Unconditional love between adults

It is regularly claimed, in therapy training, that unconditional love only exists toward children. This claim seems to me mistaken and harmful, because it conflates love with the romantic relationship, and prevents us from seeing how the former can nourish the latter.

A mantra in therapy training

In therapy training, in self-help manuals, in the popular psychology spread by podcasts, magazines and social media, one claim returns with the regularity of a mantra: unconditional love only exists toward children. Between adults, there would always be terms, limits, expectations. To want unconditional love from a partner would be an infantile demand, the sign of a regression, of pathological fusion, of an emotional dependency to be treated.

The claim is so widespread that it has taken on the consistency of self-evidence. It is repeated without being questioned, as an established fact of modern psychological knowledge. I want to question it, because it seems to me mistaken, and harmful in that it prevents us from thinking a dimension of the loving bond that deserves to be acknowledged.

Fromm, Rogers, and the hardening of their thought

The dogma has a history. It was built within mid-twentieth-century Anglo-Saxon psychoanalysis, mainly around John Bowlby’s attachment theories, and Erich Fromm’s work on the distinction between infantile love and mature love. In The Art of Loving (1956), Fromm distinguishes mature love, which rests on the equality and freedom of the partners, from infantile love, which seeks to recover, within the adult relationship, the fusion felt with the mother. He concludes that authentic adult love implies the recognition of separation between self and other, and therefore the acceptance that this love be conditioned by the reality of the other.

Carl Rogers, around the same time, theorizes within the therapeutic context the unconditional positive regard (1957). The therapist’s posture consists in welcoming the client without judgment, without condition, as if loving them unconditionally. Rogers is careful to specify that this holds for the therapeutic relationship, which is asymmetrical by construction, and he does not extend it to all adult relationships.

The synthesis that has prevailed since then, in therapeutic circles and beyond, takes elements from Fromm and Rogers, hardens them, and derives from them a norm according to which authentic adult love is conditional, and unconditional love regressive. This norm is now taught as established fact.

Dependency, implicit conditional love, mature unconditional love

The norm rests on the conflation of three things that must be distinguished. When someone speaks of unconditional love between adults, they may designate three very different realities, and the critique of the therapeutic dogma holds for the first of these realities, not for the other two.

The first reality is emotional dependency. “I need you to exist. Without you, I collapse. I cannot live if you leave me.” This posture is indeed problematic, because it places the other in an untenable situation, where they become responsible for the psychic survival of their partner. It is also destructive for the person who lives it, because it forbids them to become autonomous. Psychoanalysis is right to diagnose this as an immature organization, and therapy is right to seek to help it evolve.

The second reality is implicit conditional love. “I love you as long as you match the image I have of you. I love you as long as you play the role I expect. I love you as long as you do not put me in danger.” This love, which often presents itself as unconditional, is in fact conditional without knowing it. It collapses as soon as the other disappoints, changes, steps outside the frame. Therapy is also right to recognize it as a trap, because it cannot hold over the span of a life.

The third reality, distinct from the two preceding ones, is mature unconditional love. “I love you, without expecting anything in return, knowing that I do not love you for what you do nor for what you give me, but for the fact that you are. This love does not depend on your behavior toward me, nor on what you become, nor on the duration of our bond. It is.” This posture is neither a dependency nor a disguised conditional love. It is something else, which deserves a concept of its own.

The therapeutic dogma works by conflating the three. It takes the pathological features of the first reality and ascribes them to the third. It concludes that any claim to adult unconditional love is a regression. The conclusion is invalid, because it rests on a conceptual confusion.

Spinoza, Levinas, bell hooks: some company along the way

The idea of an adult unconditional love is not new. It runs through several major philosophical traditions, which would deserve to be taken seriously.

Spinoza, in the fifth part of the Ethics (1677), develops the concept of amor intellectualis Dei, the intellectual love of God, which he holds to be the highest form of human love. This love is not conditioned by what God gives us; it is the very joy of understanding that God exists and that we are part of it. Spinoza does not reserve this posture for the relation to the divine; according to him, all authentic love participates in this intellectual love, insofar as it loves what is, and not the image one makes of what is.

Emmanuel Levinas, in Totality and Infinity (1961), formulates ethical responsibility toward the other as infinite and prior to any condition. “The self, before the other, is infinitely responsible”, he writes in Ethics and Infinity (1982). This responsibility is not conditioned by what the other does, nor by what they give me, nor by our shared history. It precedes all calculation. Levinas speaks of responsibility rather than of love, but the structure is the same, a relation to the other that does not condition itself.

bell hooks, in All About Love: New Visions (2000), takes up the question head-on in the context of contemporary American relationships. She criticizes popular psychology for reducing love to a balanced emotional exchange, and argues for what she calls a love ethic, which includes responsibility, commitment, trust and respect, without however conditioning them on a symmetrical return. She takes up from Scott Peck the idea that to love is “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth”. This definition has nothing to do with an infantile regression.

Fabrice Midal, in his recent work on bonds, formulates a similar thesis, namely that we only exist through bonds, and that some bonds do not condition themselves, because they are constitutive of who we are.

Not confusing the unconditional with the limitless

Part of the misunderstanding comes from the confusion between unconditional and without limits. It is often supposed that if I love someone unconditionally, I have to accept everything from them, endure everything, refuse nothing. This interpretation is false, and it is what makes the concept worrying for therapists committed to the psychic health of their patients.

Unconditionality does not bear on the acts I am willing to accept from the other. It bears on the very fact of loving them. I can love someone unconditionally and forbid them to come into my home. I can love someone unconditionally and never see them again. I can love someone unconditionally and tell them that they hurt me, and move away. Love is love, limits are limits. To confuse them is to give in to an adolescent romanticism that imagines love absorbs everything.

