Yesterday I had a conversation. A conversation I had been hoping to have now for the last three years. The details of the whole conversation aren't as important as the one point made during, which was, I was not loving my life partner and my mate unconditionally. At this point in the conversation I wanted to become angered, to lash out and say this person was wrong.
Later when I hung up the phone, I sat with myself. The longer I sat, the more appalled in myself I became. My love for my mate had become me demanding things he wasn't able to currently give to me. He had been shackled by love in attempt to 'heal him' or 'cure him'. My love became something I didn't recognize. Even though I was trying to help him beat an addiction, I was not loving unconditionally. As we enter into a romantic relationship, whether we are aware of what we are doing or not, most of us are not making a conscious effort to love unconditionally. When we love someone, we want the absolute best for them, we want to see them overcome emotional, mental, physical, financial, and spiritual goals and wounds. Even if our intentions are pure and from a place of love, it is not love. Not exactly. For this I am guilty. For years I have looked at this man, a man my soul is bound to, my mate; and I wanted him to become better; not for myself, but for his own self. For years I cried, I begged, even sometimes on my knees begging him to just love himself, to stop disconnecting from his beautiful spirit to the spirit in a bottle. When we got together, when I instantly fell in love with him and asked him where he had been all my life, I didn't know he was a chronic drinker. In that moment of time when time escaped us and the Earth seemed to slow, I was in a state of unconditional love. All I knew was this man was made for me, and every other relationship in my life up until then could never touch the immediate connection we possessed.
I began to saw him for what he could be if he stopped killing his Spirit with spirits. I took us out of our blissful moments and brought us into a state of secrecy, mistrust, and dread. He couldn't hang up his addiction for my vast love for him, and I killed the trust that he could come to me about anything as his best friend with my expectations about how he should be or could be. Lies ensued as he tried to cover up his drinking, and resentments began as he failed my ultimatums time and time again. Both of us were wrong, and both of us began to become toxic and co dependent in our perpetual love cycle.
So what is unconditional love?
" Conditional love is a polarized emotion, meaning that it has an opposite emotion. The opposite extreme of love is hatred. Conditional love comes from ego and generally focuses on someone (like a romantic partner, child, parent, friend) or some thing (like a house, a car, or a job). When we love someone conditionally, we tend to want them to look, act, and think in ways that fit our own paradigms and expectations. We hold others accountable to our expectations in order to qualify for our affection. If they act the way we want them to, we express our approval; if they act contrary to our wishes, we withhold our expression of acceptance of them, usually in some form of anger. Conditional love polarizes our internal thought process to believe, “I am right, and you are wrong, so I think you should see things my way.” As soon as begin to judge someone as being right or wrong, it is our cue that we are not in a space of unconditional love because we are perceiving that we are the authority for someone else’s life. This ultimately results in a power play for everyone involved because it focuses on control, which typically elicits a defensive reaction from the people whom we are trying to change." -- The power of oneness
In essence, unconditional love is the truest and most pure form of love. It is free from expectations, mistrust, jealousy, envy, possessiveness, control, and more. It is allowing the person you love to live their truths completely, to be who they are in that moment, and in the next and loving them all the same. It is detaching yourself from trying to 'heal them' and letting them be free to be themselves wholly. Loving someone is supposed to free them, to make them feel more themselves than they ever have.
You cannot rush someone's healing. You cannot make them be who YOU want them to be, or try to mold them into the potential self they may have. Loving them without bounds means you are there every step of the way, loving each version of them they grow into. It means loving them as is, with all their faults, all their toxicities, and loving them to. If you love them, never cage them with your expectations. Transcend that and watch as they begin to heal themselves, feeling more safe and less burdened and weighed down by your criticism or judgments.
And if they don't heal the way you want them to, if you find you are in a situation that could be dangerous to yourself, take a step away. Loving someone unconditionally is not the same as putting your own vessel or spirit in danger. It just means love someone so freely that you two transcend the human way of loving someone. Love does not belong in a box of what society deems acceptable.
I love you all.
Raise those vibrations.
And do not rush your healing <3
Wonderful write-up! And a great reminder. It is true... We like to expect certain actions and words from people as if we were testing them. That's not fair.
Oh wow thank you so much for the compliment, and you are definitely right there. Expectations will usually lead to disappointments, so if we all make a conscious decision to try not to have expectations, we will find that life has a way of aligning us with what we manifest. We just must continue to choose conscious love. <3
Beautiful, I feel that I have run into this same territory recently. In my case it was a feeling that I needed to extend this to a lot of people in my life, to just let everyone be who they are. I can sometime have a ferocious soul, which can tolerate but not accept self destruction and ignorance. So there's a whole journey there in softening up and learning acceptance.
Sometimes we can logically see how someone could heal themselves, but it doesn't really do any good to make expectations. Just like you, I learned that that someone can only do it for themselves. And strangely people tend to be less likely to do things when we tell them to do them.
Awesome article, rich ground for exploration :)
oh my goodness, I appreciate the feedback and your truth so much! And I truly believe that. Even when we can see where someone would flourish with just a few tweaks of their psyche, the hard reality is it in not our journey and decisions, but theirs. They have to have room to heal themselves, and the more we push healing on to someone, the less likely it is to ever happen. Unconditional love is a hard concept to learn but is a truly beautiful thing when we do. It was like a ton of bricks smacked me in the face lol.
Thank you SO much for reaching out. I am so grateful for it. <3