Unconditional love - does it exist outside of a parent-child relationship? Is it realistic to expect in a couple relationship?

[Twoddle]

I have been reflecting on "unconditional love" after reading a reference to it in another post.

A big sticking point of mine and my ex-partner's relationship was that he felt he didn't get the unconditional love from me that he wanted and felt he deserved.

The problem (I think) is that, although we all have our quirks and bad moods and, to a degree, these need to be accepted as part of our package by our partner/spouse, there are some things that are just not acceptable. I think my ex-partner's mum was (and is) somewhat codependent to him: she will do things for him without question, when I feel she should say "no"; she has pandered to him when he has been utterly, irresponsibly behaved and/or rude and/or disrespectful - fussing over him, loving him, when really, a foot should have been very firmly put down ... even if he is an adult! The problem with unconditional love is, surely, that it can border on codependence - putting up with any kind of emerging crap in a partner because love "has" to be unconditional.

Some behaviours, surely, are unacceptable; someone cannot be accepted for who they are when they display them - no?

So, while we love our kids unconditionally because they are our children, do we or can we actually love our partners unconditionally, by virtue of the fact that we have chosen them as our partners on the basis of some key conditions (their personality, values, looks, etc)? And then, if their traits or our "conditions" waver over time, is it not realistic to expect this love to waver too? I.e. it is conditional.

Hmm. Interested to hear others' viewpoints.

Kally - you have a similar story to me. I know my dad loved me unconditionally and would be there for me anytime i needed him no matter what the problem, and again not so from my mum (strange that). I too married young and we are recovering from my hs affair. I think my view of love has changed in that i will never love anyone 'unconditionally' again ever.
Of course i love my children but will not be tolerate continued 'bad' bahaviour.
I still love my dad unconditionally i think but that is because he has never given me cause to question that and i hope i have him either.
I dont love my mother - she is a burden now and as i never felt her love was uncondionally i supose i never had it with her.
My H (and no other man) will ever get my uncondional love again. I have become stronger in my own ways now and so do not 'need' that love to be happy anymore.

Maybe it becasue i have now defined love as respect for me but i did not know that before so it never came up.
I think maybe our need to love and be loved changes as we get older and we should accept that too.

I agree with Custardo, in a way, and Amphib and others. I think your tolerance for behaviours have limits, well, at least mine has, however, despite the behaviours I would still love my children unconditionally, and I think my DH too. I may choose not to put up with the behviour from him, or them, but I would still love them, no matter what.

Yes i think we are all 'conditioned' into thinking we have to have uncondional love and if we dont give it or get it we are somehow abnormal.

It is like mothers (and fathers) who dont bond with their children - they are somehow looked down on by society.

Maybe it is easier to stay in a violet or abusive relationship than face the future alone. There is enough evidence on here to support that surely.

If we truely love someone we should help them to love themselves firstly (that is what i am hoping to be teaching my children anyway). And if you do not find unconditional love that is still ok and you can still be happy. Dont crave something that may only be a fairytale anyway.

I don't demand unconditional love from anyone. BUT I expect my partner to be there in times of crisis. What's the point of a relationship that crumbles at the first sign of problems? I mean if we start having problems due to illness or any circumstance beyond my control I would expect my partner to be there for me and see if we can get through. If the change to worse is my choice (I am selfish cow and start being negligent towards our relaionship) I don't expect my dh to love me unconditionally. I would expect him to try to talk to me etc etc, but not to put up with it forever. Ultimately he would stop loving me, unless he has a masochistic side.
Love is something you get, I think, by giving love to the other person.
As I said, this does not apply to children. Different kind of love.

I think you would only love them if you could rationalize the behaviour
'oh he is only like that because he is angry/stressed.... or whatever' But surely there comes a time when whatever way you look at it you have to admit that they may be an evil person - would you still love them then?

I read something interesting - about someone saying 'this is not my normal behaviour' as an excuse for their wrong actions. But at what point does that one 'out of character' event make you who you are. For instance an murderer is not contantly killing people but a few moments define that person as a murderer' Not put very clearly there but i hope you get the point.

Yes 'inlove' that is it.
Over the years our love has grown and so now there is more expectation for him to be there in the hard times too. It is a sort of balance - and as we have both put a lot of investment into the love account we can draw on that in times of need.
I do believe you get back what you put in too.

However i think if something awful had happened early on in the relationship i would not have 'invested' as much and so would not have stayed and worked at it.

Happywoman, strange that! I wonder if having unconditional love of a father figure all along makes us more willing to love unconditionally (once we feel it right to do so). I can remember the feeling of absolute fulfillment at loving my EH. I know I will never ever feel that again with any other man.(we are divorced and I literally cannot look at him now, he hurt me so bad and I can't stand being near him even) Since then I'm too susspicious, I would love to... (let go and love as I loved him) with no fear of it being trashed and shit on. I remember saying to him in the 'big fight' when I found out about his affair 'I loved you unconditionally and you shit all over it'.. I am not talking obsessive love here, I am referring to a love where you both feel calm, safe and fulfilled with each other equally. Doesn't matter about anything else really,:- the ups and down, the illnesses, standing by one another, you know.... you do it without calculation or trying to manouver to make your own personna/life easy. Everything shared and equal.. not dodging things to look for the easier life within the partnership...thats unconditional love. I know I'll never experience that again. What about people that have not experienced unconditional love from parents???

No. I don't think it does. I wouldn't want it TBH. It has an unhealthy element of treating the object of that love as an object rather than a vital changing human being. How can you unconditionally love any adult who has independence and autonomy. If I felt loved in that way I suspect I'd feel claustrophobic. Children are different - they are programmed to change, it's expected and fairly predictable. So whilst they are with you it is perfectly possible to love them unconditionally.

