The unconditional contract

I’ve been on about love for a couple of weeks now. Not because I think it’s the most important thing. Not because I think it solves everything.

What I have noticed is that its presence or absence, the perception of its weight in someone’s life, seems to skew the view of things. So, I’m rolling with it.

On the matter of unconditional love, I have in equal parts nothing and a great deal to say. Since throwing up my hands in despair while balancing a triple scoop of ice cream might be a wonder to behold, it’s not a real option for this page. So it’s on to the saying, then.

Unconditional love is a beautiful idea, but it is also a kind of – forgive me ¬– a kind of madness. I do not give it a high recommendation.

Think of the words “unconditional love.” What comes to mind? Parents and children, right? Am I right?

Then there are the great love stories, love songs and movies. Why do all our examples live in prose and verse, but not in my kitchen?

Let me put the disclaimer on the kitchen table: I had the “unconditional” part all wrong. Lest we forget I am the layest of laymen, I was going with a very literal dictionary definition of the word. The kind that says your love is all: all-understanding, all-accepting, all-forgiving, all-embracing.

Not for the first time, the psychs and scientists of the world liked me enough to put a ring, if not on me, certainly around me. Their definitions think unconditional love is fine. But it has boundaries.

What? But the word in the phrase is “unconditional.” That means everythingness.

They, the real researchers, think not. I have a book somewhere in my library called Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness by Kenzaburō Ōe. Zero recollection of the contents, but the title is my lesson learned, my breaking apart and reassembling. In short, my sort of thesis-making on unconditional love.

Everyone agreed with me. Unconditional love was out there, but it could be dangerous. There was surrender. There was watching the loved one walk into danger and doing nothing. There was sacrifice to the point of martyrdom.

And I suppose this is why I began to think there was something unhinged about it. Something not quite right.

I’ve never been so grateful to be wrong. The psych research lands on a caring-responsible-reasonable love. Be not judgemental but also be not the person who accepts abuse and violence. Be supportive but be not the one who enables the beloved to end up in a drain from a heroin overdose.

They even have the wild suggestion that unconditional love can be given as you allow yourself some self-love. Having that grounding of self-love helps you to better understand yourself and your boundaries.

I’m trying to parse the considerable difference between my starting definition and the one I came to understand. As simplistic as this sounds, I wonder if it’s a case of trying harder. Staying in and with the love instead of fleeing at the first sign of trouble. There is also the substantial overlap of what is expected in return.

When I knew no better, I thought there was to be no expectation at all. Zilch. Nada. Give and give and give and not count the cost, the slights, the rejections. Maybe that comes from knowing a lot of cats.

Now, with a little bit of schooling, I believe there can be respect coming from the other person. They can commit acts of caring towards me. This is beginning to sound like both people can offer unconditional love in a relationship. I may need to have a talk – a few talks – with some people.

So maybe the parental example is not off. In my earlier thinking it occurred to me that parents love you a whole lot but they are, for many, the people least likely to know us as our true-true selves. They often give us reason to believe they’ll throw us into a hedge if we don’t conform to their vision for us.

But no. And lo, they are capable of loving us and establishing healthy parameters for us, them and the rest of the family. Their unconditional love is not some unthinking, long-suffering thing. It has a plan for survival.

At the end of it all, I may or may not be any better at unconditional love. What I do know is that we must continue to interrogate the meaning of the terms we throw around. Words shape us. Let us not fall into obzockiness.