Love Without Conditions
Why are relationships so challenging for most people?
Relationships are challenging because we bring so much conditioning to them. By conditioning, I mean hopes, fantasies, expectations, and desires. We have so much we want another person to do for us — fulfill our fantasies, expectations, and desires, and if they don’t, we are angry with them and feel judgmental and critical of them.
Those judgments prevent us from loving them and cause them to judge us back and not feel loving toward us. So, the root of difficulties in love and relationships is our conditioning — the desires we have for someone to be a certain way in order to please us. This is conditional love — right? “I will love you if you behave and look a certain way, and I won’t love you if you don’t.” Conditional love isn’t love, and relationships don’t work when love is conditional.
But our conditioning doesn’t have to limit love in this way. If we can see that our expectations, desires, and fantasies are not important — that we don’t need these met to be happy and to have love in our life, then we can experience the other person just as he or she is, rather than as someone who needs to look and act a certain way for us to be happy and feel loving.
When we can just meet others, free of our ideas about what we want them to be or what we want from them and free of judgments, then love has a chance to flow from us to them. And love is more likely to flow to us from them as well. So relationships are challenging when we’re trying to get something from others or trying to change them to please us, and they work when we’re not doing that, but just being present to them as they are showing up in the moment.
Conditioning is really the only thing that interferes with love because we are all, by nature, loving, but our ideas about what we want others to be like interfere with our ability to feel that love. Love is our natural state, and when we aren’t paying attention to our thoughts about ourselves and others, then love naturally flows from inside of us to whomever we are with.
~ by Gina Lake
