This is a very good question and one I have been spending a lot of time thinking about. Unconditional love should be between a parent and child, although we know sometimes it isn’t. As for adult love, it should be conditional to a degree, meaning that you cannot sacrifice who you are for the other person. If someone’s actions / behavior is at your expense this is not healthy and you should try to see if you can fix the problem. Right now it sounds like you two have some major differences which does not have to be a deal breaker as some people can learn to accept each others differences and be together. For your situation I would think very carefully about your future. If a man is with a woman who earns more and is more driven this can eventually start impacting his ego and he might do things to make him feel better – think affair.

Essentially the person who you choose to be your life partner is the most important decision of your life so you need to think not only unconditional love but long-term compatibility. From what I have learned is that there are times you might not love your partner but you choose to be with him and you choose loving actions. This is what people mean when they say relationships are work but it needs to be work from both sides.
Best of luck to you

To me “unconditional love” means loving someone and accepting all of them, not just the “good” or the times when they behave lovingly towards you. I would say that I love my mother and sister unconditionally, though sometimes they make me so angry I could spit! I love my partner, although he annoys me to no end some days!

“Unconditional love” transcends negative emotions that pop up for all of us from time to time. We respect the recipient of our love–and they hopefully respect us–enough to forgive a little anger once in awhile.

Is this love perfect? Not at all. Love occurs between human beings, who are imperfect creatures, so it will be fundamentally flawed. Loving unconditionally means accepting love complete with human imperfections.

Dear Sapnap3:

Good communication there with your boyfriend, and it makes sense. Now we know why it is not too cold for him to play soccer and why it is too cold for him to hike. I didn’t think of it yesterday when I read your original post, that this could be the reason. It is so important, for this very reason, to ask questions and listen and ask again, so we have the correct information.

Otherwise we act on assumptions that are often enough false.

I can see that you didn’t experience unconditional love from your parents, and from my experience this is very common. It was a surprise for me when I realized this very reality. I heard so often that there is nothing stronger than a mother’s love. No, I found out, there is nothing stronger than a daughter’s love.

anita

Dear Sapnap3:

I went over your 44 threads, from your July 7, 2013 first post (about 2 years before I first participated in these tiny buddha forums), to your last post on Nov 9, 2020, which you addressed to me.

I ran some things through Copilot (AI) earlier this morning, a resource I didn’t know about until late 2024. But then, I had to get off the computer, and back to my phone, and am too low tech to access Copilot from here. But I continued to read many of your posts using my phone.

This is my understanding this morning, 5 years, 6 months & 3 days since you last posted:

You grew up a very lonely child, emotionally unattended to, severely emotionally neglected.

So much so, that at 6 or 7, you kept seeking the only attention you got back then: that of a 60- year-old man, a neighbor, who sexually molested you, touching you at 6, 7 year-old sexually and having you touch him back in that way.

You never told your parents about it back then or later because (at least from one point onward) you believed that your mother (or both of your parents) would blame you for it.

But at one point, as an adult, when you visited your parents in India, you were groped by an accountant who provided accounting services to your parents, and this time, you DID tell your mother about it and hoped or expected that she no longer use his services.

Her response: she said that he was probably just trying to be friendly, and regardless- she’ll continue to use his services because he charged less money than other accountants.

Talking about money, at one point, your mother referred to you as her “retirement fund”-

You were the only one among your (much older) siblings who had American education and was making serious money.

You felt an obligation to take care of your parents financially and felt a mix of love, anger and guilt about it.

In your adult relationships with men your attachment wounds were understandably activated and you clung too strongly to them, fearing the abandonment you experienced as a child.

You started posting here about one such relationship that ended in a breakup that devastated you.

On April 12, 2016, when you started this thread, you wrote that you lost your father and looking back, you could see that he loved you a lot and made you feel wanted.

Clearly, he didn’t make you feel wanted as a child or during all of your formative years. But we have a way of softening memories (nostalgia) so to comfort ourselves.

Two days later (above), you wrote that your mother is “very loving” but loves your older sister (who was her youngest daughter for 9 years before you were born) unconditionally, regardless of her poor choices (in your mother’s evaluation), but expected you, Sapnap3, to be perfect, thinking of you as her “trophy child”, using you to show off to others.

In your last thread on the forums, you shared that you were moving to Chicago where your mother was living at a time so to be with her.

In my post to you back then, I reminded you of what she did that harmed you (I realized only today that I made a mistake in that post- I thought that your mother excused the 60-year- old man who abused you at 6, when she was really referring to the accountant who groped you as an adult).

You posted for the last time on Nov 9, 2020, a reply to me. In your last reply you defended your mother, the woman who you truly loved unconditionally ( I am referring to the title of this 10 year-old thread(.

I would like to continue this later.

If you are reading this, Sapnap3- and it would be very unlikely, given the time that has passed- I hope that you’re doing well.

🙏 🌿 ✨️ Anita

WOW, Peter: brilliant and easy for me (!) to understand, I am in awe of the perfection of your message. In my mind, it’s Perfect.

I never read anything like that on unconditional love.

This is a message I wish lots of people would read.

I’ll let myself dance with your words instead of Analyzing them- next.

💃 Anita

“To be present is to see the other person as they are: their habits, their evasions, their peculiarities, the parts we don’t fully understand. And to meet that without the immediate reflex to fix, improve, or measure them against who they should become.”-

It just occurred to me that it’d be a good idea to have the above said as part of wedding ceremonies.

And if implemented in marriages, how much love-missed misery could prevent.

* Notice: “love-missed misery”- that’s my word-dance 🙂

“But perhaps the practice shifts here. Not toward perfect, unconditional love, but toward a willingness to notice when we’ve left presence and to return.”-

To return to the promised land.

“Presence is not passive. It is attentive, responsive, quietly engaged”-

You’ve been practicing this kind of presence for a long time here in the forums. I remember you were accused of being passive months ago, in one of the threads. You responded with a uniquely engaged-kind of grace- not defensiveness, not offensiveness.

If only world politics was run in this spirit of grace.

“Is this a reality we can stand within?”- to stand within (to not shake it, fight it, turmoil-it).

To stand within it. To B and let B.

To not exert power-over, or to submit to power-over. To void the human power quest- in relationships, personal and global- bombs, nuclear, violence.

But I digress or not. Not.

Ani-natta-nita