Loving Our Partners Unconditionally

It's a rare occurrence when the love that's shared between two people in an intimate relationship comes without a price tag. This is not merely a symptom of modern love, either. In centuries passed, we had the rules of courtly conduct and arranged marriages, two systems that served to spell out how expectations were to be fulfilled on both sides. In fact, the notion of true independent, romantic love for another person -which the old-time troubadours called amour - was an idea so radical for its time that it represented a real threat to the social order of the day.

In modern times, not so much has changed - except that a lot of our expectations are unspoken and assumed, rather than clearly set out. Many of us still behave like shipwrecked vagabonds, helpless to find real happiness or our true path in life until the right person comes along and saves us. We insist that our partners be our guiding stars, and feel disillusioned when they're finally revealed to be just as fallible as we are.

To love unconditionally means not only that we accept people, as they are, but also that we don't expect them to be the cause of our own happiness. When we feel that our happiness is contingent upon the way another person is behaving towards us (i.e., whether or not they're fulfilling our expectations) then we've disowned our power and entered into a relationship of dependency. When we're dependent, we think in terms of trying to get satisfaction from our partners. When they fail to provide it, we try to change or control them. One of the most popular ways in which one partner will try to control another is by withholding things like affection, attention, sex...in a word, love.

Unconditional love is proactive. This means that we don't wait until our partners are doing things that please us before we express our love for them. We give regardless of whether or not we stand to receive anything in return. This is a difficult path to tread, to be sure, but it often proves to be the only way to sustain a relationship over the long term.

Does this mean that we have to tough out a perpetually unhappy partnership, or one that is abusive? No. But if we've made the effort to love unconditionally, we'll know better than to try to remedy the situation by changing our partners. In many cases, we may come to find that giving is receiving. But if we get no reciprocation for all our efforts, we don't have to leave the relationship feeling bitter or resentful. Unconditional love reminds us that we are responsible for our own happiness, so where would be the cause for blame?