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Suleiman -> RE: Can unconditional love exist? (1/16/2008 3:18:58 PM)
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(via Fast Reply)
Love is a sticky word in our language, and applies to a number of conditions and states of being. As such, I would say that both conditional and unconditional love exist, and have experienced both firsthand. I often struggle with words from other languages to clarify this semantic jumble. Typically I break what we call "Capital L" love into three general categories : Agape, Fides, Eros. Each is capable of expressing itself as love, or as lust, but there are particular flavorings to each (Please keep in mind this is my own psychobabble and not to be mistaken for actual definitions of the words - I have simply found some words whose meanings are close to what I have experienced in myself and observed in others, and then malapropriated them in the name of convenient labelling). Eros, erotic love, is what most people think of when they refer to love in a romantic sense. It need not be sexual per se, but frequently a desire for physical intimacy is part of the experience. Erotic love can be unconditional, but frequently it is a short-lived experience if there is nothing else to shore it up. Fides, Loyalty, is the love that a person has for persons in their community (Again, with the mangling, I am including all aspects of intense loyalty and fidelity in this one convenient label). We don't call this love any more due to uncomfortable homoerotic undertones (modern Americans in particular seem to think that love is a purely sexual experience) but as recently as three or four decades ago, and for the last four or five centuries before that, this was counted as one of the purest forms of love there is - Love of family, love of friends, love of community. The love for a commanding officer that causes a soldier to follow orders that are clearly suicidal. The love for a country that leads men to march onto the field of war in her defense. Fides is often unconditional. You love your family and stand by them, even if they are a bunch of primitive screwheads that you can't stand the sight of. Even so, Fides has its breaking points, and so I can not call it absolutely unconditional. Most folks, no matter how loyal, will eventually give up a toxic relationship. Finally, there is the truely unconditional form of love. Agape. It's an experience so foreign to most people that it seems like a trancendental episode. Agape is the love that the divine has for humanity. Agape is the unconditional love that it is possible to feel, but is most often shut out, for another human being - any human being, without any requirement of knowing them, interacting with them, giving anything to them or asking anything from them. Usually, after experiencing Agape, most people wind up reevaluating their lives, having a crisis of faith, and run off to a monastary somewhere to make sense of whatever it was that just happened to them. Then again, most people will never experience Agape.
Love can be unconditional, but we are flawed creatures, and so there are flaws in how we express out feelings. These flaws become conditional modifiers. Time limits, hard limits, feeling that the honeymoon is over or that the person you are with is not who you thought them to be. I have fallen in love with very few people. Several of them have hurt me badly. I still remember their names, their faces, and all the little details about them. Nearly half of them did not reciprocate my feelings. Others had difficulty expressing what they felt, because they could only contextualize love as an erotic thing, and I was just not their type. I love each and every one of them, even decades after the fact.
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