I will save you some time and tell you upfront that I struggle with accepting love. I struggle with the fact that love and caring for someone isn’t conditional – that there is nothing I can do to gain or win love and affection. It’s deep rooted into the many circumstances of childhood and trauma in life; but it is a constant struggle and one that I am aware of. I can say all the right things and know the truth, but how that plays out in relationships isn’t always the same – so this is more for me than for anyone else.

The older I have gotten the more I have found that people have a tendency to place conditions on friendships, on relationships, on caring for people as a method of coping with unresolved trauma and safety measures not to be hurt in return. And while I fully stand behind boundaries, love knows no condition. If you give me a condition and call it love, I’ll raise you with a challenge that that isn’t love at all. Caring about someone, genuinely caring, about someone doesn’t know a condition; it simply is real.

Now, I have had my fair share of heartbreaks, my one love at first sight, and I have been cheated on – so I get the desire to want to protect my heart and that is a valid concern and a valid endeavor- but choosing to care about people and choosing to love someone else even after that, accepts risk and it accepts hurt if that goes wrong. It is inherent in being open and in relationships that people will let us down – but that doesn’t negate the endeavor to love and that doesn’t change whether we let people in with conditions or unconditionally. But what does change when we choose to love unconditionally is that we choose to love genuinely and we choose to lay aside wrongs, to lay aside hurts, and to love another broken person just like ourselves – because let’s face it; if you’re placing conditions on friendships, relationships, on caring about people, then you’re inherently placing those conditions on your own self and the way in which you love your self.

So from someone who knows a thing or two about feeling the need to do something to gain love, you don’t. Do not accept the lie that love has a condition. Do not accept that you’re not worthy of love and that you cannot love. We don’t deserve love, but that is what makes it so profound.