The Love You Do Not Have To Deserve

Agape names love given without regard to the merit of the recipient. It enters Western thought through the Greek of the New Testament and the enormous theological apparatus built on top of it, and it has a secular afterlife in every claim anybody has ever made about unconditional love.

Anders Nygren, writing in the 1930s, drew the contrast with eros as sharply as it can be drawn. Eros is motivated: it is called out by the value of its object, and you love because of something. Agape is unmotivated in that sense: it is not drawn out by the beloved's qualities, and it confers value rather than responding to it.

Most theologians and philosophers now think Nygren overstated it, and that no real love is as pure as either half of his pair. The contrast survives as a distinction rather than as a taxonomy, and it is useful in exactly that form.

Because here is the uncomfortable question, and it is entirely secular.

If somebody loves you regardless of who you are, in what sense are they loving you?

Love that responds to nothing about the person has a strange property: it would be identical if directed at somebody else. Being loved unconditionally can therefore feel less like acceptance and more like being interchangeable, which is the opposite of what the phrase is meant to convey. People say they want to be loved for themselves and they also say they want to be loved unconditionally, and those are not obviously the same request. They may be opposite ones.

The standard secular example is parental love, which is routinely described as unconditional and is the closest most people come to observing the thing.

Whether any parent achieves it is an empirical question rather than a definitional one, and it is not a comfortable one to investigate. The attachment research in the last book of this course is largely about what happens when the availability is inconsistent, and the finding is not that love was absent but that its reliability is what the child was measuring.

Here is an exercise that makes the abstraction concrete, and most people dislike it.

Take somebody you love and ask what they would have to do before your feeling changed. Not what would make you leave, which is a different question, but what would change the feeling itself. Most people want the answer to be nothing. Most people, on honest inspection, find a limit somewhere, and the limit is usually further out than they feared and closer in than they claimed.

The live question is not whether unconditional love exists in pure form. It probably does not, and a love with genuinely no conditions may be a policy rather than a relationship. The live question is whether a relationship is improved by the pretence that the conditions are absent.

There is a case for the pretence. Security is valuable, and a person who believes the floor is solid behaves differently from one who is testing it. There is a case against, which is that undisclosed conditions are discovered at the worst possible moment, by being crossed.

This course does not resolve it, and neither has anybody else. What it can do is give you the words to see that it is one question rather than a feeling, which is the job the first book was always for.