Love is Always Conditional

I haven’t been active on here in quite a while, though fortunately, the reason is because I’ve been busy with good stuff elsewhere (and perhaps a fair share of foot-dragging on my side-writing projects as well). So I thought I’d share this wonderful new essay from Lenny DeLorenzo on the conditionality of love, and why it’s a beautiful thing. It’s a thoughtful, encouraging, and illuminating piece on the oldest subject of all. It seems fitting, during this season of the year when our thoughts, contracted from the winter, tend to ponder a little more than usual the questions of love, and in the midst of the holiday season when our eyes are briefly turned inward to the family and loved ones still closest in our lives. Click through the link to read the full piece:

Lenny DeLorenzo, Love is Always Conditional

‘We want to say that love is unconditional. It seems right. It is equal parts comforting and challenging. It is comforting because if I am loved, then there is nothing I can do to lose that. It is challenging because in order to love, I have to will to be untroubled by obstacles. We do not want to say love is conditional because we fear submitting love to the twisted logic of relationship terrorism: if you do not meet my demands, I deprive you of what is good for you, or vice versa. We think of conditions as qualifications and we do not want to attach qualifications to love. So we say love is unconditional. But that is wrong. Love is always conditional.


'The conditions of love are not a list of demands but the ways in which love is demanding. If, as Aquinas teaches, “to love is to will the good of another,” then what makes love demanding are those conditions in which I have to figure out how exactly to will your good, conditions that also include my own creaturely limitations. You never exist in an abstract space, nor do I, and the conditions surrounding your wellbeing or woe and the conditions surrounding mine are the mold in which love is enfleshed. I love you here in this—that is, I will your good in a particular way that reckons with the conditions. If I commit to loving you in the future, then I commit myself to reckoning with whatever conditions may come. We want to call that unconditional love, but really it is a commitment to conditional love.

'The fortunate among us beam with gratitude for those who have loved us “unconditionally.” But no one has ever been loved unconditionally by another person. Instead, the gratitude is really for someone else’s consistency in loving us conditionally. What kind of person loves conditionally, in a consistent way? That is a question that changes everything, once we stop fantasizing about unconditional love. What hangs in the balance is the difference between the idea of love and the reality of love. Reality has to do with conditions.’