Think of the last time you did something generous for somebody and felt slightly unappreciated afterwards. Perhaps you had expected a thank you, some recognition, or simply for them to notice what you had done. You might not even have realised you expected anything until you didn’t get it.
That small flatness is worth paying attention to. It is one of the few moments when a condition we have quietly attached to our love becomes visible to us.
In Love: The True Nature of Your Higher Self, I said that love is not something we earn or receive from anybody else, but our natural state. Yet most of us have spent a lifetime learning something quite different.
The love we experience in our relationships is real. But we often mix it with need. We need to be loved back, appreciated, chosen, understood or valued. Once we need something in return for our love, conditions begin to appear.
Love Learned in a World Where It Can Be Lost
We learn about love early, and we learn about it in a world where very little is permanent. People change, relationships change, and sometimes people leave. So if we believe love comes from other people, there is always the possibility that once we have found it, we can lose it.
We learn it in smaller ways too. Approval comes when we behave in certain ways. Attention can follow achievement. Someone can be warm towards us one day and distant the next. None of this has to be dramatic. We simply learn that the love we receive can change, and that what we do seems to affect how much of it arrives.
And So We Go Looking
If love is something we get from other people, then it makes sense to spend a good deal of our lives looking for it.
We look in the obvious places, through romantic relationships, friendships and family. But we also look through being attractive, successful, helpful, popular or needed. We say yes when we mean no. We worry about what other people think of us. We make sure the right person notices something we have achieved.
Most of the time we don’t think of any of this as looking for love. We think we are getting on with our lives, pursuing our goals and trying to belong. And often that is exactly what we are doing. But sometimes underneath it is a need to be liked, valued, approved of or chosen.
What surprised me when I began to recognise this in myself was not that I had looked for love outside myself. It was how much of my life I had spent doing it without ever realising that was what I was looking for.
What We Look for in Relationships
We naturally go into relationships wanting things from them: companionship, affection, security, shared interests, someone who wants a similar kind of life. There is nothing wrong with that, and relationship counselling often begins exactly there, by asking each person what they need and whether the couple can meet those needs better. I looked at what we go to our relationships for in Experiencing Relationship From The Perspective Of Separation. The question here sits underneath it. What happens to our love when they cannot supply what we need?
The difficulty comes when we confuse whether someone meets our needs with their value as a person.
Needs or Values?
I once worked with someone who was very critical of his former wife because, as he saw it, he hadn’t earned enough money to provide the lifestyle she wanted, and she had eventually chosen a relationship with someone wealthier. As I listened to him, I saw it rather differently. He wasn’t particularly interested in money or the things it could buy, while she placed much more importance on them. Neither was necessarily wrong. They wanted different things from life and had different values around money.
We are allowed to choose the kind of life and relationships we want, and to decide that a relationship no longer works for us. Some relationships should be left, and nothing here asks anybody to accept being harmed. But there is a difference between deciding that a relationship doesn’t work and deciding that the other person is wrong, selfish, inadequate or somehow less worthy.
So it is worth separating two things: what I need from this relationship, and what I believe about you when you don’t give it to me. The first helps us make choices about our lives. The second tells us something about the conditions we have attached to our love.
When Love Becomes a Bargain
There is nothing wrong with needing other people. We all need affection, companionship, support and connection. The difficulty begins when we need our relationships to tell us something about who we are.
I don’t simply enjoy your love; I need it to tell me I am lovable. I don’t simply appreciate your approval; I need it to tell me I am good enough. Being important to you becomes evidence that I matter. There is a difference between I love helping you, and I need you to need me, and from the outside the two look almost identical.
This is where an unconscious bargain begins. I will love you, support you and care for you, but somewhere in the relationship I also expect something back: loyalty, appreciation, affection, attention, security, reassurance. Most of the time we don’t know the bargain exists. We discover it when the other person doesn’t give us what we expected, and the disappointment or resentment we feel shows us that somewhere along the way we had attached a condition to our love.
