from me.”
Aside from the logical inconsistency expressed in this Christmas greeting, it got me wondering about that often-used term, “Unconditional Love”. Unless I am misunderstanding the term on some level, I can’t think of anyone I feel unconditional love for. The closest I came was when I owned a beloved Irish Setter. He grew to be old and smelly and could barely walk, but I lovingly carried him around from place to place and wept like Mary when he died. However, if he bit me or became an alcoholic, I would have felt quite differently, so my affection was conditional.
Anybody believe in unconditional love, experience it, understand it, expect it or hope for it? Isn’t it a destructive aspiration because it is impossible to achieve? Am I failing to see something? Am I shallow? Or is it all bunk?
Unconditional love seems to be a contradiction in terms. On a biological and chemical level love is in its very essence something conditional, and if it is not conditional but something you force upon yourself then you don’t mean love in the emotional sense but acting loving to someone. Having ones parents act lovingly toward you seems to be something every child should have though.
It’s a term people use to inflate the actual depth and extent of their love for someone. It’s really saying; “You’ve met all the conditions I require to love you, and you couldn’t (or wouldn’t) likely disqualify yourself.”
But that’s really only those who actually do give it some thought. Many, probably most, just use it to inflate the actual depth of their love.
I don’t think such a concept is coherently possible to describe or explain and neither do I the emotion known as ‘love’ so…we’ll just keep doing the best we can.
A friend of mine received a Christmas card from her daughter that said, “Unconditional love is every child’s birth right. I did not receive it from you, therefore you should not expect it from me.”
Aside from the logical inconsistency expressed in this Christmas greeting, it got me wondering about that often-used term, “Unconditional Love”. Unless I am misunderstanding the term on some level, I can’t think of anyone I feel unconditional love for. The closest I came was when I owned a beloved Irish Setter. He grew to be old and smelly and could barely walk, but I lovingly carried him around from place to place and wept like Mary when he died. However, if he bit me or became an alcoholic, I would have felt quite differently, so my affection was conditional.
Anybody believe in unconditional love, experience it, understand it, expect it or hope for it? Isn’t it a destructive aspiration because it is impossible to achieve? Am I failing to see something? Am I shallow? Or is it all bunk?
Lousy card.
There’s unconditional love, and there is also self-protection. I’d say that you can love unconditionally while at the same time saying, “No, just because I love you that doesn’t mean I’m going to roll over and be a wuss when you come around asking for more money.” Or, “I love you unconditionally, but I love myself as well and so I’m seeing the divorce lawyer tomorrow morning.” Or, etc. The confusing comes in equation love with having some sort of altruistic obligation.
There’s unconditional love, and there is also self-protection. I’d say that you can love unconditionally while at the same time saying, “No, just because I love you that doesn’t mean I’m going to roll over and be a wuss when you come around asking for more money.” Or, “I love you unconditionally, but I love myself as well and so I’m seeing the divorce lawyer tomorrow morning.” Or, etc. The confusing comes in equation love with having some sort of altruistic obligation.
Yeah, it’s revealing when people argue against unconditional love on the basis that you can’t deny anything to someone you unconditionally love, you can’t get angry at someone you unconditionally love, or that it means you have to always consider their well-being the most important over any and all others, etc. It’s a pretty twisted concept of love ... or perhaps an investment in a position and a lack of critical thinking and self-discipline (i.e. under-restrained bias/shifting the goalposts).
Unconditional love is a nice concept and may exist as a Platonic form or idealized abstraction or divine trait, but I’ve never actually seen it in human reality. I know people whom I think I love with everything I’m capable of, but if they turned on me totally and unjustifiably, while I would be emotionally destroyed, I think eventually the love would vanish. I don’t think I could keep up the “unconditional” part under the right set of circumstances. But it’s still a nice thought and something to strive for as a goal. Just hope that a claim of unconditional love is never put to the test, ‘cause it will fail.
Unconditional love is a nice concept and may exist as a Platonic form or idealized abstraction or divine trait, but I’ve never actually seen it in human reality. I know people whom I think I love with everything I’m capable of, but if they turned on me totally and unjustifiably, while I would be emotionally destroyed, I think eventually the love would vanish. I don’t think I could keep up the “unconditional” part under the right set of circumstances. But it’s still a nice thought and something to strive for as a goal. Just hope that a claim of unconditional love is never put to the test, ‘cause it will fail.
