Love?

Unconditional love on the face of it seems like a lovely ideal, something we should strive for. The ideal of unconditional love strikes some people as the purest, most ideal way to define the essence of love. Sounds so appealing. Unconditional love is an undiluted love they say. But this seems to me to be a horrible conundrum. To love unconditionally is to love without reason. When you are selected for unconditional love then it must be arbitrary with no reference to your goodness because if it were because of inherent goodness then it would be conditional. Some folks of the Christian persuasion say that their God loves them unconditionally. He will love you no matter what, warts and all they say. Comforting thought until you look a bit closer. If God loves them "unconditionally" then he cannot refuse them on the condition that they do not accept his love. Unconditional love is impersonal and hollow to me it seems. Some people hurdle over this with the concept of only loving the good in someone and overlooking the bad. I have heard many times in my past work as a therapist for example that it is important to be able to separate the behavior from the person. We often tell this to parents and spouses. If I love only the good in you but do not love the bad in you, then I do not entirely love you in the sense that I do not love the entirety of what you do or the entirety of what you are. This is not unconditional love either in fact I'm not sure it's love at all. I could prattle on but suffice to say I think unconditional love is mental gymnastics and a myth. A load of crap we are spoon fed and encouraged to aspire to.