Thank you for your comment Zeb. It's very thoughtful and I appreciate you taking the time for your honest response.
I think that my use of "conditional friendship" in this article is a little different than the antonym of "unconditional love."
Someone who would "only be my friend when other people weren't around" is a friend only under certain conditions. What she was saying is "I like you, and I want to spend some time with you, but I will have to shun you and pretend you don't exist -- or at worst pretend to hate you, talk bad about you, curse you and actively vilify you -- when my other friends are around."
We all put conditions on our friendship and our relationships. There is, and should be, a point at which someone has unearned our trust and thus our active participation in a relationship with them. The idea of unconditional love is not that we will tolerate all behavior from our beloved, but that we will love them no matter what -- even if we have to testify against them in court and have them thrown in jail. A mother of a serial killer may still love their child even while they understand that they have to be jailed or even sentenced to death for their crimes. She can love them in spite of what they have done; it's her child, after all.
That type of love can carry on past divorce, separation, being beaten, being raped, being abused, being tortured and tormented. It's the great burden of the child who is abused by close family -- the child usually still loves their family members and relies on them for a variety of basic needs, including emotional. The goal of most child welfare agencies is to remediate the family so the child can return, and only to seek other permanent placements for a child when absolutely necessary. It's a basic recognition that there's a connection there that can't be taken lightly -- that disturbing it should only occur in the intractable cases.
That is a very very different issue than the "conditional friendship" idea. "I am only your friend under these conditions" is similar to conditional love -- which is NOT the polar opposite of unconditional love -- which I think of as "I will only love you under these conditions." The difference is how in-your-face these conditions are, how they undermine the security of the relationship, how they undermine trust, discourage intimacy and surrender in the relationship. I think of conditional love as the person who "loves you" until they find out that you're not a multi-millionaire after all, or until they find out that you're sterile and cannot mother/father children. How true is this love? There's an on-off switch for that love that can be flicked at will -- that's not the opposite of unconditional love, that's more like an illness of perception. The love was never real in the first place. I feel that way with conditional friendship -- someone who can flick the switch on the basic tenets of being humane to one's friends is not a friend. Not a real friend anyway. It's a cut below "fair-weather-friend" in my book (the friend who only calls when they need something or when things are going in a certain way in their life).
Anyway, the blog post is about my baggage with that "I can only like you if other people aren't present" shit. If my "friend" cares more about their appearance to others than about me, they're not a good friend. Other people stuck with me, publicly, and left the other group of friends who had vilified me. That's true friendship. That's seeing the value of a friend and following through with one's actions and behavior, and that's how I decided to choose/keep my friends.
I stopped talking to the conditional friend, period. She crossed the line. I still had love for her (that part is the unconditional part), and was sorely hurt and disappointed in her. Most of my hurt and disappointment was a correction in my perspective because I thought I meant more to her than that. For her to say she was certain of my innocence but not to defend it was a serious down-grade on the friendship I thought we had in the first place, and it was NOT that she was a shy and reserved person; she was quite vehemently outspoken and able to stand her ground for things she believed in. This was not a personality issue; this was a face-saving issue and she wanted to be "in the in crowd."
I still carry the hurt, the disappointment, in my once-best-friend. And I still carry love for her, honestly hoping that she's doing well and simply wanting to know whether she is OK. If she asked me to "friend" her on Facebook, I would, because it would allow me to just keep tabs on whether she's ok or not. I'd have a phone conversation with her, etc. I'd accept an apology. I might purge and cry and all that rot. I never turned my love for her into hatred. But I did relegate her to a persona-non-grata presence in my mind.
Comment by Crisses on September 10, 2011, at 07:57 AM
Retrieved from https://kinhost.org/Comments/Blog-The8-trackInOurHead-20110910T070938
Thank you for your comment Zeb. It's very thoughtful and I appreciate you taking the time for your honest response.
I think that my use of "conditional friendship" in this article is a little different than the antonym of "unconditional love."
Someone who would "only be my friend when other people weren't around" is a friend only under certain conditions. What she was saying is "I like you, and I want to spend some time with you, but I will have to shun you and pretend you don't exist -- or at worst pretend to hate you, talk bad about you, curse you and actively vilify you -- when my other friends are around."
We all put conditions on our friendship and our relationships. There is, and should be, a point at which someone has unearned our trust and thus our active participation in a relationship with them. The idea of unconditional love is not that we will tolerate all behavior from our beloved, but that we will love them no matter what -- even if we have to testify against them in court and have them thrown in jail. A mother of a serial killer may still love their child even while they understand that they have to be jailed or even sentenced to death for their crimes. She can love them in spite of what they have done; it's her child, after all.
That type of love can carry on past divorce, separation, being beaten, being raped, being abused, being tortured and tormented. It's the great burden of the child who is abused by close family -- the child usually still loves their family members and relies on them for a variety of basic needs, including emotional. The goal of most child welfare agencies is to remediate the family so the child can return, and only to seek other permanent placements for a child when absolutely necessary. It's a basic recognition that there's a connection there that can't be taken lightly -- that disturbing it should only occur in the intractable cases.
That is a very very different issue than the "conditional friendship" idea. "I am only your friend under these conditions" is similar to conditional love -- which is NOT the polar opposite of unconditional love -- which I think of as "I will only love you under these conditions." The difference is how in-your-face these conditions are, how they undermine the security of the relationship, how they undermine trust, discourage intimacy and surrender in the relationship. I think of conditional love as the person who "loves you" until they find out that you're not a multi-millionaire after all, or until they find out that you're sterile and cannot mother/father children. How true is this love? There's an on-off switch for that love that can be flicked at will -- that's not the opposite of unconditional love, that's more like an illness of perception. The love was never real in the first place. I feel that way with conditional friendship -- someone who can flick the switch on the basic tenets of being humane to one's friends is not a friend. Not a real friend anyway. It's a cut below "fair-weather-friend" in my book (the friend who only calls when they need something or when things are going in a certain way in their life).
Anyway, the blog post is about my baggage with that "I can only like you if other people aren't present" shit. If my "friend" cares more about their appearance to others than about me, they're not a good friend. Other people stuck with me, publicly, and left the other group of friends who had vilified me. That's true friendship. That's seeing the value of a friend and following through with one's actions and behavior, and that's how I decided to choose/keep my friends.
I stopped talking to the conditional friend, period. She crossed the line. I still had love for her (that part is the unconditional part), and was sorely hurt and disappointed in her. Most of my hurt and disappointment was a correction in my perspective because I thought I meant more to her than that. For her to say she was certain of my innocence but not to defend it was a serious down-grade on the friendship I thought we had in the first place, and it was NOT that she was a shy and reserved person; she was quite vehemently outspoken and able to stand her ground for things she believed in. This was not a personality issue; this was a face-saving issue and she wanted to be "in the in crowd."
I still carry the hurt, the disappointment, in my once-best-friend. And I still carry love for her, honestly hoping that she's doing well and simply wanting to know whether she is OK. If she asked me to "friend" her on Facebook, I would, because it would allow me to just keep tabs on whether she's ok or not. I'd have a phone conversation with her, etc. I'd accept an apology. I might purge and cry and all that rot. I never turned my love for her into hatred. But I did relegate her to a persona-non-grata presence in my mind.