Of course, “conditional love” is considered a vague term for a reason. We can try to wrap it in a logically strict definition, but it will never quite capture the entirety of the concept. However, with your particular example I might actually disagree. A person’s income is not really a quality, rather a consequence of internal factors such as persistence, intelligence, etc., as well as external factors such as luck. In the situation where Bob loses his job and can no longer find a new one, we may assume that he was just lucky to get it in the first place. In other words, Alice has been mistaking Bob for BOB while he was making a lot of money, falsely assuming it was because he is smart and hard-working. And when Bob lost his job, Alice saw his real internal qualities and left him, because she was loving BOB all along. In this case, Alice’s conditional love is quite well-explained by my definition.
This is in no way to claim that my definition is a precise representation of the real meaning of conditional love. In fact, I’m sure it possible to turn the story about Bob-losing-job to act against my definition as well. For example, if Alice knew all along that Bob was a sore loser from a rich family, and she loved him only for the money. At this point, however, I find it difficult to call this “love” at all… looks more like a cold play by Alice, which should be described by a different model altogether.
The point is, real-life situations have enough detail and nuance to fit them to almost any chosen formal frame. And this is good—it means that we can legitimately use many of our abstract theories, as long as they give us useful results. For example, I could model human relationships with topological spaces, or probability distributions, or with the Theory of Evolution, or with particle physics. All of these models will produce results whose significance will depend on the degree to which the models are appropriate. It’s okay that we are “moving away from the actual usage of that term”, as long as our abstraction holds a logical connection to the original idea. I think, my model of conditional love does have that connection.
Of course, “conditional love” is considered a vague term for a reason. We can try to wrap it in a logically strict definition, but it will never quite capture the entirety of the concept. However, with your particular example I might actually disagree. A person’s income is not really a quality, rather a consequence of internal factors such as persistence, intelligence, etc., as well as external factors such as luck. In the situation where Bob loses his job and can no longer find a new one, we may assume that he was just lucky to get it in the first place. In other words, Alice has been mistaking Bob for BOB while he was making a lot of money, falsely assuming it was because he is smart and hard-working. And when Bob lost his job, Alice saw his real internal qualities and left him, because she was loving BOB all along. In this case, Alice’s conditional love is quite well-explained by my definition.
This is in no way to claim that my definition is a precise representation of the real meaning of conditional love. In fact, I’m sure it possible to turn the story about Bob-losing-job to act against my definition as well. For example, if Alice knew all along that Bob was a sore loser from a rich family, and she loved him only for the money. At this point, however, I find it difficult to call this “love” at all… looks more like a cold play by Alice, which should be described by a different model altogether.
The point is, real-life situations have enough detail and nuance to fit them to almost any chosen formal frame. And this is good—it means that we can legitimately use many of our abstract theories, as long as they give us useful results. For example, I could model human relationships with topological spaces, or probability distributions, or with the Theory of Evolution, or with particle physics. All of these models will produce results whose significance will depend on the degree to which the models are appropriate. It’s okay that we are “moving away from the actual usage of that term”, as long as our abstraction holds a logical connection to the original idea. I think, my model of conditional love does have that connection.