10/10/2026
Saturday morning musings after watching 273635 Instagram reels from 6am.
I watched a reel earlier that suggested there's no such thing as unconditional love. That all love is conditional.
And initially, I agreed. But the more I've thought about it, the more interesting the question has become.
We talk about unconditional love as though it's the purest form of love. The kind that survives absolutely anything. But surely we all have conditions, whether we consciously recognise them or not?
We fall in love with people for reasons. How they make us feel, the connection we share, their values, their kindness, the way they understand us. And when those things disappear, sometimes love disappears too. Or perhaps it doesn't disappear, but evolves into something completely different.
Then I started thinking about couples who've spent 40 or 50 years together, and what happens when one develops dementia.
If someone continues caring for their partner, despite no longer receiving the affection, companionship or recognition they once did, is that unconditional love? Or is it loyalty, commitment, a sense of responsibility, or simply believing it's the right thing to do?
And can it be all of those things at once?
Because loving someone, staying with someone and feeling responsible for someone aren't necessarily the same thing.
But then I came across a different way of thinking about it, and it's completely changed how I'm looking at the whole concept.
Maybe unconditional love isn't the absence of conditions. Maybe it's the capacity to keep loving when the original conditions have disappeared.
I absolutely love that thought.
Because the reasons we love somebody at 25 might be completely different from the reasons we love them at 65. Relationships change. People change. Our needs change. And perhaps love changes alongside them.
But there's another side to it. At what point does allowing love to evolve become continually sacrificing your own needs or boundaries to preserve a relationship?
And why do we place so much value on love lasting forever anyway? Surely a love that eventually ends can still have been completely genuine.
I've gone from being fairly convinced that unconditional love doesn't exist to wondering whether we've simply misunderstood what it means.
Does unconditional love actually exist, or do the conditions just change as we do?
