People talk about unconditional love and conditional love. Maybe I’m out of the loop regarding the great loves going on around me, but my guess is that love is extremely rarely unconditional. Or at least if it is, then it is either very broadly applied or somewhat confused or strange: if you love me unconditionally, presumably you love everything else as well, since it is only conditions that separate me from the worms.
I do have sympathy for this resolution—loving someone so unconditionally that you’re just crazy about all the worms as well—but since that’s not a way I know of anyone acting for any extended period, the ‘conditional vs. unconditional’ dichotomy here seems a bit miscalibrated for being informative.
Even if we instead assume that by ‘unconditional’, people mean something like ‘resilient to most conditions that might come up for a pair of humans’, my impression is that this is still too rare to warrant being the main point on the love-conditionality scale that we recognize.
People really do have more and less conditional love, and I’d guess this does have important, labeling-worthy consequences. It’s just that all the action seems to be in the mid-conditional range that we don’t distinguish with names. A woman who leaves a man because he grew plump and a woman who leaves a man because he committed treason both possessed ‘conditional love’.
So I wonder if we should distinguish these increments of mid-conditional love better.
What concepts are useful? What lines naturally mark it?
One measure I notice perhaps varying in the mid-conditional affection range is “when I notice this person erring, is my instinct to push them away from me or pull them toward me?” Like, if I see Bob give a bad public speech, do I feel a drive to encourage the narrative that we barely know each other, or an urge to pull him into my arms and talk to him about how to do better?
This presumably depends on things other than the person. For instance, the scale and nature of the error: if someone you casually like throws a frisbee wrong, helping them do better might be appealing. Whereas if that same acquaintance were to kick a cat, your instinct might be to back away fast.
This means perhaps you could construct a rough scale of mid-conditional love in terms of what people can do and still trigger the ‘pull closer’ feeling. For instance, perhaps there are:
People who you feel a pull toward when they misspell a word
People who you feel a pull toward when they believe something false
People who you feel a pull toward when they get cancelled
(You could also do this with what people can do and still be loved, but that’s more expensive to measure than minute urges.)
I think it depends on the meaning attached to the word “love”. There are two possibilities:
I “love” this, because it brings me benefits. (it is instrumental in increasing my utility function, like chocolate ice cream)
I “love” this, in that I want it to benefit. (Its happiness appears as a parameter in my utility function)
You can have a partner or family member who means one the other or both to you. The striking dementia example from Odd Anon is a case where the dementia makes it so the person’s company no longer makes you happy, but you may still be invested in them being happy.
The first one is obviously never going to be unconditional. The second one seems like it could be unconditional in some cases. In that a parent or spouse really wants their child or partner to be happy even if that child or partner is a complete villain. Its not even necessary that they value the child/partner over everything else, only that they maintain a strong-ish preference for the them being happy over not being happy, all else being equal.
It is not that uncommon for people to experience severe dementia and become extremely needy and rapidly lose many (or all) of the traits that people liked about them. Usually, people don’t stop being loved just because they spend their days hurling obscenities at people, failing to preserve their own hygiene, and expressing zero affection.
I would guess that most parents do actually love their children unconditionally, and probably the majority of spouses unconditionally love their partners.
(Persistent identity is a central factor in how people relate to each other, so one can’t really say that “it is only conditions that separate me from the worms.”)
How do you square this with ~50% of marriages ending in divorce?
Ending a relationship/marriage doesn’t necessarily imply that you no longer love someone (I haven’t been married but I do still love several of my ex-partners), it just implies that the arrangement didn’t work out for one reason or another.
The United States is an outlier in divorce statistics. In most places, the rate is nowhere near that high.
Unless you also think the United States is an outlier in terms of spouses who don’t unconditionally love each other, I guess you have to endorse something like Kaj_Sotala’s point that divorce isn’t always the same as ending love though, right?
I’d say my identity is another condition that separates me from the worms, but you are right it is a special one, and perhaps ‘unconditionally’ means ‘only on condition of your identity’.
Oh wow, this is...not what I thought people meant when they say “unconditional love.”
In my circles, “conditional love” is about love with lots of threats and demands that the other person change, and if failing to do so, they would be told they’re unworthy of being loved by their partner.
