Recently a friend started a Facebook conversation with a link to an article on unconditional love. This is a concept difficult enough for most people to digest even in its most prosaic and, to me, misunderstood form ("I love you no matter what. I will forgive you whatever you do. I will love you regardless of circumstances or what happens"). This is a lovely sentiment but probably not realistic, and moreover, not what "unconditional" means. Besides, promising to love someone no matter what they do seems a dangerous premise, since people sometimes do things so utterly unloveable the promiser is left in the position of having to make pesonal sacrifices to the promisee in order to maintain, however tenously or tortuously, that promise to love, and love involving sacrifice is not love. Sacrifice eventually breeds contempt, because "I did this for you and what have you done in return?"

It could even get worse than that.

Valentine's Day brings out the worst in a lot of people. They make wild, Hallmark-driven, chocolate-fueled promises and statements which, if one were to scratch the surface, would clearly violate common sense and one's survival instinct.

Yet I do subscribe to unconditional love, at least as defined by me, and that definition is a reasoned and rhetorical one, not some gauzy vision of hearts and flowers, pain and suffering.

In fact I have come to the conclusion that unconditional love may be the only sane and heathy kind there is. For me, anyway, I believe that.

Consequently I offer my love, defined, to those whom I love. To anyone I love in any of the ways one might love -- and there are several at least. Parental love is supposed to be unconditional but those parented grow and change. Brotherly love may also fall prey to that "But I never thought you'd start strangling small animals" dilemma. There are times when brotherly love becomes tolerance or even less.

Erotic love, which is defined by Erich Fromm as the equivalent of romantic love, is the subject of all the Valentine's Day hoopla anyway, the love of one person for another in a very specific and personal and, yes, an erotic way (bear in mind who Eros is and that for some of us, perhaps the healthiest of us, the romantic and erotic cannot easily be separated, and I for one do not embrace that other kind of love, that tolerance of the presence of another in my life simply because, well, if she weren't there I'd have to do everything for myself -- Grant Wood's "American Gothic" comes nightmarishly to mind.

No, I take no comfort from this "Til death do us part and it won't be long" sort of uneasy co-existence strategy, nor do I want to visualize any erotic business between those two up there, even without the pitchfork being involved.

Unconditional love, for me, means precisely what it says: I love you without conditions. I love you not because you love me, but only because I love you, I choose to love you, I find overwhelming reason for the love and affinity I feel, and if you do not love me in return or to the same extent or in precisely the same way, it makes no difference because I did not offer my love as a commodity to be exchanged in kind. I simply love you because you are you.  

There is, as with most other phenomena, a spectrum of form and intensity of even erotic or romantic love. Unconditional love, loving without expectation of compensation, is most easily understood as a way of appreciating another person who meets one's own criteria for what would make a perfect mate, friend, lover, partner in crime, etc. If I were to sit down and design the perfect life companion, if I were to create a spec sheet of traits, features, behaviors, all those things that make an individual who he or she is in his or her totality, then I would know what that person would look like, how she (straight male talking) would sound, think, act, feel, move, and probably most of all, adapt, because shit happens to people with physical bodies, and it's not always within their control. It is the whole person, now and in days to come. I would know that person if I were to perform that exercise.

Oddly enough, I did do that once, not realizing at the time what I was doing, during my single foray into pure fiction. In the fullness of time it became no longer fiction, but I did not realize what I had done until fairly recently. It is handy, because now I don't have to sit down and do it over again on purpose.

One could perform such a peculiar exercise then have the incredible luck to find at least one person who meets all the criteria but is not immediately and/or fully available, for any one of a host of possible reasons, for a committed relationship. One would have to know such a person fairly intimately, though, to be able to check off all the boxes on that spec sheet. This could lead to longing for a more perfect union with that person.

Such a union might not be in the cards. What then?

Then the concept of unconditional love  is called upon to perform its heroic duty. If indeed, as many claim, we are nothing more than the sum of our neurons and hormones, or if there is some other, more ephemeral process at work, we will still necessarily feel love for the "perfect" person (perfect for me, for you, for one, since no person is perfect in an absolute sense) because that person matches up with our every odd puzzle edge to make a perfect single form of two parts.

Does it matter, then, whether or not one gets to fully own that person? The very notion of ownership cancels out the possibility of love. Does it make love for that person any less real or any less consuming? No. What it does do, though, is put to the test the notion that there is such a thing as unconditional love.

^{C.D. understood unconditional love. Eventually so did Roxanne.}

It makes unconditional love, in fact, the truth about one's self, one's character, one's ability to truly love another for reasons not measurable in terms of license, agreement, church, state or social contract.

It means I will always be here, even if you are not, because it is not a transaction: it is a fact.

It is love without condition, without strings. It puts one in a terribly interesting position, too, because it makes it more than likely that finding someone with whom to settle down will be a task in which one is really forced to settle -- for less.

Surely there are arrangements of convenience, plenty of them, like the old bat and the dude with the pitchfork. I'd rather live alone, thanks, and I really don't love living alone.

I once made sacrifices for love, or so I thought, and I truly committed myself to that relationship even though more and more, hindsight being 20/20, I can see that there was no way it could end well, no way we could have ridden off into the sunset, because the truth is I settled. My committment was more like the sort of papers signed when one is fitted for a straightjacket and led to the padded cell.

But I was committed then, and was willing to do whatever it took. It didn't matter. It was not, in the end, enough. It never could have been. And the responsibility for that lay as much with me, for having compromised my own ideals, as with her for whatever perverse reason she had once thought we were a good idea. The words of Jazz Age poet Samuel Hoffenstein come to mind now, regarding that wonderful-while-it-lasted misalliance:

When you are tired of me and I look mournfully upon the sky

We shall be friends, I hope, and meet

And talk how times were sweet

When we were sure no sword could sever

Two people born to love forever.

I won't be going down that path again. I would rather have dear friends than betray what I already know, as Hoffenstein knew in his morose moment: that if it isn't right, it isn't likely to get right, that if the sex is good then maybe that's what one should stay for, if one stays at all, and not for the hope of being loved, appreciated, understood and accepted for whatver one is...without condition.

And so I throw this unconditional valentine into the cold late winter breeze, and maybe someone will catch it, or perhaps it will be found later, lying on the thawing ground, and picked up. Or maybe it will disappear into the mists of time, unnoticed.

It doesn't matter, you see, because I did it not for you, but me.