Unconditionally Loving Another

I’ve spent the last several days thinking about unconditional love. I think most people, when they think about finding that “special someone,” a soul mate, or true love they think that they kind of love that will exist between them is unconditional. I thought that too until recently. Loving someone unconditionally can be dangerous and at times energy draining. It can also be the foundation for very unhealthy relationships.

I think unconditional love is great between family, maybe even friends and everyone needs to be unconditionally loved at some point in their lives. It’s important to have people that will accept you for who you are everyday of your life and to have their opinion of you not falter even when you make bad decisions or questionable choices.
However, unconditional love has also evolved to mean that in addition to a type of emotional state for feeling for another person you also don’t change the way you treat them or the amount of support that you provide. That kind of support often means that you don’t try to change them in any way or persuade them to think differently, form another opinion or explore other avenues.

I think there is a serious problem with those kinds of relationships. No matter what kind of a relationship you are in you can’t run away from the fact that there will at some point and time be conflict and with conflict come a need for accepting fault and some change. These type of situations posses a huge problem because we think that to ask someone to change means that we don’t love them for who they are, but in order for a boyfriend/girlfriend or husband/wife relationship to work there has to be change. It has to be okay to ask your partner to make a change or at least a compromise from time to time so that conflict can get resolved.

Does this mean that the best kind of love between life partners is not unconditional love as we have come to know it to be?

I can’t help but think of arrange marriages when the topic of love and marriage comes to mind. I know that if you look at data and studies you will find that arrange marriages or more likely to last, in other words, those marriages are less likely to end in divorce than marriages where people pick their spouse. Also, that couples in arrange marriages report loving their spouse more over time than couples in unarranged marriages. Does this mean that in this culture we have lost what a marriage is supposed to be?

There has been lots of discussion about what marriage is and how to define a married couple, but I look at the arranged marriage data and wonder what type of love exists there and if it could be defined as unconditional. I also know that there exists a theory in psychology where if a person is more likely to accept sometime if it can’t be returned or exchanged. A simple way to illustrate this is to give the example of purchasing something at store like a CD and the store offers a no exchange policy. A costumer is more likely to not only like the CD, but to like it more than a person who bought the same CD at a store that did offer the customer an easy way to return it. The same can be true with people and just about everything and this theory has been at the foundation of some arguments that it’s too easy to get a divorce and since that is the case, people jump into marriage and are quick to leave without really putting forth great effort to make things work.

I don’t know about all of this except that clearly, at least in this country, the ideas of love and family are going through some type of revision process. At one time, actually for a long time, people lived in what most refer to now as a nuclear family and that kind of family structure disappearing. Is this good or bad?