3.5 Embracing conditional love
What kind of love gets the best press? That’s easy…
Unconditional love.
It’s supposed to be unrivaled and supreme. It’s what we’re all supposed to aspire to.
But when people praise unconditional love, do they really mean they’re in favor of…
No conditions?
None at all? Not any ever?
If they do, that’s a problem.
Take Amanda, for example. She’s a battered wife, who wants to get out of a bad situation, but her minister and the elders of her church insist that she practice unconditional love. They tell her she must submit to her husband no matter what, because he’s been designated by God to be the head of the household.
They tell her she must not just obey him, but love him. With her whole heart till death do them part. Even if he threatens her or injures her, or even if he’s the one who causes her death.
“Unconditional” means you…
Never get to say no.
Or…
Set limits.
And it means…
You will be victimized.
So how can we call this love?
Unconditional means that you have to give to whoever asks you whatever it is they want. And how many people can you do that with until you’re all used up?
And then there’s the moral question. Unconditional love means you’re not making your own decisions…
You’re letting others make your decisions for you.
It means that people can ask you to do things you don’t believe in, things that are against your values and you have to do them. Because, remember: no conditions.
In this way, loving unconditionally and living unconditionally means you’re actually being irresponsible, because you’re not taking personal responsibility for yourself and your actions.
Now let’s imagine something better. Amanda goes to a see a therapist who understands the value of setting conditions. Over the next three months, she attends sessions with him faithfully. Then one day when she’s ready, she takes her kids and moves into the domestic violence shelter.
She calls her husband to tell him…
“I’ve left you. First, because I’ve finally come to care about myself enough to stop submitting to your abuse. And, second, because I care about you enough to stop enabling your abuse by suffering in silence.”
And maybe she’s still fond of the idea of unconditional love, so she adds…
“Even though you’ve abused me for years, I know your childhood history and how badly you were treated and how you became an abuser. And because I understand all this I will continue to love you unconditionally—but you may not be part of my life anymore.”
So…
She’s loving unconditionally but living conditionally.
I get that.
Then there’s Penny. She’s a single mom who says she loves her son unconditionally, and I’m curious so I ask her…
“What do you mean by ‘unconditional’? Do you mean he can get away with anything? Do you let him disrespect you? Do you let him abuse you?”
“On, no, nothing like that. It’s okay if he gets angry, everybody does, but I draw the line at abuse.”
“Why do you do that?”
“Because I care about myself, but just as importantly I care about him. I want him to learn how to be responsible to his relationships. That’s the most important lesson I can teach him.”
“Why?”
“Because if a child grows up with no limits, always taking, never learning how to care for the people who love him, how would he ever learn how to sustain a long–term relationship as an adult? If I don’t set limits on him, if I don’t teach him the value of giving to others, then I would be hurting him, undermining his future, and that’s not love.”
“Doesn’t that mean you’re setting conditions? And if you are, doesn’t this mean you’re loving him conditionally?”
“Maybe, but I still like the phrase ‘unconditional love.’ Something about it feels right.”
“Tell me about that.”
“There are days when I find it really hard to love my son. But I hang in there and take care of him. Parenting him is really, really challenging. To me ‘unconditional’ just means that I’ve learned how to push through the hard times and keep the relationship going.”
“Okay, I understand. So would it be fair to say that you’re setting conditions, but they’re very loving conditions?”
“Yes, that’s fair, but something about that still rubs me the wrong way, like conditional means it’s second–class love.”
“Is there any way the conditions you’re setting actually make love stronger?”
“I know they make our relationship better, so I guess that means they make our love stronger. I have a neighbor, Isabel, who lets her son get away with anything and that drives me crazy. I think she’s failing him. If ‘unconditional’ means you get lazy about love, I’m not for it.”
When I asked Cora about being a mom, she said this…
I love my son, but I don’t like him.
And then she explained…
I split from my husband years ago, but we had joint custody, and Brendon grew up to be a clone of his father despite all my efforts to prevent that.
But he’s still my son, so he has a place in my heart that I will never shut down. But I do have to shut out some of his behavior.
