Can you help me with voice messages on WhatsApp please? I can’t understand anything. Stefano speaks too fast! This is Mom talking, from the height of her tech literacy. And Stefano is the guy who takes care of the garden. Then she gives me her phone to try it myself. I’m sure Stefano speaks normal -- you might have the 2x option on, I say confidently, before tapping on play. And sure enough, that was the case. You must have touched this button inadvertently; to put it back to 1x, just tap on it, and I do it for her. That’s it? That’s it. She plays the message at normal speed, turns to me, and goes: do I have to reply with another voice message now? You may, but you don’t have to. Thank God. And she goes ahead typing a slow OK on the phone with her index finger, face over screen.
At seventy-nine, Mom’s never had an email address, and got her first smartphone just a few years ago. She’s never owned a computer, never put her fingers on a computer keyboard, never looked at a computer screen, never knew what to do with a computer, never even wondered what she could do with a computer. She knew how to type on a keyboard, not sure she still does. In fact, she worked at a typewriters shop before meeting Dad, back in the early sixties. Then, at twenty-one, she had me. At twenty-two, my sister. And at twenty-four, my brother. She could have done things, like working or going back to school and completing her education. But she chose to be a full-time mom, and devote her life to us.
Whenever I was in a relationship that lasted more than a few months, at some point I’d get asked Why do you love me? Early on in my love career, I’d strive to find an answer. I wanted a rational answer. And I’d think about that a lot but after a while I’d come up with something to cut it short: here’s why, now let’s talk about something else. The truth of the matter was that I didn’t know. I had no idea. There sure was something, but I couldn’t figure it out. So I’d give a fake, yet meaningful-sounding, answer. Maybe it wasn’t fake and I didn’t even know. There was this need to explain, define, elaborate on, articulate love. Otherwise, the thinking went, it wasn’t really love.
Later on, I’d go straight to the point: I don’t know, I’d answer. Which was the truth. How could you not know? they’d reply. I want to be with you, rather than anyone else. If that’s the definition of love (or part of it), then I must love you. This type of reasoning regularly disappointed my partners. I have to admit I was never a good love model -- you couldn’t take my relationships as examples of quintessential love. My involvement was always intense, but also atypical. And, paradoxically, the minute I could articulate clearly why I (supposedly) loved someone, the love would end right there. As if bringing the whole experience into the rationality realm would taint it, somehow. Weird. But whether I knew (and could articulate) why or not, my love was conditional. It was tied to an expectation.
Conditional love is I love her because she’s beautiful and makes me laugh. It’s I love her because she calms me down, I love her because she makes me feel good (whatever that means). Unconditional love is I love my children. They refuse to obey when they’re little; I love them. They ignore my texts or don’t return my calls when they’re teenagers; I love them. They do things I disapprove of and piss me off when they’re grownups; I love them. That’s unconditional love. There are no conditions to my love. Unconditional love is real love.
Mo Gawdat says that unconditional love is the only kind of love that makes us happy. All the other kinds of love are anchored in conditions, tied to expectations. And anything that you attach to expectations, sooner or later, will change. If you love someone because they make you laugh or because of any other triggering condition, eventually you’ll change or they’ll change and that triggering condition will no longer exist. What will you do then? Maybe you’ll find a new triggering condition, and you’ll fall in love again. Rare, but possible. I know people who have experienced something similar. But chances are that you’ll find something else, somewhere else, in somebody else.
When you embrace unconditional love, something amazing happens, Gawdat continues: suddenly, you’re in control. Because the joy of unconditional love is to give it, there are no conditions. You’re not expecting anything in return. Instead, conditional love is reciprocity -- I’m going to love you for this and in return you’re going to do that for me. Of course nothing of this is contract-like, explicit, or clearly stated. It’s an unconscious process. But if you want to get to the core of unshakeable happiness derived from love, he says, learn to love beyond conditions. And if you can learn to love beyond conditions, the world will love you back without conditions.