There is another side to that bargain, and it is the one we are least likely to admit to. When somebody hasn’t given us what we expected, most of us don’t say so. We make the reply a little shorter. The warmth goes out of our voice while the words stay perfectly polite. We go quiet and rather hope the silence is noticed. We don’t offer the small kindness we would normally offer without thinking about it.
I have done all of those, and I suspect most of us have. It is rarely calculated and almost never announced. But something is being communicated all the same. You haven’t given me what I expected, so something from me is temporarily unavailable too.
When Fear Gets Mixed with Love
Fear can easily become mixed up with love, particularly when we believe we are protecting someone or doing what is best for them.
A friend worried about her teenage daughter constantly. The girl had to account for where she was, and her mother would phone to check. She undoubtedly loved her, but fear was driving it, and her daughter eventually found the protection oppressive. It also began to make her wonder whether the world really was as unsafe as her mother believed.
I saw something similar with a colleague whose son was very relaxed about revising for his exams. She was so worried about his grades that she began imposing sanctions when he didn’t revise. Her intention was to help him succeed. What he learned was that her approval was connected to his results.
These are ordinary examples of something most of us do. We love someone, become frightened about what might happen to them, and then try to influence the outcome. The love hasn’t disappeared, but fear has started directing how we express it.
A useful question is this. Does my love leave this person freer, or smaller?
Making Love Special
We naturally have people who are special to us. Our partners, children, family and close friends have a place in our lives that other people do not. The problem isn’t having special relationships. It is the conditions we attach to that specialness.
We may expect the people we love to put us first, understand us better, or prove that we are equally special to them. Being chosen, needed or particularly important to somebody becomes evidence that we are loved and that we matter.
Families are particularly good at creating these expectations. You’re my daughter. Also, you’re my mother. You’re my partner. You should know me better than that. The closer the relationship, the more we expect from it.
Our Higher Self has an unlimited capacity to love. As human beings, we have a limited capacity for relationships, so we don’t have to stop having special ones. The opportunity is to notice when specialness itself has become one of the conditions of our love.
We Do the Same Thing to Ourselves
The conditions we attach to loving other people are usually the same conditions we attach to ourselves.
Most of us have a critical voice that is very good at pointing out what we got wrong and where we don’t quite measure up. Even when things are going well, it tells us we were lucky, that somebody else could have done it better, or that sooner or later we will be found out.
We call some of this self-doubt or imposter syndrome, but underneath it is the ego thought system I wrote about in The Thought System That Has Been Running Your Life. Our worth is still conditional. I’ll be good enough when I achieve this, change that, or finally become the person I think I should be.
Which is the same question we have been asking other people all the way through this article, only now we are asking it of ourselves. What do you have to do before I can love you?
And there is always another condition. Once we achieve one thing, the critical voice finds something else. If other people, achievements or circumstances can prove that we are good enough, they can also appear to prove that we are not, and we are left looking for reassurance about something that never quite settles.
Try This: What Did You Expect?
Think of a relationship where you feel disappointed, hurt or resentful about something the other person has or hasn’t done.
Write down what you expected from them. Not what they did, but what you were hoping for. Perhaps you wanted more appreciation, affection, loyalty or support. Perhaps you wanted to feel needed, chosen or important to them.
Then ask yourself why it mattered. What did you make their response mean about you, about them, or about the relationship?
There may be something you genuinely need to address. But you may also recognise an expectation you didn’t know you had. You don’t need to do anything with it yet. Just notice what you find.
What Happens When We Remove the Conditions?
None of this means the love we have felt for other people wasn’t real. The ego didn’t create love. It added its own needs, fears and expectations to it.
Most of us have also known moments when none of those things seemed to matter, and we simply loved. We weren’t thinking about what we were getting back, whether somebody deserved it, or what their behaviour meant about us.
Perhaps unconditional love isn’t something different that we have to learn how to create. Perhaps it is what is already there when we begin to let go of the conditions we have attached to it.
So what does unconditional love actually look and feel like in everyday life?
That is where we go next, in Why Unconditional Love Is Harder to Receive Than to Give.
Articles in Love
Love: The True Nature of Your Higher Self
- Why Love Feels Like Something You Have to Earn
- What Unconditional Love Looks Like in Everyday Life