And some of the limits I set are serious. I don’t let him come visit me at my home anymore, because I decided to make that an abuse–free zone. So I meet with him at a restaurant. When we’re in that kind of public space, he doesn’t yell at me or berate me. That’s how I protect myself without cutting him off entirely.
One time I told him, “Brendon, you’ll notice that I don’t let you to berate me like what your father used to do to me. But I haven’t cut you out of my life, which is what I did with your father. That’s because even though our relationship is not what I want it to be, I still care about you, and always will.
“And I’m scared for you. The only girlfriends you’ve ever had are submissive women who take crap from you and don’t stand up for themselves. Which is how I used to be with your father. And I can tell you that’s not love.
“But I want you to have love in your life. Real love. Deep love. The best there is.”
I’m usually in tears by the time I get home from my meetups with Brendon. And our relationship is not getting better, but I’m on a mission. I stay connected to him because I want him to know that if he ever decides to change, I’m there for him. He can come to me and I will help him.
In that way, I still get to be his mother. A mother on deck, waiting, hurting, but hanging in there, because I’m hanging in for something that matters to me, even though I know the day I’m hoping for might never come.
When you set loving conditions, that’s an act of love. In the Twelve Step movement, it’s common wisdom that if you allow people to use and abuse you, that’s not doing them any favors. Instead…
You’re enabling their abuse.
And in so doing, you’re helping them continue a behavior that’s making a ruin of their life.
Sometimes setting limits is very hard and it takes a monumental act of love to set them and stand by them.
Here’s Ronnie…
My brother Joey and I grew up in foster homes. We went through hell together. There’s no one who has a deeper place in my heart. But he got in with the wrong crowd and got into drugs. Now he’s seriously addicted and I have no choice but to set limits on him.
It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do, because when he’s in pain I feel his pain like it’s my own.
But the last two times I let him come stay at my apartment he cleaned me out.
So now when he asks to come stay with me, I tell him, “You can’t stay with me but if you go into rehab I’ll pay for half of it. But I’m not going to let you steal my stuff ever again because you just sell it for drugs and then you stay trapped and I love you too much to help you hurt yourself.”
I can only find the strength to stand by the limits I’ve set, because I know in doing that, I’m taking a stand for love.
So if unconditional love is such a problem, where did it come from? And why hasn’t it just disappeared? Why is it still such a force despite what’s wrong with it? The reason is because…
It’s an essential feature of tribal fundamentalism.
As I’ve said before, we humans lived in small bands within relatively small tribes for tens of thousands of years. And in those days, if you weren’t part of a tribe, if you were pushed out and had to live in the wild on your own, you likely didn’t make it. So being part of the band was a matter of life and death.
And the tribe demanded absolute loyalty.
Or you could say, they demanded unconditional love. Which was really…
Unconditional submission to the tribe.
For the purpose of survival.
And so we learned to sacrifice whatever parts of ourselves and our personalities we had to sacrifice in order to fit in.
Notice how that works. The band says…
You have to love us unconditionally.
But…
We love you conditionally…only as long as you fit in and obey and contribute.
This is what it was like in my childhood church, but with regard to God.
Everyone said that God loved us unconditionally. But that wasn’t true. He had conditions. Severe conditions. If we didn’t love him and obey him exactly like he wanted us to, he would punish us. Like sending us to hell for eternity.
But meanwhile, he demanded that we love him unconditionally. It wasn’t okay for us to ever complain about his behavior or question him or get mad at him.
I’ve noticed over the years that it’s very hard to pin down “unconditional love” in any concrete way, and that’s because it wasn’t designed to be pinned down. Quite the opposite…
Foggy vagueness keeps its magical aura humming.
But what makes me most skeptical about unconditional love is…
How very many more people want to receive it than give it.
Unconditional love is missing the core moral element that I would want all of us to have in our relationships. So to switch to conditional love, and stick with it, is an upgrade.
I don’t want any of us to be sacrificial in our love. I want it always to be a two-way street—I do my part and you do your part. I want each of us to take responsibility for putting in our maximum effort. There’s nothing sensational or mystical about this, it’s just…
The down-to-earth, moral work of mutual nurturance.
Conditional love, in what it can promise, is so much less than unconditional love…
But in what it can deliver, it’s so much more.
