Unconditional love.......wanna buy??

We've heard songs about it, seen it in the movies, heard it talked about on Oprah by relationship experts and read about it in thousands of self help books. But what is unconditional love? We all want to feel loved. We think about it, hope for it, fantasize about it, go to great lengths to achieve it and feel that our lives are incomplete without it. The lack of unconditional love is the cause of most of our anger and confusion. It is no exaggeration to say that our emotional need for unconditional love is just as great as our physical need for air and food.

It is especially unfortunate that most of us have no idea what it actually is? Our misconceptions began in our early childhood, where we saw that when we did all the right things, people loved us. They smiled at us and spoke in gentle tones. But when we were bad all those signs of love instantly vanished. In short, we were taught by consistent experience that love was conditional, that we had to buy love from the people around us with our words and behaviour.

So what’s wrong with conditional love? We see it everywhere we look, what’s so wrong about it? Imagine that every time you pay me fifty dollars, I tell you I love you. We could do that all day, but at the end of the day would you feel loved? No, because you would know that I loved you only because you paid me. We simply can’t feel fulfilled by love we pay for. We feel loved only when it is freely, unconditionally given to us. The instant we do anything at all to win the approval or respect of other people, we are actually paying for the attention and affection we receive. We can never feel genuinely loved in that way because