Love Without Conditions
Last week while I was driving, I was listening to the season finale of the podcast On Being with Krista Tippet. She was interviewing the US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, a unique person who holds government office but also is an incredibly compassionate person. (Those two don’t usually seem to go together). Alongside his official duties, Murthy does important research around the epidemic of loneliness in the United States and has a lot to say about how integral community is to mental health and emotional well-being. It’s a great conversation and I highly recommend taking some time to listen to his words.
At the end of the podcast, Tippet puts Murthy on the spot and asks him to leave the audience with a short meditation. He responds by asking the crowd to raise their right hand and put it over their heart. I instinctively did that same while driving in my car. He then asks everyone to think about the people that have provided support throughout their lives; who celebrated success and stuck by through times of struggle; to remember what it feels like to have that unconditional love - to hold on feeling, to seek it out, to spread it to others. It’s a beautiful blessing, but sitting alone in my car, I got a bit choked up. I thought back to the various relationships that I’ve had in my life with family, friends, partners, teachers, and mentors, and had to dig deep to find times where I could say that I could tangibly feel truly loved.
Unconditional love. Love without conditions. It feels a bit foreign.
I have had many people who have loved me throughout my life, and many more that still do love me. With the exception of my children when they were young and my current partner Shay, I can say with reasonable certainty that that love always felt very conditioned.
I think the notion of love is sometimes hard to grasp when, really, it’s opposition is not conflict. That is to say more simply: you can love someone even when you’re in conflict with them. You can love someone and disagree with their choices. You can love someone and be angry at the same time. You can love someone you haven’t seen in a long time. You can love someone that makes you mad. Unconditional love is hard to recognize, because when you feel that conflict, the love quickly becomes overshadowed. Disagreement can feel like a personal attack. Anger can make you feel disconnected. Conflict can make you feel downright unloveable. I think in these moments, it feels like the conflict or disagreement has attached conditions to that love.
In recognizing this, I’ve been thinking more about how to show my family that I love them unconditionally, even when I know conflict will arise. I mean, the easiest way, of course, is to remind them in those heated moments with as much sincerity as I can muster, that I love them regardless of my frustration or anger. But holding this goal of tangible unconditional love has opened up some others doors that were somewhat unexpected:
taking time to listen attentively
helping with chores or tasks out of love and without the expectation for reciprocation
hugs for no reason (with consent, of course)
extending notions of trust and support
focusing on relationship over self
These are all actions that increase connection: building trust, giving time, sharing moments. It may be that unconditional love is hard to hold in those moments of conflict, but building a strong foundation of love based on connection and trust means that a) conflict is less likely to arise and b) conflict is resolvable because there aren’t hidden agendas of control and power mixed in.
While I doubt this is a firm recipe for all relationships, it does seem to be a clear way forward to showing our kids, in particular, what the practice of unconditional love might look like. When I originally conflated conflict and disagreement with placing conditions on love, I think it was more a lack of trust and connection in the relationships that I remembered and I do think that those are integral to strong relationships of all shapes and sizes.