My parents have not always had the best relationship with each other or with me or my sisters. I’ve often felt like the love of my father was conditional, because he was constantly threatening to disown us or cut us out of the will if we did something he didn’t like.
He may have been joking.
...Sometimes?
At least to my knowledge, none of us have been disowned or disinherited...
Yet.
But regardless of whether or not we internalized this, I think it’s important to explore how conditional love and acceptance have colored my life.
When I was younger, I started dating a beautiful french woman. I had a bunch of really dramatic thoughts about the nature of our star-crossed love. How cruel it was for the universe to cause me to meet someone so special when I was blessed with so many opportunities in a country she couldn’t stay in.
Alas.
Some of those thoughts were full of a poignant, youthful angst… But some of them reinforced narratives that lead to a lot of unhealthy behavior. For example, one time, in the middle of the night I bought a ticket to France to go be with her to prove my love in a whirlwind of passionate, Parisian romance. I didn’t tell my family what I was doing or where I was going. I just left.
But that’s not the story I’m going to tell you.
What I’m going to tell you about is the story I told myself about love… because it was the underlying cause of EVERYTHING else.
You see, I’d been working on understanding the concept of “unconditional love” by studying theology and philosophy.
I didn’t realize this at the time, but I was trying to find a way to love everyone perfectly. And if I know anything now, it might be that perfectionism can be one of the quickest ways to discover the potential for misery on any given journey. At this point in my life, I knew two things about love:
Love is more than a feeling
Sometimes, loving someone isn’t enough to make a relationship happen.
I was about to learn that loving someone wasn’t enough to make a relationship work either.
But I thought it was. Sweet summer child.
You see, one of the ways I’d learned to think about love was in “love languages.” I naively thought that perhaps if you loved someone, you could simply learn to speak their love language to them and your relationship would work. Especially if they were willing to speak yours back to you. I’d gotten it in my head for example, that if a person loved quality time, being endlessly available was being endlessly loving.
You may have noticed, but I’ve since come to believe that this is not correct.
Y’see, at that point, I thought love was about making other people feel good. My mind had equated love with giving people what they wanted. Or at least, what I thought they wanted. And the more I could give them what they wanted, the better of a match we were for each other.
What I learned through this experience, was that giving people what they want, doesn’t always make them feel good, but it can sure as hell make them feel validated.
And you have to be careful what you validate.
My friend Sarah pointed out that you can’t always know what you’re validating until you’ve spent extensive amounts of time with the other person.
Something I learned from this experience of trying to please people, was that unconditional love doesn’t mean:
Not having boundaries
It doesn’t mean not saying “no”
and it sure as hell doesn’t mean the people you love will feel improved by or grateful for what you do, even if they ask you for it.
If you’re expecting your love to transform someone into their best selves and make them grateful to you for seeing all that they could be, think again.
The reason I think this story is important, is because the relationship issues you have seen modeled in your youth are often the ones you attempt to solve in your life.
The narrative that I acquired from my childhood, was that a relationship was an unbreakable commitment. I learned that love meant being endlessly giving or-.. in less euphemistic terms, a people pleaser. I learned that saying no when a person had an emotional need was always a refusal to love them.
It took me living through these experiences to really understand how hard it can be to truly see what kinds of choices we’re making from inside of situations. How hard it can be to extract ourselves from these situations once we feel beholden to the bonds we’ve made. Love turns into a game of zero sums and sunken costs. But most importantly, I feel like I’ve learned that we can’t always trust ourselves to know what kind of scenario we’re in until we are truly present.
On this journey of self-love, I’ve realized that having no idea how to love myself wasn’t remedied by losing myself in other people. It’s only been through nurturing a desire to grow, and empowering myself, that I’ve learned what I feel helps me grow. I’ve learned who actually cares about that growth and supports it, which makes me feel loved.
Here’s a link to my first book if you’re interested in supporting my work:
https://amzn.to/36XeGYk