2026-08-18
Maybe I am capable of unconditional acceptance but not unconditional love
Disclaimer
- personal
- target audience - strictly myself
Main
- See also: I want to feel chosen
- Violates X Y rule
- In a previous note, I wrote that I seem to be looking for something similar to "unconditional acceptance" in a romantic relationship. Now I'm like, wait, am I capable of offering this to another person?
- I think the answer is yes but I am not sure.
- I don't actually know what it means to not accept someone. There are just drives I can relate to and drives I can't relate to.
- For instance if my partner goes and physically tortures a bunch of people for fun, I can't relate to this very well, because I don't seem to have a part within me that derives pleasure from torturing random people. My partner would be acting on an instinct / drive that is a bit alien to me. But that doesn't mean I don't "accept" them as a person in some fundamental sense.
- It is possible I end my own relationship with this person as a result, but that is different from either love or acceptance. You can accept someone, even love someone, and still end a relationship for the most inane reasons. When I use the phrase "end my relationship" I basically mean reduce time spent with them to zero, and retract promises of future time spent. You can stop spending time with someone and still accept them or even love them.
- It is not difficult for me to stop loving most people.
- If you mean "love" as in unhealthy infatuations then sure, I have had a bunch of those in teenage, and ending those wasn't straightforward.
- But apart from that, I don't really care about (let alone love) most people that much. It is very easy for me to detach and move on, if given enough time, because I was never that attached to begin with.
- I might be nostalgic about past memories, sure. This still feels different from actually caring about the person or actually wanting their life to be good rather than bad, by their own lights.
- [Some relevant notes about my previous relationship kept private.]
- With most people in my social circles I just have a mild emotion of "I wish their lives are better rather than worse", but beyond that, I genuinely don't strongly care. If one of my friends died tomorrow I will probably not think much about them a month from now, I'm not going to be busy crying about it or something.
- What does unconditional love mean if you love no one?
- Loving people is the rare state for me. Not loving people is the default for me. Therefore I don't actually even deeply understand what it would mean for me to "unconditionally love someone", as a separate concept from "uncondtionally accepting someone."
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