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Today's
Meditation:
Thank you, Rachel, for saying something that needs to
be said, again and again and again. All true love is
unconditional. Anything else is not love, but needs
to have another name. "Unconditional
love"? What can that possibly be? Can we
actually qualify love? And if we do, are we doing so
accurately? Love, we know, is simply love, and the
idea of giving it any other name seems more like an effort
for us to justify not loving some people while loving
others.
Her focus on perfectionism in relation to love is
interesting. Perfectionism is a disorder that makes
people so tied to outcomes that they have to try to
control all of the processes that lead to the
outcomes. In relationships, a perfectionist will try
to get the other person to do things in certain ways, to
talk in certain ways, to act in certain ways. And
the message that the perfectionist sends is, "I'll
love you as long as you do things right." In
other words, "As long as I approve of all that you
do, we'll be okay."
Looking at life this way can keep us from getting all that
we can out of our experiences here. Expecting people
to be certain things and to act in certain ways keeps us
from getting to know those people as they are, as opposed
to how we want them to be. And if someone we love
wants us to act in certain ways and say certain things, and rejects us if we don't
live up to those expectations, then we have to realize
that that person was willing to share approval, but not
necessarily love.
I don't want to give approval dressed up as love. I
want to share love with my fellow human beings. And
while approval can do a lot for some people in some
situations, it certainly is no substitute for love.
And the term "unconditional love" really doesn't
make sense when we think about it, does it?
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