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On Unconditional Love
What we all want and none of us can give
Like so many lies, unconditional love is a shared deception, equally ruinous to self as to one’s beloved. Those who believe they possess unconditional love for another may find themselves wasting a life, desiccating the flower of youth and spoiling the fruits of their effort, for the sake of one who, without the slightest willingness to develop or aid themselves, is inexorably bound for desolation, and, at last, at the price of much wasted time and labor, this supposedly unchanging lover will be disappointed by their inevitable abandonment of the one they once loved. Those who believe they are the subjects of unconditional love have a road ahead of them that will necessarily fork into two destinies, either the fragile joy of self-deceit or the pains of cruelest betrayal. One is given unconditional love for as long as they consistently prove themselves deserving of it. Fall too far and none will follow.
Whosoever believes in unconditional love lacks an imagination for sin. Unless one would claim to be capable of demonstrating a loving acceptance of the most vile sort of human atrocities, it is not that their love is unconditional, but that their love is to be granted so long as the trajectory of their beloved’s behavior remains unchanged, so that what one has observed in the past persists into the future.
