3rd Question - what does love demand

3) Is my desire to love and to be loved conditional or unconditional?

It may do well to pause for a moment here and give some background about our desire for love which has occupied the writings of many philosophers since the time of Plato.

We appear to have a desire for perfect and unconditional Love. Not only do we have the power to love (i.e., the power to be naturally connected to another human being in profound empathy, care, self-gift, concern, and acceptance), we have a “sense” of what this profound interpersonal connection would be like if it were perfect. This sense of perfect love has the positive effect of inciting us to pursue ever more perfect forms of love. However, it has the drawback of inciting us to expect ever more perfect love from other human beings. This generally leads to frustrated expectations of others and consequently to a decline of relationships that can never grow fast enough to match this expectation of perfect and unconditional Love.

The evidence of this desire for perfect and unconditional Love manifests itself in our frustrated expectations within relationships. Have you ever had this experience – where you thought a relationship (or friendship) with another was going quite well until little imperfections began to manifest themselves? In situations like these, there might be slight irritation, but one has hopes that the ideal will soon be recaptured. But as the fallibility of the beloved begins to be more acutely manifest (the other is not perfectly humble, gentle, kind, forgiving, self-giving, and concerned with me) the irritation becomes frustration, which, in turn, becomes dashed expectation: “I can’t believe I thought she was really the One.” Of course, she wasn’t the One, because she is not perfect and unconditioned.

This gives rise to the question, “Why do we all too frequently expect our beloveds to be perfect and expect ourselves to be perfect to our beloveds if we did not have a desire for perfect and unconditional Love in the first place?” The reader must now apply this question to him or herself. If you did not have a desire for perfect and unconditional Love, why would you be so dissatisfied with imperfect and conditioned manifestations of love in others (even from the time of childhood)? If you sense within yourself an incapacity to be ultimately satisfied by any form of conditioned or finite love, then you will have also affirmed within yourself the intrinsic desire for unconditional Love, which leads to the next question.