Conditional vs. Unconditional Love

why privileging the latter and ignoring the former ruins our chances of getting sh*t done

I’ve come across a bunch of folks lately who, after a mind blowing, heart opening experience of cosmic unity, decide that it’s time to love everyone in their lives utterly unconditionally.

This is a tragic error of cosmic proportions.

Let’s unpack exactly why, and what to do instead.

First, we’ve gotta acknowledge the temptation of “loving everyone unconditionally” and why it’s such a sucker punch.

You typically get to that conclusion from one of two directions: inspiration or revelation.

Inspiration is a contact high. You go to church and read about JC kicking it with lepers and hos and decide that’s the high road you wanna take too.

Or maybe you read The Prophet or the Alchemist and get all fired up and figure this is the Noble and Virtuous Path from here on out.

Regardless of who sparked it, Inspiration is largely a path of emulation.

Monkey see, monkey gonna tryna do.

Revelation is a more direct hit.

Especially these days when everyone and their mothers are hooking down psychedelics, huffing and puffing with breath work or fiddling and diddling themselves to tantric union–we’ve got no shortage of paths up Love Mountain.

Zooted to the gills on feel good neurochem like dopamine, anandamide, oxytocin, and endorphins, why, of course we feel the unity in all the things, the illusion of separateness, and the somatic certainty that love is all we need!

Down the mountain we come, dispensing flower petals and shit-eating grins.

We are that enlightened. We can hold that much love!

So we love bomb our stoner brother-in-law who’s been driving us crazy and is late on his rent.

We give our marginally competent CFO a thirteenth chance because, after all, their childhood money traumas made it hard for them to make reasonable financial forecasts.

We forgive the friend who dicked us over on a business deal because they were only the universe reflecting our own scarcity.

We strive to feel compersion for the lover who just can’t seem to stop sampling the greener grasses (and asses) as they help us heal our own poor attachment style.

It’s all exactly perfect!!!

For a minute.

Then we endure the increasing cognitive dissonance as their errors and our frustrations pile up.

This continues until we either blow up and unleash all of our pent up frustrations (which is very un-enlightened of us, we know).

Or we frantically double down on our pursuit of Unity until all our petty concerns once again dissolve into the white light of Cosmic Consciousness (whew!).

But here’s the thing:

Loving someone Unconditionally works in two, and only two situations.

Situation One: You really are mind-melded Soul Mates and there’s no daylight between you.

Situation Two: You love them at arms length and never need anything from them.

For everyone in between, big huge important chunks of our love for them are absolutely conditional! We definitely do need something(s) from them.

Our love is conditional upon them:

Keeping their word.

Pulling their weight.

Watching our back.

Chipping in for the tip.

Doing their share of the dishes.

Hustling back on defense.

Keeping it in their pants.

Showing up as a halfway decent person.

Whatever has led us to be interdependent with this fellow human. Those are the conditions of our love.

And when and if they (or we) don’t show up as agreed, it’s our duty and obligation as good friends, parents, lovers, clients, teammates, neighbors or colleagues to name those glitches or breaches and sort that shit out.

Hate the sin. Love the sinner.

Written out like this, it seems unremarkable and obvious.

But in practice, we’re forever messing this up.

“We’re perfect exactly as we are,” Suzuki Roshi reminds us, “and we could all use a little work!”

But when we call each other out about our behaviors (necessary and reasonable), we often collapse as if our very essence is being attacked (brutal and rarely helpful).

Which is a shady non-violent communication workaround for accepting responsibility for our actions.

Don’t confuse the Soul with the Role.

Your immortal soul? Why of course I have unconditional love for it/you and wish you the absolute utter best on your journey!

God speed, and all that.

And you can fuck things up almightily, disappoint me constantly IRL and I can still hold to that unconditional love for your immortal soul.

(I’m just never gonna expect you to catch me again after what happened last time).

But your contractual role that I meet you in? (whether that’s relational, legal, professional or ethical).

Well, for that my friend, we have rubrics, scorecards, norms, expectations and agreements.

And when the dropped balls and error messages pile up, we are obligated to sort it out at the level of those roles and agreements, not at the level of “soul agreements” no matter how profound that cacao ceremony was last weekend.

Because here’s the thing: holding each other accountable and not dissociating from the nuts and bolts of commitments is how we forge and temper our relationships into something truly remarkable.

It’s how we get to high performing group flow (ask any NBA championship team, world-class band, or tier one spec ops outfit), it’s how we get to thriving partnerships and families, it’s how we build organizations that change the world.

And we don’t get there by glimpsing Unity Consciousness in a peak state, and becoming egoically attached to all that sweet, sweet non-attachment.

We don’t get there by spiritually bypassing the nitty and gritty in favor of the vague and fuzzy.

We don’t get there by confusing or conflating Soul with Role.

The first is timeless and without conditions.

The second is time-bound and the foundation of our relations.

We need ‘em both to get sh*t done.

Next week gonna unpack how to blend both using a cool model from Harvard Business School and a much tighter definition of tantra than we’re used to…