Conditional Love
I have been thinking about love lately, the types of love that exist, how love is shown, and specifically, how conditional love can mimic true love, causing incredible harm in the process.
What is conditional love?
Conditional love is pretty self-explanatory — it’s when someone’s love for another person is dependent on certain conditions being met first. The conditions can be anything, but are typically expected actions or behaviors.
To make this a little more relatable, here are a couple of signs that you might have experienced conditional love from a parent:
- You felt loved when you accomplished something they could brag about.
- You felt unloved when you disappointed them.
Here are a couple of things you might have heard in a romantic relationship based on conditional love:
- I’ll stay with you if you quit your job.
- I’d like it more if you weren’t working all the time.
- I’d have more fun if you tried to be more.… (Fill in the blank with almost anything.)
Did you notice the common thread in both types of relationships? Whether you look at the parent/child relationship or the romantic relationship, one person’s love for another hinges on if. Sometimes this condition is explicitly stated, but other times, it’s communicated through actions, tone of voice, and facial expressions.
When you were a kid, you might have brought home a report card with a bad grade on it. If your parent communicated their disappointment with a look on their face or the way they spoke to you, and did not follow up their initial disappointment with any encouragement about doing better the next time, or telling you they still loved you, you may have internalized this message — if I disappoint them, they won’t love me as much.
On the other hand, if you brought home an award or told them about an accomplishment, their reaction might have communicated that they loved you as much as possible.
Needless to say, it doesn’t take long for a child to pick up on these messages and realize that they need to earn their parent’s love — even if this is never a conscious decision or thought.
When a child is taught conditional love, the effects are long-term and will very likely negatively impact any future romantic relationships they have.
By the time the child reaches adulthood, conditional love is so ingrained into their patterns and habits, that they don’t even realize they expect to receive conditional love from others. When one person with a history of receiving conditional love enters a romantic relationship, this will be their default expectation of the other person. In other words, they naturally expect to have to do or say the right things in order to earn and keep the other person’s love. It will not occur to them that love can be anything other than conditional.
Before you think this story is becoming too sad to continue reading, let me tell you that there is always hope to change our default patterns, behaviors, and beliefs.
I was that child and I was that adult. Sadly, my father did not know how to show unconditional love to me or any of his other children. While I grew up thinking and believing that my dad loved me no matter what, the truth is that his love was based on what I achieved, how I made him proud of me, and whether or not I ever disappointed or embarrassed him. I did not realize any of this until I was well into adulthood.
One of the ways I began to realize that something was “off” in my expectations of love was the way my husband reacted to things I said. In the first year of our marriage, I behaved in a pattern that only he noticed. It was so ingrained in my thoughts and habits by that point, that I was completely unaware of its existence.
Whenever I was home alone for several hours, I would do as much cleaning and housework as possible. Within minutes of him walking through the door, I was listing off all the things I’d accomplished. For example, I’d tell him that I’d vacuumed the apartment, done two loads of laundry, and washed the dishes. Sometimes he’d respond with amazement at everything I’d done, but increasingly, he began to ask me why I was telling him all of this. He’d even ask me why I didn’t give him a chance to notice on his own so he could thank me.
The first few times he asked me those questions, I was too confused to give a good answer. I probably stumbled through some answer of not wanting him to think I’d been lazy. Increasingly though, I began to be frustrated with the questions because they were starting to force me to look more closely at myself and I didn’t want to.
Eventually, I began to realize that I craved a positive response from him for all I’d done. Whenever he was amazed or surprised or full of thanks, I thought I was receiving his love. For him to question why I was telling him about my accomplishments, rattled my understanding of how love worked. On a very subconscious level, I thought love was: doing something worthy of attention, making sure to point out the something, get the deserved attention and “love”. What my husband was showing me was that my understanding of love was wrong.
Through a combination of lots of counseling for me, and conversations with my husband, I began to understand that there was much more to true love. I began to learn that love is a choice, a verb, an action — that love does and love works. I began to realize I never rattled off a list of accomplishments to my mom because I had somehow learned that she loved me no matter what. Unfortunately, I’d never realized that a man, my husband, could love me like that because I expected him to show love the way my father had — conditionally.
I still remember the moment I had the realization that he was trying to tell me as plainly as possible that he loved me for me no matter what I did. I broke down crying because I couldn’t understand how he could possibly love me for just me. I wasn’t worth that kind of love.
While he never said it, I think it broke him a little to realize how I looked at myself and that I couldn’t see what he saw.
I chose the picture of the empty swing at the beginning of this story to represent how love is easily absent when it is given conditionally. Conditional love is not steady, enduring, constant, or faithful. In fact, it is incredibly selfish. It asks, “What can you do for me in order to deserve me showing love to you?”
I do not have words to express how incredibly grateful I am for my husband and the way he has faithfully shown his unconditional love to me over the past 22 years of marriage. In fact, he has been a wonderful example for our girls of what it looks like to have a dad who loves them unconditionally.
While our story is not a fairy tale — there have definitely been hard days and hard times — I like to think our story shows what no fairy tale ever could — that unconditional love is what needs to be at the core of every love story.
