What’s love got to do with it?
If Tina Turner is now singing to you, you're welcome. 😬
Until recently I never really understood that love is not meant to be conditional.
Really.
Love requires no reason to surface. Love requires no performance at all.
That might feel itchy to you if you were raised in a culture of conditional love. The one that has you whispering I’ll love you if…
If what?
Such a loaded question.
In the movie Dirty Dancing, we get to explore love based on the characters' ability to overcome social barriers suggesting that love is conditional on achieving a certain level of equality. The move ends with a scene that breaks that conditional barrier. (It’s one of my favorite movie scenes.)
The series This Is Us explores how family love can be conditional due to personal expectations, secrets, and the impact of past choices on relationships.
In the series Mad Men we are invited to reflect on the conditional nature of love in the context of the 1960s corporate and societal norms.
These are just a few selections of pop culture that delve into the complexities of love. Exposing us to the diverse ways in which love can be affected by personal, societal, and emotional conditions. Hmmm.
It is not shocking to learn that it all starts when we are little humans. It’s how we were loved into being that sparks this conditioning.
From there, in our adulting, we go seeking conditional love. For me, I believed in my little heart that love required performance, it required me to do something.
As a child… I believed if I was good girl and well-behaved, then I was loveable.
As a teenager…I believed if I got good grades, then I was worthy of love.
As a young adult… I believed if I got a good job and worked tirelessly, then I would receive love.
As an adult… I believed if I could do for others, then I was deserving of love.
Unchain our heart.
When we subconsciously continue this patterning of seeking conditional love, we feed the loop by conditioning our love, placing expectations on family, partners and friends.
How about we break the loop. Unchain our hearts (thank you Joe Cocker, and you’re welcome).
What if we lived instead like love was free? From a knowledge and understanding that being loved and expressing love comes with no strings attached?
Admittedly, this practice does not come easily after a lifetime of conditioning. However, we are capable of building new neural pathways in the brain. The awareness alone can inspire us to love others just because they exist, no reason needed.
The research tells us we have to start with taking care of ourself first. It feels like a necessary reparenting. Investing the time to nourish our body with good food and exercise. Investing our energy on mental, physical and emotional wellness from the inside out. Filling ourselves up with self love is what makes our heart excited, then we are infused with the ability to create positivity resonance, and positively influence other humans in the circles we swim in.
We have opportunities for this kind of unconditional love all day, every day. Sometimes it’s easier to begin practicing with strangers, saying thank you, looking them in the eyes, sending them subliminal unconditional love just for being human.
I’m now thinking Tina Turner was wrong. Love is not a second hand emotion, it has everything to do with it.
Thoughts?
Resources:
🤓 Looking to explore unconditional love more deeply, I offer you a short course on the topic.
📖 Curious to read more? Dr. Barbara Fredrickson’s book, Love 2.0, defines our supreme emotion simply:
“Love is that micro-moment of warmth and connection that you share with another living being.”
🎧Listen to this podcast episode with Leonore Tjia about Radical Self-love. Warning: it will change you forever.
Like rewiring our whole brain, all that we were taught!