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                                  %CONDITIONAL LOVE 870106

     Conditional love involves the offering of openness to
dialogue and  intimacy,  conditional upon  the  meeting of
certain  explicit or tacit conditions.   In the absence of
conformity  to  such conditions the conditional  lover  is
unwilling to perform the role of lover,  blocking  thereby
the service and sacrifice which are the essence of love.

     Conditional  love is a consequence of finitude.    To
survive  as  lovers  finite  creatures must take  care  of
themselves as well as of the needs of others.   A   person
who  pays  no attention to their own needs can  not  be  a
lover for long, especially in a society in which there are
few genuinely loving people.   If everybody  is possessive
and out to  meet their  own  needs,  it is difficult for a
truly self-less lover to survive for long without  putting
some conditions upon the expressions  of love.  Thus there
is a natural tendency to survive through conditioning  the
expressions of love.

     Totally  unconditional lovers run the risk  of  being
used  and abused by people who are not seeking  a  balance
between   personal  and  communal  integrity  and  so  are
dominated  by  selfish unbalanced motivations.    Enabling
such perverse people  to continue successfully in behaving
as they do without any honest  challenge  to their ways---
leads to  additional perversions.    Charitable challenges
are not obvious nor easy to consummate effectively.  It is
not an act of  love to  refuse to challenge disintegrative
behavior.    It is not an act of love  to refuse  to  call
people  engaged  in  disintegrative  behavior to  seek  to
promote balance between personal and communal integrity in
charitable  ways.    Neither  is  it  an act  of  love  to
callously   condemn  and  reject  the  person  trapped  in
disintegrative  behavioral  patterns.    The   integrative
alternative   to  dichotomous  extremes  is  usually   not
obvious.  The dichotomy is a consequence of disintegration
and engenders further disintegration.

                                                                                                                               
                         (c) 2005 by Paul A. Smith in      
                    (On Being Yourself, Whole and Healthy)  
                                                                                                                               
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