The term “unconditional love” is getting thrown around quite a bit lately, as something people desire to experience, attain or achieve in life.

Which kind of makes it sound like the “conditional love” that we are all currently experiencing is bad, wrong or inadequate in some way.

Which has had me thinking, “what is unconditional love, and why do we feel we should love unconditionally?”

Realistically speaking, there will always be conditions. It’s in our nature as humans to make conditions. We need to protect ourselves, and we are innately selfish (and selfish isn’t necessarily bad). Self-preservation.

Conditions themselves don’t need to be negative.

They can be used in a negative way, sure, but they aren’t negative as a concept. After all, everything is conditional in some way isn’t it?

Conditions are there so that we can love others as openly as possible, and at the same time love and respect ourselves equally.

By working with and around each other’s conditions, we can live together in love. So by struggling and striving to attain or experience this clichéd “unconditional love,” are we not just fighting against our own built-in humanistic mechanism, which may not be flawed in the first place?

Recently I came across this quote that a friend of mine posted, and I thought it so beautifully and perfectly stated why we are incorrect in striving towards something that is most likely unattainable, and almost definitely unnecessary.

Because “Love, in truth, doesn’t need any other adjectives.”

I had to share.

Dear Human:

You’ve got it all wrong.

You didn’t come here to master unconditional love. That is where you came from and where you’ll return. You came here to learn personal love. Universal love. Messy love. Sweaty love. Crazy love. Broken love. Whole love. Infused with divinity. Lived through the grace of stumbling. Demonstrated through the beauty of—messing up. Often.

You didn’t come here to be perfect. You already are. You came here to be gorgeously human. Flawed and fabulous. And then to rise again into remembering.

But unconditional love? Stop telling that story.

Love, in truth, doesn’t need any other adjectives. It doesn’t require modifiers. It doesn’t require the condition of perfection. It only asks that you show up. And do your best. That you stay present and feel fully. That you shine and fly and laugh and cry and hurt and heal and fall and get back up and play and work and live and die as you.

It’s enough. It’s plenty.

~ Courtney A Walsh.

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Apprentice Editor: Bronwyn Petry / Editor: Catherine Monkman
Photo: Wikimedia Commons