Unconditional Love is for Relatives, not Relationships

Love without condition is love without boundary, and love without boundary is bound to hurt

I blame Disney movies for making me believe in unconditional love. Something about a gorgeous stranger sulking over my comatose body in a selfless display of unyielding devotion caught my attention as a kid. As creepy as I find it now, back then, it made perfect sense. Boys grew up to marry their mothers’, girls grew up to marry their fathers’, both loved with a never-ending love, greater than the day they’d pledged it to one another, and all was happy in their happily ever after. Then reality struck, our perfect parents became ordinary people, and all of a sudden love wasn’t so simple anymore. My first heartache taught me a very valuable lesson, that love without condition was love without boundary, and love without boundary was bound to hurt. And it did, hurt pretty damn bad too. But not enough to make me halt my hunt for unconditional love. This particular guy may not have been capable of doing it right, but someone out there was, or at least I hoped. There was no way I was about to accept that I was both looking for and promising to give a love that was impossible to get from or give to an intimate partner. Nope. Something about this fantasy had to include the fairytale I’d spent my whole childhood hearing about, if not, I was in for a lifetime of…