Unconditional Love

Unconditional love is a very talked-about but much misunderstood concept. It sticks in people's minds as something highly desirable and ideal but limits and refutations abound. Would you still love me if I were an earthworm? If I were a mass murderer, would you turn me in? I think these sorts of questions miss the point. A notion of unconditional love is founded not on what the prerequisites are but on the intention of it. I'll focus specifically on the unconditional aspect of it, not the "what is love" aspect.

What would a workable definition of unconditional love even be? One that conforms with how people generally use the term — but only to the extent that the usage is consistent, and can be understood as a distinct concept standing in sensible relation to other concepts. If something is treated as distinct, its definition should be meaningfully distinct from those of its neighbors, even where much of the usage overlaps. And usage can simply be mistaken about what a thing means, because usage can amount to nonsense when it is inconsistent.

I think the best workable definition for unconditional love is one where the intention of the love is simply the love itself. There are no downstream consequences being sought by giving the love. Simply felt, simply given freely, perhaps because of some things in the past or the way you are rather than to get something from you, to get you to behave in a certain way, to get you to love them. This corresponds to the love not being retrocausally caused, that there are no backwards causal links. It is not that there cannot be conditions; it is that you cannot put conditions on it. I'll go into why I think this makes sense, why this fits the intuitive notion of it, and what it does and does not entail.

Unconditional love is normally understood as not having prerequisites, not requiring somebody to be a particular way. I think it's much better understood as not having goals, not having intention, simply being. If there is intention it takes away from its unconditionality. There could be as many contributing causes as there might ever be. For them to be formal prerequisites as such would require a degree of intention. That is incompatible with it being unconditional. Nevertheless they may causally affect it.

The exemplar of unconditional love is the love of a parent for their child. They want them to flourish and succeed but critically they do not love them in order to make them succeed. They want those things as a consequence of their love; they do not love them as a consequence of wanting those things. The unconditional love of a parent does not fade or fail as a consequence of those things becoming unreachable, or when the child falls short. Unconditional love does not waver when grades slip, when an injury derails an athletic career. The desire for the child's flourishing is an expression of the unconditional love, not its objective.

I think one thing characteristic of unconditional love is love in the face of ingratitude and the face of it being unrequited. There is something beautiful about unrequited love, something pure. Somebody can be hopeless in their unrequited love — hopelessly in love, which is not the same as being without hope of it being returned. Whether or not they can hold on to that hope, they're helpless and loving. It can feel futile but it simply is what it is. The loving does not stop: it was not conditioned in the past on being loved, and it is not conditioned on a future of being loved. But is hopelessness itself a condition? Many unrequited lovers do hold onto hope — does that make their love any less unconditional? My view is no. Hope happens to you; it is an affective state, not an aspiration, goal, plan, or intention. You can hope to win the lottery, but — short of cheating or other extenuating circumstances — you cannot aspire, plan, or intend to. The crux remains twofold: whether the love is in fact conditioned on the hope being fulfilled, and whether the love is intended to affect the outcome. Either would make it conditional. Unconditional love can hope; it cannot insist.

The unrequited case gets at a characteristic of unconditional love: the purity, not trying to get something in return and not having an intention or aim. It's aimless. Aimlessness is a different thing than being without cause or without purpose entirely. It does not preclude there being conditions that led you to that situation. But does it preclude choosing it of your own volition? Could you choose to be unconditional — decide, theoretically, to be unconditionally in love, to give yourself wholly to it without any hope of it being returned? Would it still be unconditional if the condition was in fact to make you feel that way? You chose: "My life will be better if I'm unconditionally in love, even if it's unrequited" — and then you found that it was not. Then would it be unconditional if you then lost hope of finding that happiness — and with it, the love? No, that wouldn't be unconditional love. It can't be chosen.

If someone asks, "Would you still love me if I were a murderer?" and the love is unconditional, then the answer is: I could not choose to, or choose not to — and I don't know if I would. You may even suspect that you wouldn't. You cannot make it depend on how it would feel, in the future, to unconditionally love a murderer — then it would not be unconditional. Nevertheless, the fact itself may cause the feeling to end.

Is it identified with following your heart? Following your gut, doing what feels right? Is that what love is, or is that what is unconditional about unconditional love? There is a distinction between something being purely emotionally driven and having agency over it — doing it for a purpose. Though the two are often aligned, they can come apart: you can reason through doing something that you must, as in a forced move in a game of chess, and you can do something for a purpose but driven by emotion, as in a crime of passion. Following your heart, then, is not itself what makes love unconditional; a crime of passion follows the heart and is purposeful all the same. It is associated with feeling only insofar as it arises from feeling and not from reason. Principally, to me, unconditional love is about its purity and lack of reason and intention rather than intensity itself.

Could it really be conditioned on things in the past then? De facto, yes: you may not be able to say "I choose to condition it on X," but you can reason about the circumstances in which you would or wouldn't feel certain ways.

You can't exercise control over it though, so if someone says, "Would you still love me if I killed someone?" the answer may be yes, or no, or I don't know. What it can't be is "I would choose not to love you, in order to punish or discourage you." If you can exercise that sort of volition over it then it is not unconditional. Likewise for things that are now in the past: you may or may not feel love in consequence of them, but you cannot feel love — or withhold it — as a response to them: to punish, or because it is deserved.

And so, back to the earthworm. If someone asks whether you would love them if they were an earthworm — to the extent the question is not too abstract to have a sensible answer — the answer, in my view, does not really bear on whether you love them unconditionally. What would bear on it are answers like: I would not try to stop loving you in order to prevent you from becoming one. Or: I suspect I might not, but I could not decide to.

Unconditional love takes you as you are and does not try to get you to be a certain way.