All you need is to recognize your equality of consciousness and accept them as equal human beings. Then you would see whatever it was that caused them to turn on you and you would feel compassion as you blew them away with your .45s (or, less mercifully, dragged them into court).
Unconditional love is a nice concept and may exist as a Platonic form or idealized abstraction or divine trait, but I’ve never actually seen it in human reality. I know people whom I think I love with everything I’m capable of, but if they turned on me totally and unjustifiably, while I would be emotionally destroyed, I think eventually the love would vanish. I don’t think I could keep up the “unconditional” part under the right set of circumstances. But it’s still a nice thought and something to strive for as a goal. Just hope that a claim of unconditional love is never put to the test, ‘cause it will fail.
All you need is to recognize your equality of consciousness and accept them as equal human beings. Then you would see whatever it was that caused them to turn on you and you would feel compassion as you blew them away with your .45s (or, less mercifully, dragged them into court).
True, killing with compassion is a mark of a sensitive person.
Even smacking them around doesn’t affect dogs. They STILL love you. I guess you could beat them into viciousness, but it isn’t their inclination. I saw a show on NOVA recently about these scientists who raised a bunch of wild wolves in Russia. The kept cross-breeding the least aggressive wolves and within a few generations, the wolves became more like dogs than wolves. Their ears even changed and became more floppy. So, it seems dogs are wired to adore humans.
I love animals so much. I am saddened when I see human beings abused, but mistreat an animal and I want to start stabbing people. Apparently, a lot of folks are like this. Because they can’t reason, animals are just so….innocent. They may be vicious predators, but they didn’t choose to be so. I suppose one could make the case that human beings are quite similar to this. No child says, “When I grow up I want to drink too much and beat up my wife.” BUt…it doesn’t affect me the same way. I groan aloud whenever I see those commercials for animal adoption with the sad-eyed cats and dogs and the heart rendering music in the background.
Unconditional love seems to be a contradiction in terms. On a biological and chemical level love is in its very essence something conditional, and if it is not conditional but something you force upon yourself then you don’t mean love in the emotional sense but acting loving to someone.
Well, in a very broad sense most everything is “conditional” in that it’s tied up in the causal nature of the universe, but I don’t think that’s what people mean when they say unconditional love. I think they mean: I have a friend, family member, or spouse that I will love no matter what he or she might do, within the reasonable limits of the imagination; or, I have some spiritual or philosophical background that promotes loving your neighbor as yourself, that type of thing.
Maybe it’s not what they mean, but I don’t think you can separate the two (causal nature of the universe and loved ones’ behavior). Love is conditional on the state of the old meat computer, and the state of the meat computer is conditional on its inputs—which include loved ones’ behavior. Unconditional love would require free will. Either that or the ability to control the inputs to the meat computer. From that standpoint, it might be possible for unconditional love to exist provided the target of one’s unconditional love is a non-existent being. Like Jesus, or a dead relative.
From that standpoint, it might be possible for unconditional love to exist provided the target of one’s unconditional love is a non-existent being. Like Jesus, or a dead relative.
From that standpoint, it might be possible for unconditional love to exist provided the target of one’s unconditional love is a non-existent being. Like Jesus, or a dead relative.
From that standpoint, it might be possible for unconditional love to exist provided the target of one’s unconditional love is a non-existent being. Like Jesus, or a dead relative.
Oh here’s a slightly relevant anecdote which taught me an important lesson about unconditional love. I became infatuated (not sexually) with a bi-polar woman who was SO CHARMING. She always had fears that she would have to return to a mental hospital and I cheerfully told her that I would be there for her and I would try to prevent this from occurring. I’d talk to her family, etc. This was a stupid thing to promise, but she was just so cool; I adored her and who would think she’d be without family? So, sure enough, she goes crazy while her husband was in Egypt; she has no children and her family was scattered around the globe. I didn’t know what to do because she was completely irrational, so I ended up contacting her psychiatrist and she ended up on a mental ward and I ended up puking every morning from guilt. She had once made a friendship bracelet for me out of multi-colored yarn and one afternoon, while I was walking outdoors, I untied it and let it flutter away in the wind. This was a dramatic gesture, but one I knew I had to make.
