Facebook status: conditional love is worse than hate.

unexpected responses that turned a status in a blog-like posting lol

Status: conditional love is worse than hate.

Chris Meyer: Galin, I thnl you're wrong. I think love between humans is always (with the possible exception of a parent's love) and necessarily conditional, and that it's good that it be so. If you love a friend, or a girlfriend or wife, you must love them because of x about them, and if x weren't the case of them, you wouldn't love them. After all, if x weren't the case of them, they wouldn't be them, so lounge THEM wouldn't mean anything. For one person to love another person unconditionally would be to love no one in particular, so any live between human beings that is to be meaningful must be conditional. I don't think there's anything cynical about that.

Linda Zheng:

I kind of agree with you, galin. conditional love to me doesn't seem to be just appreciating someone because of how they are or what they can do for you, but basing your very love for them on these details. and unconditional love.. mm, it's an appreciation of someone's random attributes, yes, but all under the greater understanding that they are beautiful and precious in how they were made, and basing your love in that. whether anything is worse than hate, though.. that's another story haha.

Antoine Vo: I must go with Chris and against Linda's argument. First, expanding on Chris example with a concrete example, let's take a simpler idea of friendship where it is easier to think about it without the immediate discomfort of thinking about love. Ask yourself of why do you feel such a bond to the friend. You like that person, right? Therefore, the friend must have some quality that make the person likable. You wouldn't be a friend if the person treats you poorly, the person can't be a friend if that person cannot act as one. However, isn't that a condition? Does that devalue the friendship?

Now, if we base our love on they beauty and preciousness of a person, I have to argue that it is flaw. At the very minimum, the simplest flaw is we just made our condition that the person in the "beauty and preciousness in how they are made." It is still a condition, a condition that is hard to remove as all human have it, but still a condition.

However, I also want to point out another flaw that is a bit more conceptual. We need to take account of our emotion, the people we love, did you decide to love the person seeing beauty and preciousness of the person? No, it is a choice where you announce in your head that you shall love for so and so reason, the feeling just develops. That mean the nature of our love, the trigger to the feeling is something else.

At the very least, conditional love is absolutely not worse than hate. Hate only destroys, does conditional love only destroys?

My Response:

hmmm interesting. never would have expected such long respnoses lol

so I was thinking that someone who receives conditional love would suffer more than someone who is hated. Conditional love is especially hurtful in close relationships such as family and those with significant others. Wanting to be loved is a jealous feeling. When someone wants to receive love from a specific person, they are jealous for it and thrive on it. Once someone has experienced love, they would never want to let it die, and when it does, it is painful.

Conditional love lasts as long as whatever conditions are met. When a parent loves a child or when a husband loves his wife conditionally, the child and the wife must have something to give to receive the love that they crave. However, no one can meet these demands consistently. If a husband marries his wife because qualities x, y, and z, the wife must maintain those qualities to receive love from her husband. Because she desires his love so much, she feels pressured, and even bound to maintain those qualities to receive love. The tastes of the husband may also change. Even if the wife gives what the husband first wanted when they got married, she can lose his love if his conditions change. Love, in this relationship is fragile, and unhealthy.

Also, if a parent places conditions to love on a child, the child faces the same pressures. Being human, no one can meet these pressures 100% of the time. Unconditional love loves through failure and weakness.

Conditional love between spouses and family must grow into unconditional love in order for the relationship to be healthy. A boyfriend may love a girlfriend based on certain qualities, but this love must grow so that he loves her because of her and only her, and not just her qualities. Conditional love requires an exchange, but unconditional love is free.

Being hated is better than receiving conditional love because it is easier to dismiss someone than to earn their love. If someone hates you, you can turn to others. Hate is easy to identify and counteract. People are repulsed by hate; they ignore it and fight against it. If someone hates you, you can ignore or stand your ground. However, earning love through condition is more complicated and difficult. If you hate someone, you couldn’t care less about them, but if you want love from someone, you are at their mercy because you know that when you stop meeting their conditions, the love will stop coming.

However, hate is more complicated in closer relationships because you cannot escape, but conditional love can be the root of hate. Once a parent does not get what they want from their child or a husband loses interest in a wife, love disappears because conditions are not met anymore. This leads to a struggle to reestablish love, which can lead to fighting and pain in the relationship.

