Against Unconditional Love

(spoilers for books that have been out a pretty long time)

Sometimes, two books rhyme. I recently finished reading Wuthering Heights (yes, for the first time, don’t tell the department that gave me my English degree). I found myself thinking about Doris Lessing’s unforgettable and genuinely haunting The Fifth Child, which I found for two pounds in a secondhand store at lunchtime and swallowed whole over the course of the afternoon, completely letting my actual work fall by the wayside. The Fifth Child isa novella about a happy suburban family whose youngest son is born—demonic? Evil? Alien? Unlucky?

The two books, clearly, rhymed in some way for me. Both partake of the Gothic tradition. Both are interested in collisions between the social/controlled/ordered and the wild/inexplicable/primitive.

But the thing that really drew these books together for me is that each one is obsessed with the problem of unconditional love (romantic love in the case of Wuthering Heights, and maternal love in the case of The Fifth Child). And when I say problem, I mean problem. In both cases, unconditional love wreaks havoc, even ending lives. I have not thought a lot about the question of “unconditional love” in the past. It’s not a theme I ever saw myself writing about. But I’ve found myself thinking about it more often, prompted by the ongoing genocide in Palestine, by a general feeling of frustration with dogma, nationalism, the compulsive repetition of cliche and recitation of allegiance. I will explain what I mean by this later. But first, I should clarify my terms.

When I talk about unconditional love, I am not primarily talking about a feeling: I am talking about a set of commitments and actions. The emotion of unconditional love is outside anybody’s control. There are people who I’d feel love for even if they charged at me with a knife or burned my house down. I’d hate them, but I’d probably still love them. There isn’t much choice involved in these things. But love as a commitment—a set of duties, actions, displays, utterances—is subject to choice, at least to the extent that any freely undertaken action is subject to choice.

I’ll lay my cards on the table now and admit that I feel suspicious of unconditional love. When I say that I am suspicious of unconditional love, I am referring to this agentive, active love. My suspicion, to a great degree, comes from the perspective of the beloved rather than that of the lover. After all, it’s actually very fun to love someone or something unconditionally—to let your feeling of love seamlessly and uninterruptedly flow out into actions. It feels both easy and virtuous. On the receiving end, though, I am not entirely sure that I want to be loved without condition.