Yes 'inlove' that is it.
Over the years our love has grown and so now there is more expectation for him to be there in the hard times too. It is a sort of balance - and as we have both put a lot of investment into the love account we can draw on that in times of need.
I do believe you get back what you put in too.

However i think if something awful had happened early on in the relationship i would not have 'invested' as much and so would not have stayed and worked at it.

Kally that is interesting may I ask did your father ever cheat on your mum? Also did you feel you were in competion with your mum for his love? I ask this because i do think my dad cheated but i would have forgiven him and still loved him for it anyway. I felt my mum was a bit jealous of him loving me - and i know she also did not like him visiting his mother (which i find stange too).
Just like you i felt the love my h and i first had was supporting - but post affair i did and do still feel i gave up too much for it and it is something i would not want my children to do.

I think that 'unconditional love' for a partner does not exist. We all, consciously or otherwise, put conditions upon our relationships or 'love'.
For example, fidelity is a condition of my relationship with dh. If that condition were broken, our relationship would likely not survive. Now if, as I assume from the vitriol heaped upon posters who admit to having or considering an affair, most mnetters also expect fidelity from their partners, how can we possibly say our love is unconditional?
Now children, that's another story. I agree with Lapin, we're programmed to love them whatever. There may be behaviour that we cannot tolerate, we may have to make decisions not to have them in our lives (violence, drugs etc.) but I'm not sure that you could ever stop loving them.

I also think that couple love is self-feeding. There is an element of narcissism in it for most of us. It's hard to love someone who doesn't love you so if my DH stopped loving me I suspect that after a time it would change the way I felt.

still pondering this - all love grows and we do love our children uncondionally i think but as they become adults they do need to learn that there is a limit to that love too - otherwise it is 'unhealthy' i think. So as children grow we 'teach' them what love really is. In fact i dont want my children to always think i will love them no matter what they do - i want them to understand that everyone has limits (just that as a mother mine is harder to reach ).
Now falling in love is different - you can instantly fall in love with your baby but that again is different. And i am hoping that there is the same feeling with grandchildren.

To go back to a point kally - just because you and i will never love so completly again does not mean it is not as good - i do have a fantastic realationshio with h again - yes is is different and i am causious but it is in some ways better because i think it is healthier for me as there is more balance and i am getting more out of it now iyswim.
I liken it to believing in father christmas - once that fairytale is shattered we still enjoy christmas we can never go back and believe again but we enjoy it in a different way.

That's where I differ happywoman. I will always love my children no matter what they do - I might show that love by rejecting what they do and trying to steer them right, I'd never reject them or not love them.

I have been thinking about this some more since yesterday and other posters talking about respect seems to be me to be the key to the difference between unconditional love and conditional love.

I think if I totally lost all respect for my DH I couldn't love him any more. If my children did something so awful I lost respect for them I would still love them. I wouldn't like them, I would be ashamed of them but I couldn't stop loving them.

HOwever, I have been testing out my theory by thinking of things that might kill off even my love for my children and I think, of all the horrible things they could do, possibly the worst thing one of them could do would be to deliberately and in cold blood (so not in a fight or an accident) murder the other one.

So maybe the fact that I can think of a scenario where love could fail means that love is never unconditional. It is almost but not quite.

You'll never know if you do love your child unconditionally until they do something that tests it to the limit.
The same with a partner.

But I still can't imagine loving a partner unconditionally, like I feel I would for my children.

Message withdrawn

unconditional love is what a parent has for their child in that there are no conditions attached. Unconditional love in a relationship needs to be two ways and based on trust and respect rather than a biological bond. It is about putting the beeds of partner or relationship before your own so if uyou demand unconditional love you are not giving it so instead of loving your partner it is about your need to be in control and feel the most powerful

Wow! Great to read all the posts - loads more since I last checked in. Really interesting.

Here are a couple more things to throw in the pot. Firstly, when people talk of wishing to be "accepted for who I am", isn't that essentially a request for unconditional love? As with unconditional love of partners, I have a problem with this too - not so much with kids. I see it as being of the same ilk. Do others agree?

Secondly, I know we talk of loving our children unconditionally, and I know, deep down, I have an extremely strong love for DS. However, there are times - days - when it all goes tits up, he's behaving abysmally, I've run out of ideas and energy for curbing it, and then I know - I feel it in myself - that there is some ill feeling there on my part. I'm sure there is always love there, at some level, but superficially at least, I feel it fluctuates. Is this the not-liking-our-children-sometimes that we talk about? Because, at least in a superficial, how-loving-am-I-being-with-DS-from-moment-to-moment respect, I would say love for a child is conditional too. For example, even if it might be my parenting lapses that are in some part to blame, if DS has broken something, yelled a bit of abuse and clouted a peer, I don't feel loving to him at that point; I don't feel like scooping him up and giving him a big squeeze.

Hmm. So maybe while a deep love tends to remain constant with a child, how loving we are towards them fluctuates and is conditional ... or is that just me?!

Thanks again for what's become an interesting and helpful discussion.

I think there is a significant difference between parent-child relationships and adult-adult relationships. The former, in its early stages involves dependency and need - all the child has to do is be a child, and the parent's role is to meet the child's needs and keep it safe, and support its growth to independence.

I do think unconditional love is possible between adult partners, and I would define unconditional love as being free of any sense of obligation or entitlement on either part - I think it requires the maturity to meet your own needs whilst simultaneously being able to yield to the relationship. Any adult relationship that involves a consideration of 'need' smacks of dependency.