“Unconditional” makes a lot more sense if we think of it as “unconditional, conditional on my ability to think of conditions on my love”. This is what I think most people mean by unconditional love: they can’t think of any reasonable conditions on their love, and would discount unreasonable conditions as unusual or outside the realm of what’s meant by “unconditional”.
This is probably something like a shape-rotator vs. wordcel thing: shape-rotators take words literally and are uncomfortable with a word like “unconditional” unless there are literally no conditions, while wordcels are happy to say “unconditional” if the conditions are outside their Overton Window for reasons they would stop loving someone.
I wouldn’t be surprised if this isn’t that rare for parents for their children. Barring their children doing horrible things (which is rare), I’d guess most parents would love their children unconditionally, or at least claim to. Most would tolerate bad but not horrible. And many will still love children who do horrible things. Partly this could be out of their sense of responsibility as a parent or attachment to the past.
I suspect such unconditional love between romantic partners and friends is rarer, though, and a concept of mid-conditional love like yours could be more useful there.
Suppose we replace “unconditional love” with “unconditional promise”. E.g. suppose Alice has promised Bob that she’ll make Bob dinner on Christmas no matter what. Now it would be clearly confused to say “Alice promised Bob Christmas dinner unconditionally, so presumably she promised everything else Christmas dinner as well, since it is only conditions that separate Bob from the worms”.
What’s gone wrong here? Well, the ontology humans use for coordinating with each other assumes the existence of persistent agents, and so when you say you unconditionally promise/love/etc a given agent, then this implicitly assumes that we have a way of deciding which agents are “the same agent”. No theory of personal identity is fully philosophically robust, of course, but if you object to that then you need to object not only to “I unconditionally love you” but also any sentence which contains the word “you”, since we don’t have a complete theory of what that refers to.
This is not necessarily conditional love, this is conditional care or conditional fidelity. You can love someone and still leave them; they don’t have to outweigh everything else you care about.
But also: I think “I love you unconditionally” is best interpreted as a report of your current state, rather than a commitment to maintaining that state indefinitely.
I would think totally unconditional love for a specific individual is allowed to be conditional on facts necessary to preserve their personal identity, which could be vague/fuzzy. If your partner asks you if you’d still love them if they were a worm and you do love them totally unconditionally, the answer should be yes, assuming they could really be a worm, at least logically. This wouldn’t require you to love all worms. But you could also deny the hypothesis if they couldn’t be a worm, even logically, in case a worm can’t inherit their identity from a human.
That being said, I’d also guess that love is very rarely totally unconditional in this way. I think very few would continue to love someone who tortures them and others they care about. I wouldn’t be surprised if many people (>0.1%, maybe even >1% of people) would continue to love someone after that person turned into a worm, assuming they believed their partner’s identity would be preserved.
As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found his wife transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect...
...but he concluded that since ontologically this insect was not his wife, his marriage vows no longer applied. He squashed it under his boot as he walked out.
Im with several other commentators. People know what unconditional love is. Many people have it for their family members, most commonly for their children but often for others. They want that. Sadly this sort of love is rare beyond family.
I felt some amount of unconditional towards my dad. He was really not a great parent to me. He hit me for fun, was ashamed of me, etc. But we did have some good times. When he was dying of cancer I was still a good son. Was quite supportive. Not out of duty, I just didnt want him to suffer any more than needed. I felt genuinely love. I would have done a lot of costly things for him if he asked. My mom and uncle were giving him intrusive treatment than he wanted. Though it hadnt gotten too out of hand yet (except for the fact it burned all my moms money). But I very seriously told him during visits if he said the word Id call my lawyers and make sure he didn’t get medically tortured. This would have cost me a lot of money and time but he was my dad! How can a son let his father down like that. He died before legal issues came to a head but I was in his camp. I didnt care how many people got mad at me.
Yes. this is my experience of cultivating unconditional love, it loves everything without target. I doesn’t feel confused or strange, just like I am love, and my experience e.g. cultivating it in coaching is that people like being in the present of such love.
It’s also very helpful for people to experience conditional love! In particular of the type “I’ve looked at you, truly seen you, and loved you for that.”