People will fight to receive love and are hurt greatly if that love can be taken away. Unconditional love gives security, stability, and allows for unending mutual love to foster. Unconditional love is hard to maintain, however, because people have only so much unconditional love to give. Conditional creates a jealousy that makes someone fight desperately to gain love, a fight that is harder than dealing with hate.

Person B:wow galin, well said! I agree with a lot of that.

a few things in response to antoine's argument. I think it's important when defining these two terms to realize that 'conditional love' means a love defined by these conditions-- be it beauty (which you agree is problematic) or how they treat you. if you stake your friendship on these specific terms, it means that these terms ultimately dictate whether you remain in that friendship. I'll take on your example. in that scenario, you would stop being friends with the person if they started treating you poorly. that sounds like the logical thing to do, right? but think about how many times friends, family and loved ones in general have not been 'nice' to you. maybe they were going through a rough time. maybe they felt like they didn't need to conceal things from you because you were close to them. whatever the reasons, I think we can agree that all these relationships are strengthened by the occasional disagreement; none that I know of have existed in perpetual, uninterrupted harmony. it's true that what draws us to another person may be these characteristics, but what keeps us with them should be the love we have for the whole being we've discovered since that initial attraction.

most people agree that superficial characteristics shouldn't be the basis of a relationship. fewer would say that being treated well is an unfair expectation. but how awful would it be if we were to desert our friends the very moment they stopped being nice to us? it could be the moment they most need us to love them. but if what you have is a conditional love, rooted and sustained by that condition, you would not stick around to fulfill that need.

as for the emotions related to love.. mm, I feel like I would go on for way too long about that, haha. it's kind of similar to what I've said above, though. in my opinion, love fueled mainly by emotions (and hormones) simply doesn't work outside of hollywood movies-- look at our marriage stats. sure, first you pick someone out of the ginormous crowd because of x and y feeling, x and y feature. then you learn to love them for their beauty and preciousness as one of God's children. then you learn to respect their dignity as a human being. and then, when you're tempted by other things or people in the world, you don't succumb. you hang on, because what you have is true love, unconditional love.

Chris Meyer:

Linda, do you love everyone equally and in the same way? I suspect not, and I think that's the way it's supposed to be. You can love every person in the sense of willing good for them because of their personhood or their being God's creation or anything else, but if you love particular people in particular ways, then I think (1) that love isinseparable from its associated emotions and (2) it must be based on particular attributes of that person. That doesn't mean the list has to be short, or even that you have to be able to name specific qualities, simply that those qualities exist. And most importantly, it doesn't mean they have to exhibit those qualities at every single moment. There is a woman I love, and one thing I love about her is her kindness. Recently she did something terribly unkind to me, and I was really, really angry. But I still loved her—not because my love for her is unconditional, but because I know that kindness is a stable haracteristic of hers even if she doesn't exhibit it at very moment. If, on the other hand, I discovered a longstading pattern of unkindness, i might cease to love her, because her kindness is a condition of my love

Chris Meyer: And, if I recognized a pattern of unkindness, I might say, "she isn the person I thought she was," ie, the conditions of my love are precisely those characteristics that make her "her" for me. A person might not be defined by his characteristics, but for anyone else he is. Eg, if a white woman who had never gone to college came up to me and said she was my acquaintance Galin Ma, I would say that she is not.

Chris Meyer: As I mentioned before, I'll admit that parental love is unconditional, and I suppose that love between spouses can be also, but it's worth noting that both begin based on a condition. The reason a parent begins to love a child is that the child is their child, and the reason a person begins to love someone he will marry is certain characteristics he enjoys or approves of, and in both cases, the unconditional love could not have existed without the original, conditional love.

Antoine Vo:

@Linda You're obviously correct that a friend or relationship isn't always smooth sailing.

However, friends do have limits. Take any friend you can think of (lfor imagery, I'll use Galin). Galin is awesome, good-hearted man, considerate, friendly, etc. One day, Galin started to act poorly, but that's only one day. A bad day doesn't break a friendship. Now let's say he keeps doing it. Every time you see him, he demonstrates that he doesn't treat you well. He does actions that indicates he doesn't care. You continue to forgive him and even entrust him with something. He betrays that trust. If he keeps doing it unapologetically, will you continue indefinitely? Will you continue to be mistreated for a friendship when he doesn't even consider you a friend?

