Unconditional Love

There is a theory in our human existence we call unconditional love.  It is a mysterious and elusive concept, much more applicable to pets than people, really, but each of us searches, sometime endlessly for it.  I am not certain I have known unconditional love in the human realm.  I am not sure I needed to test it if I did find it, but I have most certainly tested it, assuming I have ever experienced it, and with that test, I have lost it.  You see, if we test that love, we know only how to test it to the breaking point, but theoretically, unconditional lover has no breaking point.  A conundrum is it not?

The closest I think humans get to unconditional love is that which we experience with young children and pets.  Young children will love you regardless of what you do to them and our history is replete with examples of children that have loved their parents, truly, deeply and unconditionally even while enduring the worst abuse imaginable.  Eventually however, children grow up and learn that their circumstances are unacceptable and learn not to love abusive parents, and this is as it should be, in my estimation.  The love of an abused child for their abuser is based on more of a dependence than love.  Pets on the other hand, never really figure out that they really should bite the hand that feeds them sometimes.  Getting kicked when their so-called master/owner comes home from a bad day at work is not in their job description, but, for whatever reason, they still wag their tails and love them in spite of it all.

Their remains, however, that concept, that yearning and that hunger we all have for unconditional love, no matter how unlikely it may be.  I am a romantic, and there are those that would say I am a hopeless romantic.  I prefer to think of myself as a hopeful romantic.  I still believe in the concept of almost unconditional love.  I think, like most men, I may have even found it a couple of times, but foolishly tested the limits of that love and lost them.  I think it was a result of youthful stupidity or maybe a disbelief that anyone could love me as deeply as I loved them.  A friend of mine told me years ago something wise and brilliant.  He said, "You cannot truly love another until you have learned to love yourself. For if you are not worthy of your own love, then how can it be a gift you value enough to give to another.  Certainly, if you are not worthy of self love then any love you give is worthless."

I do not look into the mirror each morning and marvel at what stares back at me and anyone that stands behind me and does is blind, but the woman that sees through the faults and the years, and particularly the miles, and sees something I have just come to see myself is the woman I seek in life.  She is the woman that sees everything there is to see about me, knows everything there is to know about me and likes me anyway.  This is unconditional love; the kind of love that endures and the kind of love that does not need to be tested.  It is there.  It is constant.  It is true, and it is as unconditional a love as we humans are able to give and receive.

I Think I have felt that love three times in my life.  Twice I felt it from another and once I offered that love to another.  Unfortunately, as they say about life, timing is everything, and what I felt from others was not what I felt for them and the one time I felt that way for someone, they did not return those feeling for me.  Hearts were broken and lives changed, some for the better, some for the worse, unfortunately; then we cry, but we change.  We improvise, we adapt, we overcome, but mostly we learn, and we become wiser, and we begin our search anew, wiser and smarter to be sure, but also with the knowledge that the adventure of finding unconditional love, though difficult and oft times painful, will bring us unimaginable joy that will make up for the pain, sorrow and heartache that we encounter on the journey to unconditional love.