For the Merriam-Webster dictionary, “unconditional” is defined as “not conditional or limited.”
For my mother, unconditional love is not the absence of conditions, but the weight of constant presence.
My mother knows the art of split-screen living.
She consistently sends messages like ‘Where are you?’ and ‘Remember to eat and take your medicine regularly.’ Her phone remains face-up and notifications-on to answer regardless of when or where she is — during client meetings or at 3 a.m., even when she has to get up at 6 a.m. for work. Our lives blur at the edges — my tears become her sleepless nights, my success is her victory and my failure is her wound.
Through this invisible tether, I become familiar with the guilt of my delayed replies, knowing that somewhere, she is waiting.
Stanford University Davis-Brack Professor Hazel Rose Markus and University of Michigan Robert B. Zajonc Collegiate Professor of Psychology Shinobu Kityama state that Eastern cultures tend to perceive the self as fundamentally interconnected, and this self-construal can influence “cognition, emotion and motivation.” My mother and I understand this interdependency in our shared emotional monism despite being 8,157 miles apart.
This singularity is intensified in her relationship with my father. They don’t have best friends, they told me, because they have one another. They do activities together and come home to each other. My parents share everything and hold no secrets because the concept of privacy between them seems foreign.
This is a fusion in which two individuals are so intertwined that they become indistinguishable. My parents call this unconditional love.
Unconditional love is unchanging, as its presence is without the consideration of another entity; it exists as itself, independent of changing circumstances. Similarly, the participants in a union would seek to move and exist as a singular — two made into one. This idea is perpetuated through media like Hallmark romance movies, in which the ending is usually the joining of a man and woman in a romantic relationship after troubles.
But philosopher Gillian Rose writes in her memoir “Love’s Work” that “exceptional, edgeless love effaces the risk of relation.”
According to Rose, a genuine relation requires differentiation, precisely because loving involves labor. Only in recognizing the other person as an other, therefore recognizing yourself as an individual, can you grow and develop, she said.
This is where the conditionality of love lies — in existing as yourself and in the limitation of yourself within a union.
Understandably, there is less risk in existing as one entity, instead of as separate entities. But eliminating risk threatens the possibility of true love and freedom. Paradoxically, allowing otherness and acknowledging the space for separation makes genuine recognition possible.
However, this does not mean that love is based upon rigid qualities of the other person.
In a 2003 article, Professor of Political Theory at the University of Leeds Derek Edyvane argues that because people and their values evolve, it is implausible that love is solely contingent upon unchanging properties.
Within the continuum of time in which relationships and humans operate, the very unchanging nature of unconditional love would deny the ever-evolving character of relationships.
In fact, love involves valuing of the relationship itself — the make-up of different individuals, not just individual qualities. Focusing on the relationship provides a stable foundation that can withstand changing individual characteristics.
In this case, is not about perceiving love as dependent on specific qualities, but the recognition of otherness and boundaries as a whole — where one ends and another begins. Thus, there exists a void between an individual and another, and accepting this void is essential to building an authentic connection.
True perception needs distance. One loves by seeing something exactly as it is, neither more nor less. Authentic love, therefore, requires separation at the same time the connection is maintained. This tension is why love requires, and is, labor — there is work involved in looking beyond what you wish to see.
While I understand the different conceptualization of love and relationships between my mother and me, I have chosen a different kind of labor of love. This is not a rejection of her or how she expresses love; I see her fears, her anxiety, her love and care. Both of our forms of love require their own kind of labor: hers in a constant presence and mine in distance.
Now, I check in frequently with her, although she understands my silence not as a rejection of our connection, but a matter of personal schedule. In this way, we have accepted our conditionality that lies in the differences between us.
As Rose says, “Acknowledgement of conditionality is the only unconditionality of human love.”
The ability to recognize love in all of its contradictions and maintain it is henceforth what I posit as conditional love.
Contact Val Nguyen at vnguyen4@oxy.edu