IME both of these loves feel pure and powerful from both sides, and neither of them are related to being attached, being pulled towards or pushed away from people.
It feels like maybe we’re using the word love very differently?
Where would you place the reaction of thinking the speach was embarrassingly poor and due to the love you have feeling the emarrassment your self due to your close connection with Bob, not wanting, or feeling like you need/should to do something, to help “fix” Bob and still acknowledging your close emotional connection with Bob?
In my mind, conditional love always had to do with acceptance. If you love someone unconditionally, you love them for who they are, you admire their existing qualities. By contrast, loving someone conditionally means that you will love them on condition that they acquire some additional qualities. This is why it is considered to be toxic—conditional love is not really about the person being ‘loved’, rather about an image of what that person could become.
We can quantify this concept in quite a neat way. Say that for any kind of love, there is a certain image of the loved person (Bob) in the head of the loving person (Alice), that represents the best, most lovable version of Bob. We will call this image BOB. Now, some qualities (or ‘conditions’) of BOB (say, N of them) may already be present in Bob (say, M out of N). Let’s define the conditionality of Alice’s love for Bob by the ratio (N-M)/N. That way, if this ratio is 0, that is, M = N, then all of BOB’s qualities are already in Bob, i.e. Alice loves him for who he is, unconditionally. If, on the other hand, this ratio is 1, that is, M = 0, then Bob is simply out of the equation—he doesn’t even intersect with his image. Quite amusingly, in this model, it is the perfectly conditional love that would make no distinction between people and worms, because the object really doesn’t matter. If a worm could smile and talk and walk like BOB, Alice would readily love this worm (with a conditionality of 0, by the way) like she never loved Bob.
We can see that my definition is actually roughly equivalent to yours. If Alice pulls Bob closer after a bad speech, it means that Alice is fine with who Bob is now, i.e. Bob’s qualities somewhat align with BOB’s.
Much like your notion of unconditional love, a conditionality of 0 is practically impossible. Bob needs to be a complete saint to perfectly align with BOB (or Alice needs to have really low standards). There will always be something we will want to change about our partners—bad habits, speech patterns, their attitude, etc. But a low conditionality shows that we are already with the right person, while a high conditionality indicates that we are trying to turn them into something they are not.
I think, by defining conditional love precisely in this way, we are moving away from the actual usage of that term.
> By contrast, loving someone conditionally means that you will love them on condition that they acquire some additional qualities.
One particular contra-example I can think of is, conditional love based on the income of someone. I think leaving a spouse or friend once he loses a job, and is no longer capable of making the same amount of money, is generally accepted as conditional love. But it doesn’t fit the description above. Bob, in this case, was already rich, but he loses that “condition” when he loses his job.
Of course, “conditional love” is considered a vague term for a reason. We can try to wrap it in a logically strict definition, but it will never quite capture the entirety of the concept. However, with your particular example I might actually disagree. A person’s income is not really a quality, rather a consequence of internal factors such as persistence, intelligence, etc., as well as external factors such as luck. In the situation where Bob loses his job and can no longer find a new one, we may assume that he was just lucky to get it in the first place. In other words, Alice has been mistaking Bob for BOB while he was making a lot of money, falsely assuming it was because he is smart and hard-working. And when Bob lost his job, Alice saw his real internal qualities and left him, because she was loving BOB all along. In this case, Alice’s conditional love is quite well-explained by my definition.
This is in no way to claim that my definition is a precise representation of the real meaning of conditional love. In fact, I’m sure it possible to turn the story about Bob-losing-job to act against my definition as well. For example, if Alice knew all along that Bob was a sore loser from a rich family, and she loved him only for the money. At this point, however, I find it difficult to call this “love” at all… looks more like a cold play by Alice, which should be described by a different model altogether.
The point is, real-life situations have enough detail and nuance to fit them to almost any chosen formal frame. And this is good—it means that we can legitimately use many of our abstract theories, as long as they give us useful results. For example, I could model human relationships with topological spaces, or probability distributions, or with the Theory of Evolution, or with particle physics. All of these models will produce results whose significance will depend on the degree to which the models are appropriate. It’s okay that we are “moving away from the actual usage of that term”, as long as our abstraction holds a logical connection to the original idea. I think, my model of conditional love does have that connection.