“In the name of God, I, ----- take you, ----- to be my wife, husband, to have and hold from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, until death does us part.” These are the words that couples swear to each other during the marriage day.
In reflection of the words vowed on the marriage day, couples are actually saying that “unconditional love exists”; loving each other in sickness and in health, for worse or for poorer, is possible.
The most frequent question that couples ask each other many times are those related to whether they are loved unconditionally, and they tend to ask the person they love; what do you love about me?
Such a question like “what do you love about me” can trigger relationship problems once answered explicitly because people are not happy with expectations, especially when they are honestly disclosed.
Teal Swan, the International Speaker, Spiritualist and Best- Selling author, argues that people crave to get unconditional love and therefore think it is the highest human virtue to adapt. Contradictorily, according to Swan claims, unconditional love does not actually exist.
She puts it; “To want unconditional love is to want a relationship where there is pressure on you without expectations.” With such belief, she says, we are not actually looking for love but a feeling of being loved and wanted to the degree that somebody pulls us in and keeps us with them.
Swan argues unconditional love is conversely given by a person’s primary partner because they are kind of close friends who have skin in the game.
“Primary partners are the people who are going to love you unconditionally because they are the people most affected by anything you do or anything you say, and to be unconditional, the person must be disconnected from the conditions around.
But with unconditional love, people are actually in a position where everything you do will not affect them because their unconditional love pulls them to love unconditionally. Whether you go home and burn your house down, they won’t be affected.” she argues.
“A friend is conditional at a certain level, but a primary partner is going to be more conditional than that. A primary partner is going to love with pressure and expectations,” she adds.
The reality in a relationship is that everyone has different conditions, and in fact, unconditional love is mythical and; on either way pressure or expectations work out
“Unconditional love is only found in the spiritual nature because to take something as part of you does not require compatibility,” she noted.
She believes unconditional love is gained in the context of spirituality because people are going to be one.
“There is no way to separate from the universe. This is why you get the out-of-body experience of the universe at large in what many call “God” being unconditional love because it sees you as part of itself. It cannot separate from you. It is not pushing you away. It’s deeply pulling you in.” she claims.
In physical reality, however, she argues, there are conditions relative to the relationship you choose and therefore emphasize that people should be straight to their conditions with other people.
“It is important to keep in mind that we have different and unique conditions for every different relationship that we come across, from coach’s relationships to business relationships to friends to siblings to husbands, to wives. We believe that unconditional love is being good, and therefore the conditions have to be unconditional, but it’s actually impossible.”
According to Swan, expressions of conditions make people feel shame about them, and therefore they decide to hide, but the suppressed expectation does not permanently go away.
“Just because we build shame around conditions, it doesn’t mean the condition vanishes. In fact, it stays there, but the person keeps it in her subconscious mind and denies it exists,” she adds.