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Comment by ArtDev | Hacker News Reader

Well, we can all agree that the word "love" is overloaded. With my parents and my kids.. my love is truly unconditional.

No matter what they do or say, I will always love them.

Unconditional love has no place in romantic love. They shouldn't even be sharing the same words.

Romantic love is absurdly conditional. We need a different word. The word "lust" is also a temporary state, even with new couples.

Music, romantic movies and shows like "The Bachelor", have warped our cultural ideas around relationships.

However, sometimes media can explain it perfectly:

"Listen Morty, I hate to break it to you, but what people calls 'love' is just a chemical reaction that compels animals to breed. It hits hard, Morty, then it slowly fades, leaving you stranded in a failing marriage. I did it. Your parents are gonna do it. Break the cycle, Morty. Rise above. Focus on science."

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If Dan Harmon had known that R&M would be misquoted out of context so much... he would have probably written it anyway, because it made him a millionaire and fuck poor people trying to make you feel guilty, but regardless -- he's on record multiple times saying how he's baffled that people take Rick as a model when it's patently clear that he's an antisocial psycho who will never find happiness (see for example "Auto Erotic Assimilation"), borne out of Harmon's worse instincts.

For the record, Harmon is currently engaged and will probably marry (for the second time) pretty soon.

As a fan of the show -- seems like many people love Rick because it's very flattering to reason that you're alone (or misanthropic, whatever) and depressed because you're so much smarter than everyone around you.

I used to think that. Until I met my true love. Hope you get to experience it some day. 23+ years of embarrassingly romantic, lustful, sacrificial, unconditional straight-out-of-a-Shakespearean-sonnet divine true love.

There is such a thing. Rare. But it does exist.

It's not unconditional if it's also lustful.

Ha. I'll leave it to you to parse adjectives. All I'm saying to the delightfully Spock-ian logical HN poster is that all the cynicsm and scientific Mumbo-jumbo about endorphines and the like vanish upon laying eyes on your soul-mate. I could never convince you of true love. I don't mean to even try. I hope you have the distinct pleasure and privilege of discovering it for yourself.

The GP was making a distinction regarding the application of the quality of unconditional to romantic love. At the minimum, if there's lust involved, it's by definition not unconditional. You snarkily leave me to parsing adjectives all the while triumphing your definition of true love over others. One can accept the notion of 'true (romantic) love' but pretending its unconditional is lying about facts.

I'd also argue that even parental love and the love for the offspring is not unconditional either: you love them because they are your parents, or your children.

We can participate in the varieties of the human experience, but let's not lose sight of the truth or muddle the meaning of words. I'm of the opinion that completely unconditional love can only occur in relation to an other from whom one stands to gain absolutely nothing.

> If there's lust involved, it's by definition not unconditional

Can you elaborate on this?

Lust is conditioned by pleasurable sensory inputs and the prospect (or consummation, if you're lucky) of the sexual encounter.

Right, but how is that necessarily a condition (pre-requisite) for love?

You can't call a (romantic) love unconditional, if there's lust involved. The lust conditions the (romantic) love. This is not the same as saying lust is a necessary condition for love (but is usually a factor in romantic love), which I have not said nor implied.

Why must lust necessarily impose conditions/pre-requisites on unconditional love? This is the part I don't understand.

We're talking about romantic love where lust is a dominant factor, if there was no sexual attraction bringing the two parties together, then how could there have been any subsequent love to arise? The sexual attraction (lust) is a condition that caused the love to sprout in the first place.

I'm not saying there aren't other possible ways for people to get together, but we're specifically talking about cases where people get together because they're attracted to each other (the condition).

I think what you're wanting to say is that a conditioned love (for example, one that starts with lust) can become an unconditioned love. But I don't think you can separate the cause and effect like that, because the memories, experiences and identity shared between the parties is still going to rest as a factor for them staying together for a "unconditional" love to take place, and hence its not truly unconditional: it's based on something.

> We're talking about romantic love where lust is a dominant factor

Oh, I thought we were talking about unconditional love in general.

> if there was no sexual attraction bringing the two parties together, then how could there have been any subsequent love to arise?

Afaik sexual attraction isn't a pre-requisite for love in general, let alone unconditional love.

All this considered, I'm still unclear on why unconditional love and lust cannot co-exist. I can see how uni-directional/unfulfilled/non-reciprocal lust could in some cases diminish the love felt by one party (this would be a case where it isn't isn't actually unconditional love), but the part I don't understand is that unfulfilled lust must do this, even if the lust is strong.

I'm not making the case that sexual attraction is a necessary pre-requisite for love. I'm making the case that in a love where sexual attraction is the pre-requisite, that love is not unconditioned.

I meet a woman. She's beautiful. I'm attracted to her. She's attracted to me. We do the deed. Multiple times. Girlfriend. Boyfriend. Get married. We keep doing the deed. Multiple times.

Eventually, we stop doing the deed, grow old. Now we say we love each other unconditionally. But how can we say that, do we now live in a vacuum that we're going to ignore the entire history of our past and that our sexual attraction (or simply, our enjoyment of each other) caused the dominoes to fall the way they did?