So, she eventually recoverd. Tearfully, I told her about the friendship bracelet and how I had to “let go”. She listened, snorted, and said. “Oh that piece of shit? All it did was bring bad luck.” Then she assured me that, alas, she belonged in the mental hospital at the time and I was an idiot for listening to her.
What I learned is that I created this whole scenario in my brain, and then lived it like it was real. I was misguided by high ideals, an infatuation with concepts such as Unconditional Love, Sacrifice, Sacred Vows, Responsibility (all with capital letters) and a whole lot of self-importance. Throw Motherhood onto the list, and I’d be as screwed up as my tenant with the beastly daughter.
I’ve learned a lot of terms on PR, but my absolute favorite is reification. If this word were somehow incorporated into the Dick and Jane stories I read in my youth, my life might have been very different.
Despite all this, I am still drawn to the idea of unconditional love. I’ve decided that it might be the perspective God would have of us, if he were real. You know, utter forgiveness because we’re all rather pathetic.
The sad thing is that I’m finally, to some degree, wise, wonderful and half-way reasonable, but I’m going to take all this to the grave with me, which really sucks. This is the best argument for Reincarnation there is, except for the fact that it is woo-laden. I keep trying to share my knowledge and insights with young people, but they all think I’m quaint with a slight case of dementia because I can figure out all the buttons on my cell phone.
In discussion of the transition from matriarchy to patriarchy, Fromm suggests some of the ways that the patriarchal social structure “is closely bound up with the class character of present-day society…. The patriarchal family is one of the most important loci for producing the psychic attitudes that operate to maintain the stability of class society.” (CoP, p. 124). In his view, a “patricentric complex” develops in bourgeois society which includes “affective dependence on fatherly authority, involving a mixture of anxiety, love and hate; identification with paternal authority vis-a-vis weaker ones; a strong and strict superego whose principle is that duty is more important than happiness; guilt feelings, reproduced over and over again by the discrepancy between the demands of the superego and those of reality, whose effect is to keep people docile to authority. It is this psycho-social condition that explains why the family is almost universally regarded as the foundation (or at least one of the important supports) of society” (CoP, p. 124).
In a patricentric society, one’s relation to the father is central. Going beyond Freud’s theory of the Oedipus complex which also ascribes the father-son relationship primary importance in psychological development, Fromm inventories various ways in which paternal authority is introjected in socialization processes, and the ways that such processes reproduce the values of capitalism and bourgeois society. Fromm then contrasts children’s relations with their mother and the matricentric values involved in this relation. While relation to one’s father is often conditional on one’s behavior, success, and ability to fulfill his expectations, there is at least an unconditional element to mother love and less rigid introjection of values, guilt, and needs to succeed to win love:
“Summing up, we can say that the patricentric individual—and society—is characterized by a complex of traits in which the following are predominant: a strict superego, guilt feelings, docile love for paternal authority, desire and pleasure at dominating weaker people, acceptance of suffering as a punishment for one’s own guilt, and a damaged capacity for happiness. The matricentric complex, by contrast, is characterized by a feeling of optimistic trust in mother’s unconditional love, far fewer guilt feelings, a far weaker superego, and a greater capacity for pleasure and happiness. Along with these traits there also develops the ideal of motherly compassion and love for the weak and others in need of help” (CoP, p. 131).
I groan aloud whenever I see those commercials for animal adoption with the sad-eyed cats and dogs and the heart rendering music in the background.
I was just noticing, watching one of those Sarah Mclachlan animal welfare commercials, that many of the animals didn’t actually look sad. They just looked like standard issue cats and dogs. It was the music and the fact the picture was in slow motion that gave almost all of that impression. Many were clearly unhappy, injured and such, but many of them weren’t—at least not in any apparent way. If I can remember, next time I’ll turn off the sound and see what I think. My impression could have just been due to the fact I’m suspicious of overt sentiment like that, even when used for a cause I favor.
