I have said this outloud to DP before who felt entitled to unconditional love from me.
My love is conditional. It's conditional because I have boundaries and it's conditional because I have expectations.
He feels that's rather transactional, but so what?
Life is transactional. I looked after him through ill health and that took a long time, now I expect him to look after me through ill health but he feels that he is displaying unconditional love towards me by doing that when I can guarantee he wouldn't have bothered if I'd have left him to it when he was down and struggling.
My nan has a son who is a schizophrenic, alcoholic, drug abusing, intentionally homeless, poor decision making drain on finances and sanity who has been in and out of prison with absolutely no hope of rehabilitation. A few years ago he had a stroke after getting his head caved in by someone at his communal living facility for talking to the voices about murdering everybody in the building which is a common theme for his schizophrenia that used to terrify me as a child, and while part of me has empathy that he's not had an easy life he's had everybody's future inheritance thrown at him in a bid to help him rehabilitate to the point that my nan needs me to live with her as much as I need her to live with me just so we can stay alive. She really wished he'd not pulled through after the stroke, the liver failure, the kidney failure, and the multiple overdoses. She doesn't love him, or like him, he is just a burden but she feels guilt for bringing him into this world and not being able to stop him getting to this point in his 50 years of life.
Equally I have a cousin who only ever talks about money. She always wants money, but she never just asks "can I have £10 please" or "would you please be able to pay for a new set of wheels for my car because I'm short this month?" It's always a fully fabricated exhausting sob story where a question is never asked it's just built up so that she expects to be given money, and if she isn't offered it she razes hell and goes scorched earth with everybody, triangulation, manipulation, wrongly reporting people for benefit fraud, social services, the lot. She is just utterly nasty. I don't understand how she has any friends, unless her friends are all just vile manipulative users like she is and then I guess you are the company you keep. I've known from a really young age she'd be like this. I remember my mum collecting me from our nans house and I was screaming and crying about how horrible she was and my mum said "but if she wasn't here anymore you'd really miss her" and I stopped my crying, wailing and screaming and at 5 years old I said "no, I won't", and my feelings have literally never changed from then.