I can't say to this woman when I'm old: "I would have loved you even if you weren't hot when we were younger" because this is an untestable claim and ontologically absurd since the "you" (from my perception of her) she was when she was younger is inseparable from how "hot" I found her.

> I'm making the case that in a love where sexual attraction is the pre-requisite, that love is not unconditioned.

Ah ok that's the misunderstanding then, because earlier you said "If there's lust involved, it's by definition not unconditional", which is obviously something different so I got confused.

> Eventually, we stop doing the deed, grow old. Now we say we love each other unconditionally. But how can we say that, do we now live in a vacuum that we're going to ignore the entire history of our past and that our sexual attraction (or simply, our enjoyment of each other) caused the dominoes to fall the way they did?

"But how can we say that"....well, that's been my question all along, I was hoping you could explain how it isn't possible to love unconditionally in this situation, or one where lust is involved.

But now that you've provided extra constraints and context (where sexual attraction is a pre-requisite, and that you are speaking from your individual experience) I think the confusion is cleared up.

> I can't say to this woman when I'm old: "I would have loved you even if you weren't hot when we were younger" because this is an untestable claim

Exactly, as is saying unconditional love is not possible in the presence of lust - it would require a means of knowing the emotional feelings (something notoriously difficult to measure) of all people who have been in love throughout history.

> Ah ok that's the misunderstanding then, because earlier you said "If there's lust involved, it's by definition not unconditional", which is obviously something different so I got confused.

I didn't really say anything different, I was replying to an OP who said that he is participating in a love which is both unconditional and lustful, and I said that it can't be both. You can't simultaneously lust for someone and love them unconditionally, the lust colors the fact that you give a damn about them in a first place. Even after the lust disappears, you still have the shared memories, experience and identity that bind the relationship and form the basis of the love. These are all that condition the love.

> But now that you've provided extra constraints and context (where sexual attraction is a pre-requisite, and that you are speaking from your individual experience) I think the confusion is cleared up.

These "extra constraints and context" you point to are explicit and implicit if you read the post I was replying to, I did not provide any new modifiers to this discussion. Nor am I speaking from individual experience.

> Exactly, as is saying unconditional love is not possible in the presence of lust - it would require a means of knowing the emotional feelings (something notoriously difficult to measure) of all people who have been in love throughout history.

Why do you need to know their emotional feelings? Is it not enough to know that lust causes attraction?

How are you defining unconditional love anyway? My definition: love which is not based on conditions. How can the presence of lust NOT condition any resulting love? You can't reject basic cause and effect.

> Why do you need to know their emotional feelings?

How do you know whether all people are unable to love unconditionally when lust is involved?

> from whom one stands to gain absolutely nothing

Some people look at unconditional love as something where both parties gain absolutely everything.

I'd also argue that even parental love and the love for the offspring is not unconditional either: you love them because they are your parents, or your children.

Yes. An expectation of unconditional love is often abusive. It often boils down to expecting slavery and servitude from another person.

I was a full-time mom for nearly two decades. A lot of people seem to expect unconditional motherly love from me while they don't give a rat's ass about my welfare or do a fucking thing for me. My actual biological children treat me very well.

I think of actual love as symbiotic. It enhances the lived of both parties. This is a highly conditional definition.

> An expectation of unconditional love is often abusive. It often boils down to expecting slavery and servitude from another person.

I agree. I realized this, when my wife told me she would love me unconditionally, and I later pressed her to fulfill that oath in the midst of me behaving unreasonably towards her. That's not love, that's subjection.

What she meant by unconditional love is that she'd love me even if I'm sick and poor, and I'd rather she'd love me then than when I'm being a tyrant.

My last serious boyfriend was from an older middle eastern culture. In his view, setting a high bar for leaving a person's life intact, even if it means letting them go and walking away, is merely friendship, not love.

I'm not at all impressed with the high percentage of people who promise to love each other forever when they take marriage vows, then seek to vindictively tear each other part during the divorce. My divorce was amicable.

Didn't mean to be snarky. Your post below regarding your wife and her definition of unconditional evidences great self-awareness on your part; namely, acknowledging when you were being unreasonable. I'm not that great at a parsing the differences in meaning between all the different types of emotion-laden words. Not my forte. That is, I can read books and whatnot about the 'five different love languages' and stuff like that, and it just doesn't compute. Maybe I'm the one who is Spock-Ian.

But, at the end of the day, all I know is I saw this chick once and utterly fell head-over-head in love and it hasn't worn off or diminished in any respect... it just gets better and better each and every day. Maybe I'm unique. I don't know. Or, maybe SHE's unique. Like I said, it's embarrassing how ridiculously blessed in this regard I am. I just perceived, from reading the comments, that behind all the analytical profundities, there is a sad hoplelessness lurking whereby some posters have resigned themselves to the dismal idea that 'True Love' ain't real. Well, I'm just here to say they're wrong. Thank god. They are utterly wrong. And thats all I have to say about that.

He forgot to mention paradoxical. Which it so is.

Ha, Rick and Morty, best show ever ;-)

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