In my mind, conditional love always had to do with acceptance. If you love someone unconditionally, you love them for who they are, you admire their existing qualities. By contrast, loving someone conditionally means that you will love them on condition that they acquire some additional qualities. This is why it is considered to be toxic—conditional love is not really about the person being ‘loved’, rather about an image of what that person could become.
We can quantify this concept in quite a neat way. Say that for any kind of love, there is a certain image of the loved person (Bob) in the head of the loving person (Alice), that represents the best, most lovable version of Bob. We will call this image BOB. Now, some qualities (or ‘conditions’) of BOB (say, N of them) may already be present in Bob (say, M out of N). Let’s define the conditionality of Alice’s love for Bob by the ratio (N-M)/N. That way, if this ratio is 0, that is, M = N, then all of BOB’s qualities are already in Bob, i.e. Alice loves him for who he is, unconditionally. If, on the other hand, this ratio is 1, that is, M = 0, then Bob is simply out of the equation—he doesn’t even intersect with his image. Quite amusingly, in this model, it is the perfectly conditional love that would make no distinction between people and worms, because the object really doesn’t matter. If a worm could smile and talk and walk like BOB, Alice would readily love this worm (with a conditionality of 0, by the way) like she never loved Bob.
We can see that my definition is actually roughly equivalent to yours. If Alice pulls Bob closer after a bad speech, it means that Alice is fine with who Bob is now, i.e. Bob’s qualities somewhat align with BOB’s.
Much like your notion of unconditional love, a conditionality of 0 is practically impossible. Bob needs to be a complete saint to perfectly align with BOB (or Alice needs to have really low standards). There will always be something we will want to change about our partners—bad habits, speech patterns, their attitude, etc. But a low conditionality shows that we are already with the right person, while a high conditionality indicates that we are trying to turn them into something they are not.
I think, by defining conditional love precisely in this way, we are moving away from the actual usage of that term.
> By contrast, loving someone conditionally means that you will love them on condition that they acquire some additional qualities.
One particular contra-example I can think of is, conditional love based on the income of someone. I think leaving a spouse or friend once he loses a job, and is no longer capable of making the same amount of money, is generally accepted as conditional love. But it doesn’t fit the description above. Bob, in this case, was already rich, but he loses that “condition” when he loses his job.
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.
In my mind, conditional love always had to do with acceptance. If you love someone unconditionally, you love them for who they are, you admire their existing qualities. By contrast, loving someone conditionally means that you will love them on condition that they acquire some additional qualities. This is why it is considered to be toxic—conditional love is not really about the person being ‘loved’, rather about an image of what that person could become.
We can quantify this concept in quite a neat way. Say that for any kind of love, there is a certain image of the loved person (Bob) in the head of the loving person (Alice), that represents the best, most lovable version of Bob. We will call this image BOB. Now, some qualities (or ‘conditions’) of BOB (say, N of them) may already be present in Bob (say, M out of N). Let’s define the conditionality of Alice’s love for Bob by the ratio (N-M)/N. That way, if this ratio is 0, that is, M = N, then all of BOB’s qualities are already in Bob, i.e. Alice loves him for who he is, unconditionally. If, on the other hand, this ratio is 1, that is, M = 0, then Bob is simply out of the equation—he doesn’t even intersect with his image. Quite amusingly, in this model, it is the perfectly conditional love that would make no distinction between people and worms, because the object really doesn’t matter. If a worm could smile and talk and walk like BOB, Alice would readily love this worm (with a conditionality of 0, by the way) like she never loved Bob.
We can see that my definition is actually roughly equivalent to yours. If Alice pulls Bob closer after a bad speech, it means that Alice is fine with who Bob is now, i.e. Bob’s qualities somewhat align with BOB’s.
Much like your notion of unconditional love, a conditionality of 0 is practically impossible. Bob needs to be a complete saint to perfectly align with BOB (or Alice needs to have really low standards). There will always be something we will want to change about our partners—bad habits, speech patterns, their attitude, etc. But a low conditionality shows that we are already with the right person, while a high conditionality indicates that we are trying to turn them into something they are not.
I think, by defining conditional love precisely in this way, we are moving away from the actual usage of that term.
> By contrast, loving someone conditionally means that you will love them on condition that they acquire some additional qualities.
One particular contra-example I can think of is, conditional love based on the income of someone. I think leaving a spouse or friend once he loses a job, and is no longer capable of making the same amount of money, is generally accepted as conditional love. But it doesn’t fit the description above. Bob, in this case, was already rich, but he loses that “condition” when he loses his job.
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.