This distinction makes it possible to respond to the most frequent objections to the concept. “But you cannot love unconditionally someone who is violent, toxic, manipulative.” Yes, one can. One can continue to love that person, to wish them the best, to recognize their humanity, while setting the necessary limits, up to no longer sharing one’s life with them, protecting the children, pressing charges or cutting off all contact if that is what must be done. Unconditional love obliges nothing other than to recognize that the other is. It does not oblige one to sacrifice oneself, to destroy oneself, to put oneself in danger.

This misunderstanding, which is massive, is perhaps what best explains the contemporary resistance to the concept. It has been confused with self-sacrifice, with submission, with self-erasure. Yet the unconditionality I am speaking of is compatible with a strong presence to oneself, with clear limits, with a firm refusal of mistreatment. It is a quality of love, not an erasure.

Loving is not being in a relationship

The other confusion that must be named, and which seems to me even more important than the first, is the one established between love and the romantic relationship. When unconditional love between adults is discussed, it is almost always imagined that the question is posed inside an ongoing romantic relationship, and the critique aimed at the concept is lodged in that supposition. But love overflows the relationship. We all know, without always drawing the consequences, that one can love people with whom one is no longer in a relationship, that one can love people who are dead, that one can love writers, artists, strangers, figures one will never meet.

That love is one of the clearest forms of love, precisely because nothing conditions it and it expects nothing. The love one has for a departed parent, for a friend who is gone, for a writer whose work one reads, is conditioned by nothing outside itself. One can live it alone, without interlocutor, without response. It exists in me, and it exists whether I share it or not. It is exactly the same structure as the unconditional love described in the preceding sections, simply carried by a situation in which the confusion with the relationship no longer arises.

To love without risk, without relationship, without anything in return, is easy, and everyone has done it at least once. The real subject is elsewhere. It is to understand how that love, whose existence we recognize without difficulty as soon as absent people are concerned, can inhabit and nourish present romantic relationships.

Adjusting the terms rather than conditioning the love

This is where thought becomes practical. When two people love each other and live in a relationship, moments inevitably come when the terms of shared life do not suit them. Rhythms do not match, inner territories are too different, one wants to live together when the other needs more solitude, one wants to be available all the time when the other cannot. If one confuses love with the relationship, one concludes almost always that love is in danger, that it is no longer there, that conditions must be negotiated to bring it back. The relationship becomes a bargaining table, in which each tries to have the other accept their own needs, for fear that otherwise love would be threatened.

If one knows that love is unconditional, that its existence does not depend on the terms of the relationship, the movement is reversed. Love is no longer at stake in the negotiation, it is what makes the negotiation possible. I know it is there, I have nothing to defend, nothing to wrest from the other through concessions. I can therefore, in confidence, work with the other to invent the terms that allow the relationship to exist and that respect the limits of each. If shared life does not suit us, we can decide not to live together, because we know it will not put our love in danger. If certain rhythms exhaust us, we can change them, without fearing that the change of terms will kill the feeling. The relationship serves the love, and not the other way around.

This reversal changes many things in the practical life of couples. Instead of expecting the other to fulfill the conditions I set, I can adjust the conditions so that the relationship is possible. Love stops being the reward for the other’s conformity to my expectations, it is recognized as a given, from which the terms can be discussed freely. Many people do this without theorizing it, by inventing forms of relationship offset from the dominant model: living apart while still loving each other, keeping loving bonds with former partners, not expecting the other to become what they are not. When this holds, it is because deep down they have made that distinction between love and the terms.

And when difficulty comes, when fear, fatigue, disappointment shake the relationship, one can, knowing that love is unconditional, reconnect to that source. The love is there, I know it, I do not need to obtain it through a new proof. I can from there continue to love, and look for the terms that allow the relationship to continue or, sometimes, that allow the relationship to take another form.

What I see around me makes this thought all the more necessary. Many relationships end in suffering because the terms no longer suit, and that inadequacy is interpreted as a disappearance of love. Yet love, in many cases, is still there, larger than the terms, more important than them. If the people involved had known that it existed without condition, they could have worked on the terms without fearing the loss of love, chosen other forms, or parted in the recognition of the bond that remains, rather than in the belief that everything is over.

What recognizing unconditional love makes it possible to hold

In the age of dating apps and the culture of swipe, of quick replacement, of the marketization of emotional bonds, the concept of adult unconditional love has a precise critical reach. It stands against the implicit logic of permanent partner evaluation and of trade-up, against the idea that any person in the couple is in principle replaceable by another. This logic is spread by the platforms, but also by certain therapeutic discourses that valorize self-love to the point of turning every relationship into an investment with personal returns.

To recognize the possibility of adult unconditional love is not to call for self-sacrifice, nor to call for staying in relationships that do harm. It is to name a quality of bond that does not reduce to balanced exchange, that is not measured in reciprocity, and which constitutes, for those who experience it, an existential point of reference. It is not to be confused with romantic passion, which can fade. It is not to be confused with attachment by habit, which is something else. It is the recognition that the existence of the other, independently of what they give me, is precious.

This recognition is what the Ancients called philia, in the lineage of Aristotle, what Christians called agape, what psychoanalysis sometimes calls true love by distinguishing it from desire and demand, in the lineage of Lacan. These traditions have not disappeared because they would be old, they have been forgotten because they disturb contemporary relational economies.

Philosophy has something to do in recalling them, not to bring back a morality prior to our time, but to name a dimension of the bond that our current categories no longer name, and whose recognition allows for freer relationships, because one ceases then to confuse the quality of the love with the conformity of the terms.