Occasional disagreement and openness is a sign of a good friendship, but bad intentions is not. If a "friend" betrays your trust repeatedly and/or with intention, will you continue the facade of a friendship (or relationship) forever? Perhaps the friend wasn't the friend believed that he/she was. Perhaps the friend changed and the person you knew is no more. Whatever the cause or change, the condition is broken.

@Galin Conditional love is not like some little trigger where "you failed to make me laugh today, my love is dead." Chris made a good example. One can love a person for kindness, but the person doesn't have to be kind every moment. Yet, for a person to be kind, they have to do kind actions. If one stop doing the action long enough, but start doing cruel actions repeatedly, then the person have become cruel, kindness is no longer a quality of the person. Fortunately, while people change, intrinsic qualities makes it rare for someone to change in such a way even when measured in great amounts of time. Yet, the conditions remains, but it doesn't put a great pressure or strain to keep up with the condition. There's no suffering if the condition is being who you are.

As for hatred, I must counter that hatred being more avoidable, it is not always the case. There are ways a person can hurt another without having to have access to the person directly. Hatred comes in many ways, we can look to history for many example. Racism is one form of hatred that while our lives is nearly non-existent, have caused much greater crimes in other parts of the world and in history.

Unconditional love can cause suffering too. The run on the assumption that both sides are in the best of intentions, but there are plenty who abuse such unconditional love to the fullest. I think suffering by abuse of unconditional love is much more common than suffering by the struggle to meet conditions.

Chris Meyer: You do make a good point, Galin, that, because of the vulnerability that comes with caring about someone and knowing that you could lose their love, condiional love can be more difficult and more painful than hate. And if that's all you were trying to say, then I guess I don't object. But I don't think that pain makes conditional love actually worse than hate, or not worth pursuing.

Antoine Vo: Well, I can also agree that in the individual perspective, vulnerability to love while it is conditional can bring more pain. I can agree with that as said by Chris.

However, I want to bring up can unconditional love really exist? I can agree with the love of a mother and child, or at the very least, the condition of that is unbreakable (though rifts between children and parents had happened, but in our case, virtually unbreakable). There's plenty of examples of marriages where the unconditional and unbreakable love turned out to be alot more conditional and breakable then believed.

Linda Zheng: ah, there's so much material to work with here! Chris and Antoine, I think you both make substantial points. it'd be tough for me to touch on everything, so I'll take it easy and just respond to the specific things that jumped out at me =)

Chris: again, I think it's important to define these two big terms we're discussing. I've already mentioned conditional love from my perspective; I'll focus now on unconditional love. one common understanding of unconditional love is that it homogenizes the various relationships we build-- my love in friendship with Galin is no different from my love for boyfriend is no different from my love for my parents, etc. I don't think this is the case. almost paradoxically, unconditional love allows you to appreciate all the different facets of a person specifically because you have not overemphasized the importance of any one aspect. and because of this, you can truly say that you love these people differently, for the unique beings they are and for the unique relationship you have built with them within this understanding. so no, I do not love everyone in the same way. but my love for these people is unconditional, all the same.

as for the point both you and Antoine bring up, about continued mistreatment and someone not being the person you thought he/she was, I'd like to elaborate on the nature of unconditional love-- specifically, its power to let both parties heal and evolve. I'm not sure of exactly what happened between you and the girl, Chris, but in a broader sense, I can relate to the situation. the only difference is, I was in the girl's shoes. and as much as it hurts to have someone fail you, it can also be devastating to be the person who failed. I don't think I ever fully realized, until then, how scary and hopeless it feels to doubt your own ability to be good and kind; it's also easy to convince yourself that yes, you have changed, and there's no use in trying to redeem yourself. if the person I hurt had approached me with the attitude that they'd forgive me, but only if I were truly kind, I don't know how I would respond. it would probably reinforce questions in me, increase the turmoil, rather than give me strength to reclaim that part of me. in my case, the other person did otherwise. he approached me with his unconditional love, and an unwavering intent to forgive through that love. because of this, both healing and growth happened—for both myself and him.

