Maybe it’s the autism talking but conditional love is better than unconditional love.
People who love me unconditionally love an unchanging image of me that they hold in their heads. My family loves me unconditionally because they still link me with the image of their “son”. But their love is overbearing and controlling. They feel that their love entitles them to some right to pass judgement about my life choices, and they resent that I have changed my name and presentation to something that no longer matches the ideal that they love.
When you love a person for who they are, the love is inherently conditional because you recognise that the person might change. You love the person for a reason, and if that reason no longer holds (and another does not take its place) then that love might also not hold.
When someone tells me they love me unconditionally, what I hear is that they will always love me for the person I was at some point in time. Their love for me is grandfathered in, I’ve got love tenure. I don’t want that! I want the people close to me to continually love me for the person who I am.
Rather than someone loving you because they decided to at some point in the past, doesn’t it mean so much more for someone to think each day about whether they still love you and decide that they do? I want people’s love for me to be renewed daily.
