I’m sitting on my boyfriend’s bed. It’s the color you would associate with being in the military. Just a sand brown that you’re more likely to see on the walls of an older home than on a bedspread. But then again, dudes be doing stuff like this.

I clean, therefore, I am

I can’t come to his house and not clean. First, because I love him and want him to have a clean home. Secondly, because I would like to exist in the home without stepping on crumbs everywhere. It’s one of THOSE boys houses; everyone knows them. The ones where it’s a bunch of dudes together and no one cleans because no one else cleans. So we create a standout on who's gonna clean first because you didn’t do it last, and I’m not cleaning up your mess.

I get it. It’s why I don’t really want to live with roommates ever again. There is absolutely a world, and a roommate agreement, where that doesn’t happen, but it’s so easy for resentment to build. Especially when everyone has different standards, or ADHD (maybe you don’t even see the crumbs), or just lacks communication skills.

I’ve lived in so many versions of that dynamic. Group homes in Lakewood, CO. Even my last roommate situation in Boulder (I thought I did really good vetting that one, too). For a long time, I sought to make the dream roommate setup: shared houses, intentional communities, co-ops. But through it all, I couldn’t really get it to work in the way I imagined it in my head.

And what they all really taught me was about the limits of our love and our ability to put that love into action. We say we want connection and mutual respect, but most of us don’t know how to do that beyond our preferences. We say we want a cleaning standard and then build resentment when someone can’t meet it. We want the “us” — the mutual care, the natural rhythm of give and take — but we keep our scorecards to our chest.

Unconditional love

I think it comes from that longing for unconditional love. The ease of how it must feel. Maybe it’s a fantasy. Maybe it’s not.

I think we know unconditional love is possible, but it seems to go against our nature (or at least our skills).

I can hear my Mom’s voice in my head: “The only person that will ever love you unconditionally is your mom”. She said that for years. Implying everyone else wants or needs something from you.

But I don’t think that’s true. And I like to think we can’t have a world where that kind of love is shared more freely.

First, because Christ loved us unconditionally. We have the best teacher about unconditional love that we could imagine. Yes, yes, I will bring God or Christ into everything—because God is everything.

Secondly, we have the capacity to love unconditionally, even if we only get glimpses of it today. The one where your mom holds you after a big mistake. The one you might get with a partner, who looks at you with acceptance, understanding, and appreciation.

My thesis is that we’re supposed to grow into that. Both from what Christ teaches us, and also what makes the most sense in the process of maturation. The thing that matures us most is the path.

So is there a world where the “us” of unconditional love is front and center? Held equally by each individual?

I think we’re learning what that even means for the first time. We’ve had it around for millennia, but it’s with us differently now. Could we even do it as a society, and what are the things needed to get us there? To love without judgment or transaction. To equally put the other before you.

Roles don’t need love

Today, we don’t have to love our roommates. We can just play the role: “roommate”.

In the same vain, we don’t need unconditional love for a society to keep moving, for the machine to turn.

In my questioning this morning, I found this article: The Unconditionality of Love: Value, Singularity and Sacrifice.

The paper argues that love is both unnecessary and transformative: we can play our roles in life without it, yet when love shows up, it changes the relationship from the inside out.

So you can be a roommate and not have love, a mom and not have love, a partner and not have love. It makes us sound more like animals.

It goes on to say, love doesn’t fixate on a checklist of traits; it sees the beloved in their singular “that-ness,” so the qualities we notice become expressions of that uniqueness rather than reasons to justify loving them. We appreciate their authentic expression of self and life.

Because of that, unconditional love steps outside deal-making and exchange—it refuses to turn the other into a thing to be bargained with. Real love naturally leans toward sacrifice, but not the transactional kind; it’s a “sacrifice for nothing,” a letting-be captured by Augustine’s line volo ut sis (“I will you to be”).

The Good Samaritan, which the paper quotes at the end, is the concrete image of this: he crosses identity and obligation lines to act from compassion without making the wounded man a means to an end.

In The Good Samaritan, everyone in the story sees the wounded man, but only one perceives him. His sight becomes a loving gaze, the kind that transforms.

Philosophically, the piece builds this case to show that love’s unconditionality is a way of seeing—and that seeing is what transforms.

I think I want “unconditional love” to equal some way of action. I want the solution. I want the outcome. And what I’m taking from this paper is that true unconditional love doesn’t, or it can’t. It can’t necessarily give us some framework for how to treat the world or each other, but it can show us how to see.

That’s why Jesus ends The Good Samaritan with “Go and do likewise.” He’s not saying “be nice,” he’s saying: see differently.

And that seeing, that awareness, that perspective of unconditional love, can at least set the tone for something else to emerge.

What unconditional love isn’t

Teal Swan says that unconditional love might make grounds for abuse. I tend to agree, in our current state. Where a lot of us still lack basic skills for communication, emotional regulation, where we live with high amounts of stress, where the medical system keeps us numb, where our food is crap and killing us from the inside out. You can’t achieve these really advanced outcomes without having the basics down.

And, unconditional love is a paradox. It’s a paradox because it asks us to love without needing anything in return, yet we only learn what that means through the very conditions that test it.

It’s an advanced thing to hold paradox in your being. It’s why most advanced spiritual teaching is at the level of paradox and why society is still focused on the binary, good and bad.

It’s a paradox because it’s both freedom and discipline. It asks for no conditions, yet it demands everything.

And so it has to be a condition of seeing. An orientation of sight.

If love’s unconditionality can’t give us a checklist of behaviors, it can at least give us orientation: a way of moving through imperfection without closing our hearts. To see someone clearly and to do it without abandoning ourselves is the discipline that makes the freedom possible.

So I’m not sure if we’ll ever get a society that acts unconditionally, but maybe we can keep letting love recondition our sight. Because every time we love without making it a transaction, every time we set a boundary without withdrawing care, every time we see another human as singular instead of sortable, we take one small step closer to the kingdom that Christ modeled.

Unconditional love might never be our natural state, but it can be our direction. The thing we keep trying to see into.

Love,
Val

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