Interesting idea. It’s hard to love someone without triggering conditions, immutably. We may say that’s not true. That, in fact, we do love our partners unconditionally (especially if we’re asked in the first innings of a relationship). Sure, we may say that. But our subconscious knows there’s something that we receive from our partner that keeps us going, that makes us love them as the “supplier” of that something. And our subconscious also knows that when that something disappears or gets less valuable to us, our love weakens or vanishes. We don’t want to admit it to ourselves, and that’s probably too crude a way to put it, but that’s how it goes.
Motherly love is the only form of unconditional love that I know. It doesn’t need conditions. It’s there, it will always be, no matter what. As a dad, I can hear myself say that I do love my kids unconditionally. But their mom’s love is more unconditional than mine, if that makes any sense. Mine might waver under certain remote circumstances that I couldn’t even fathom this very minute. Hers won’t, under any circumstances.
Why did you choose not to pursue anything besides taking care of us? I ask Mom, sometimes. What else would I do? she always answers, there’s nothing more important than you in my life. And if what’s most important in my life absorbs the entire me, so be it. I ask her if she has any regrets. Who doesn’t? she says. But I was never the kind of person who could do many things well, so I chose to focus on one, with the hope of doing it well. Also, I was blessed: life permitted me to focus on what I loved the most, and of that I’ll be eternally grateful.
Of course, things have not always been good, like in any family. Ebb and flow, ups and downs, rain and shine. But for Mom, taking care of us was always unconditional and uncompromising. I’m lucky to have had the best upbringing. From her I got a passion for books and cooking and dogs. On unpleasant things, I got the notion that everything passes, sooner or later. That we have to look beyond the bad, at the new good that will come again. The idea of life’s circularity, of things and situations that depart and return. That an approximation is better than nothing. That I should trust my gut, always. And smile, if I want a smile back. That I should always look for the silver lining -- if you don’t see it, look harder, cause it’s always there. When you take a medicine, you really have to think that it will do good to you, she’d always say when I was a kid, home sick. If you don’t help it out yourself, it won’t cure you!
And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make, goes The End, a beautiful song by The Beatles. I’m listening to it right now, as I close this piece. And as much as I’ve always loved that line, for the first time I think that that’s not always the case.
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Oh wow. All true. Unconditional love (in the true sense of the word, in its all-encompassing meaning) is only motherly love. And it can't be an opinion, it's just like that. But perhaps stupidly or perhaps because I'm not particularly knowledgeable, I ask myself: but why? Or why?
And then: why isn't it the same for children towards their parents ? Don't get us wrong, I love my mother immensely, she truly is the most important person to me. But I see it, I feel it, a mother's love is "visceral". So it naturally arises to me that if basically we are potentially capable of feeling such love, why don't we also feel it for "the other" in the broadest sense and in every moment ? Maybe a little out of presumption: I don't think it's a lack of experience. Even those who declare eternal and infinite love, I don't believe it. Utopic . There will always be something conditional. In the end, we love others because they make us feel good, because they trigger something in us (endorphins or who knows what else), because they often let us know aspects of ourselves that we hadn't considered before. And then doesn't this turn in an egocentric sense into self-love ? And then there comes a point in which something changes, something changes us, or perspectives, expectations change, we no longer want what made us feel good, actually maybe sometimes it happens that we want to go through something that makes us "feel bad". Well, falling in love yes, we could define it as unconditional: “we don't see anything” ! We don't even know the other completely, we don't see or don't want to see defects, etc. But it is clear that falling in love does not last forever.
This does not mean that we will all experience a delirious happiness, but not unconditional in the true sense of the term, of total acceptance of others.
And nothing wrong with conditional love which is reciprocity, perhaps the trick is to find a reciprocal balance every time, together. It can be difficult because it involves changing, keeping up with each other and finding a trigger every time, but it is possible. Rare.
Despite everything, even a little sarcastically I can also admit that love generates love (my mother has always tried to inculcate this in me. Maybe she succeeded). An approximation is better than nothing.
This is a love letter.