I emphasize that this type of love helps both parties, because I can understand how you might disagree with the takeaway from my story. the person who has been hurt, in most cases, wouldn’t be so unwise as to tell the offender that their love is conditional, right? for the most part, no (though phrases like “I can forgive you this time, but if it ever happens again…” say a lot more about the underlying dynamics than you’d think). but even when you conceal that well, it reveals itself in all the worst ways. you struggle to forgive the person, to believe that this is really just a minor blip. in response, she may seek to prove herself to both of you, either consciously or subconsciously. distrust and insecurities: what more do you need to erode a relationship over time? conditional love is easily battered; it is constantly threatened by decline in strength and eventually, defeat.
alright, reality check time! in reality, conditional love is better than no love. to be more generous, conditional love can work sometimes—as I hope, Chris, it has worked out with you and that girl. in reality, if someone keeps unapologetically mistreating you, you should not be their friend! taking it to another level, if you are in an abusive relationship, you should get out. I wholeheartedly agree. but I don’t think this is a valid argument against unconditional love. unconditional love is not a right; it is privilege with a purpose. we are not to be foolish in exercising unconditional love, as we “suffer and sacrifice for another person’s good, not to allow them to continue to sin against us.” the beauty of unconditional love, though, lies in the fact that when we are strong enough to exercise it—even when it’s hard, even when it hurts—we get results. people surprise you with the good they have in them, and you find new reasons to appreciate them in your love.

a few things in closing. conditional love is, of course, still love. I think it’s a more immature and potentially dangerous form of love, but I would rather see this kind of love than no love at all (which is why, Galin, I hesitated to agree with your initial statement completely). and unconditional love is HARD! I definitely haven’t mastered it. I don’t think it’s an impossible ideal, though; it’s just a heck of a lot of work and discipline. Chris, you’ve referred to parental love several times, and I just wanted to offer my take on that. I don’t think that love comes simply from the child being “their child”; that kind of possessiveness and ownership can lead to parents disavowing their children for coming out, or even just not choosing the profession they’d prefer. I think the reason why so many parents are incredibly loving is that they witnessed firsthand the miracle of their child’s birth. parents can most fully appreciate the mystery, awesomeness and preciousness of life.

I think it’s somewhat clear that I’m speaking from a christian viewpoint. if you guys are interested in digging a little deeper into this topic, I’d recommend the four loves by cs lewis. he’s a wayyy more articulate speaker and thinker on the subject, and most of what I’ve said is really a tiny chunk of his argument in the book. if you do read it, let me know what you think! (maybe not on galin’s wall. I’m starting to feel bad hahaha)

Chris Meyer:

A couple things, Linda. Three, actually.

1. I don't know what you mean by unconditional love being a privilege. The defining characteristic of a privilege is that it can be lost, as far as I can tell. And to love someone unconditionally because of who they are seems to have similar problems. As I've claimed, I believe correctly, I am only the sum of my attributes as far as anyone else is concerned. And to love me because I am whom I am means that if I were not who I am you would not love me—after all, that would be loving someone else, not me. So to love me because of who I am means to love me conditionally on my having certain characteristics.

Chris Meyer: 2. I want to clarify what I mean by my point about parental live being based on a condition. I simply meant that, to the extent that it makes sense to call someone "me" who had different parents, if I had been anyone else's child, my mother would not love me. Her love for me, though it now be unconditional, was once based on my identity as ge son—and that, as I've argued above, this constitutes a condition on her love.

Chris Meyer: 3. I think you've mistakenly assumed that conditional love must be very fragile. If you give me a nuclear bomb, I will break a diamond for you—something can be very strong, but still breakable. I can forgive 490 times and still love conditionally. And in the case of friendship and romantic love, I think that this is not cynical, but is a necessary condition for the live to be meaningful. I am probably done now, though if you respond I'll probably read it.

My Response: Chris summed up in one sentence what i was trying to say: "the vulnerability that comes with caring about someone and knowing that you could lose their love, condiional love can be more difficult and more painful than hate."

It's also a good point that Antoine made the conditional love doesn't necessarily disappear because of a bad day; it needs to be long term.

Also I agree that conditional love is better than no love at all in most cases, but sometimes conditional love can be more painful than hate in an intimate relationship.