Why unconditional love is fake

Hi sweethearts,

I haven’t done an all-speaking blog lately so I thought that it would be interesting in writing one again today. This one is a subject dear to my heart, but oh so painful.

Why I blog about this is personal. I’m not the best with talking about my feelings. I used to be an introvert but I learned to be outgoing more. It’s still not easy to talk about my feelings; so I like to get things straight in my head with writing about it instead of talking about it.

Also, with my ADD it’s not easy for me to do a clear, structured ramble about such a difficult subject. I just need to write about it, to organise all the things in my head so that I don’t forget anything and that I can take the time to think before I talk.

I have made the same mistake over and over in the past, to speak out, before I figured out what my actual point would have been. This might have caused me trouble because I didn’t say what I was actually thinking and people totally misunderstood me.

To write this post, I did some research over the internet and on my social media… I found out that only 10% of my followers don’t believe in real, unconditional love. So I felt pretty lonely, when I did this poll because for obvious reasons… I’m a nonbeliever. But this also motivated me to do some more research about this matter. I genuinely believe that all my past relationship problems had a basis in (un)conditional love. And with having this in the back of my mind, I solved a lot of problems that I was creating in my head.

So then about why I’m writing the title: Unconditional love is fake? Because it is. It just is.

In our society we see so many romcoms, advertisings on tv and billboards with happy lovely couples who seem to have met their soulmate,.. and then ads about websites like match.com where they choose your soulmate for you...

It’s hard for us to really understand what love means. It seems like we need to fall in love with using websites to help you, and then a second later in a movie, they’ll tell you that you don’t NEED to search for love. That love will find you instead of the other way around.

This has intrigued me. Do we just fall in love without our knowing, or can we let computers help us to find love. Should we even be searching for love, because: do we need it? Does everyone needs it? Or is it just some of us?

Why is it fake? Humanistic psychology etcetera.

First of all, if we look at pedagogy and psychology (which is kinda like my interest from my job), the answer would be simple: we do need love. In order to grow up and create a decent adult life, we do need love. We will need a bond with our parents or caregivers, to be able to grow up and handle our emotions and social situations. Without this bond, our future will have a lot of difficulties to overcome. In fact, it’s the truth that psychopaths often had a very difficult childhood. SO: if we had a non-loving, non-caring environment in our childhood, it would be very hard for us, adults, to really know how to treat other people because we simple never learned how to do this.

But what has this to do with unconditional love? I think that this real emotional bond between parents or caregivers and children actually can be unconditional. We choose to become parents because we want to feel love for our kids and just enjoy having them. This can be unconditional love for me, we don’t expect anything from them, we just choose to have them to feel and share love.

This is not the case for partners in relationships. When we fall in love, we the only thing we want is that the other person loves us back. Isn’t this setting a condition? We want something from them back. We need their love.

If I was a parent, I’d love my kids too and yes ofcourse I’d love it if they’d love me back, but I wouldn’t really need it. For me, it’d be about only giving my love to them, not having it back. In a relationship this is different. I would almost need the love from the other person, otherwise I’d be unhappy. And here we found the exact problem with unconditional love. We set conditions by wanting people to love us back.

If you search on google for articles about unconditional love, you’ll learn that researchers and publicists associate unconditional love with altruism. To be honest, I’m a pretty selfish person and I need a lot of personal time and space. So altruism isn’t really much in my vocabulary. Maybe this is also why I don’t believe in unconditional love? Is it because I always set conditions and expectations? Maybe this would be a quick answer already…. I just don't think that we can give it all, just to one person. I mean, would you really give up on everything just for a person? Shouldn't your happiness come from within, instead of hoping that it would come out of a relationship?

In the humanistic psychology they also speak about unconditional love. Rogers (one of my fave pedagogues ever), said that humans need environments that provided them with genuineness, authenticity, openness, self-disclosure, acceptance, empathy, and approval.

So what Rogers actually is saying here: in order to raise kids, we need to fully accept them to give love unconditionally. Authenticity and acceptation are key here.

He also believed that we need to accept clients/kids and always stay kind, genuine and . Remaining calm, while a kid is having a meltdown for example. This mental breakdown can be a part of the kid’s personality so we ned to accept that… This is really interesting for my job. It helped me a lot with handeling crisis’s at work, but that’s something else…

So also in relationships, we should love the other person unconditionally, by fully being authentic to them, in order to fully accept them. And I truly believe that we will never fully accept one another. Am I maybe too dark here? I don’t think so.

I always wanted to change everyone around me. Okay, I do love my family and friends and I did love my ex genuinely, but this has nothing to do with my will to change them all. It’s just in my personal nature that I’ll never believe that someone is perfect. I’ll always find something that I don’t like and that I don’t want to see anymore. So the fact that I want to change who I love, is actually proof that I just can’t love unconditionally…

Wanting to change them has also to do a lot with the way I look at myself. It’s a total cliché but everything I hate about everyone around me, is probably everything that I hate about myself. Stating with hating… Cause I hate hating. This is something that I’m trying to change since the last month. It’s extremely hard but I want to let go so much anger I feel inside.

The social illusion.

Another statement I’d want to make is unconditional love in our society. It is just impossible to love unconditionally one another in our society today. Unconditional love should mean that you have no responsibility over the other person, that you just feel the love and that’s it. I believe that this is so wrong. I always feel responsible for everything because I’ll always find a link back to myself, why I am so responsible for what happened. I think that if you choose to be in a relationship, that you are responsible too for what the other person is doing. If he or she is ill for example, wouldn't you want to help him/her?

The social illusion about unconditional love also makes it a great excuse for us not to grow or heal. If we’d love everyone unconditionally, we would never get over a breakup. Here’s why: If you knew the person well enough and you know yourself too, then why are you breaking up? Shouldn’t you see it coming then? AHAAA probably, yes… Plus, it stops us from always growing. If you “fully accept” the other person, then he or she would be perfect already, so they wouldn’t need to get that extra push to grow and mature. If we simply agree that he or she probably will hurt you and won’t ever be perfect, then we have that openness for growth. What I'm basically saying here: if you want to love someone unconditionally, you'll never be able to help the other person to change or grow because you're stuck with the illusion of perection. ell, erfection doesn't exist and maybe you should stop eeking for it.

So have I pointed out my opinion enough here? Do you guys still believe in uncodintional love? Well, if you let go any expectations, you might get surprised about your relationships. You'll fight a lot less!

Et voila, this is just my honest opinion here. I don't want to sound depressing or whatsoever. I just want you guys to stop overromanticising life. If we stop to have expectations towards the world, we'll never get disappointed anymore.

Have I anything else to tell you? I think I'm finished here! Love is great, love is good... Just make it genuine and real.

Thanks for reading this blog!

X Steph