In the world today, we are obsessed with unconditional love. It is what we all want and for most of us, it is what we want to be able to give, regardless of whether or not we actually currently can. But there is a form of “love” that is quite popular between people in the world today that is not love at all; instead it is poison in the disguise of unconditional love. That form of “love” or shall I say relationship is “I love you even though”.
The word love is totally misused. We have one word to cover several different things. What we are talking about today is not love; it is ‘wanting’ something in some capacity. To understand what love is, watch my video titled: What is Love?
Most of us have been on the receiving end of this type of relationship. If we were the scapegoat of the family, this was the only relationship we were afforded… I love you even though you’re a burden. I love you even though you are the main source of the problems for the rest of us. I love you even though you are an addict. I love you even though you are difficult. I love you even though you’re fat. I love you even though you are mentally ill. And the list goes on and on. Before today, many of you would have received a letter with the words “I love you even though” and would have taken it as loving, while ignoring that little seed of pain those words brought up. You may have thought “Oh… If they love me even though, they must really love me”. But all this reaction says, is how poor your self concept really is. And how unlovable you really feel.
It is impossible for someone to say “I love you even though” without simultaneously seeing something about you as unlovable. This is why it is poison under the guise of unconditional love. It is to say, “this is unlovable and still I love you”. It is I love you despite, instead of I love you with that thing. It excludes that part of you. To give you a metaphor, it is like visiting a person who wants you inside, but as long as you remove several parts of yourself that they don’t like and leave them outside.
This type of pseudo love sets up a really dysfunctional dynamic. First, it puts the person doing the pseudo loving in a position of power. It is in and of itself a narcissistic power play. They get to be “the good guy” and therefore superior for loving something “unlovable”. This form of pseudo loving is all about the person doing the pseudo loving. And it puts the person receiving the pseudo loving in the position of being both inferior and in debt to the other. It pushes them into a state of forced alliance and forced gratitude because that person did what no one else would do… loved them despite their defects. This can lead to an emotionally abusive dynamic whereby a person convinces a person that they are so unlovable and therefore would never be loved by anyone else. This person experiences such a self esteem drop that they end up feeling that they have to stay with that person, or the reality is they will end up alone. They buy it. “I love you even though” is a brilliant power play because no one can fight it. If they fight it, on the surface, they are turning away someone who ‘loves them the most’ and they are being the bad guy.
If you love someone ‘even though’, the reality is that you fully reject an aspect or several about a person. You do not want that part of them. You have a negative judgment about it. The reality is that you are in a relationship with the idea of a potential. Unlike it sounds, “I love you even though” is not what people say who have accepted something about someone else. It is what someone says if they are staying with someone during their process of change. It is what someone says if they are holding onto the idea that one-day, this person will change to be what they know they can be and should be. To understand this dynamic completely, watch my video titled: Overlay (What Prevents You From Having a Real Relationship). To be in a relationship with someone who loves you “even though”, you have to buy into that overlay of theirs and feel bad about yourself because of the fact that you are currently falling short of it.
If you love someone “even though”, you have got to accept the reality of a person. This might make you really sad, but you have to accept the reality of him or her. It is a rejection of who they are in favor of they could be. For this reason, I want you to ask yourself a question, if the truth was this person would never (and I mean never ever) change the thing you disliked and didn’t want about them, what then? Would you even want a relationship with them at all? If yes, why? Why do you want that person to be close to you?
There are some in alignment reasons and a lot of reasons for wanting someone close ‘even though’ that are really out of alignment reasons. To give you some examples of out of alignment reasons to want to be close to someone who you see in such a negative light, here are some: 1. Out of principal (such as because I’m your mother). 2. In the transaction someone is getting out of the relationship, the pros outweigh the cons. 3. We can’t see ourselves as good if we are the one that pushes them away, so they have to do it. 4. Unconscious polarization that causes a magnetic pull or attraction to them. When this happens, it is because you have suppressed a part that they are the reflection of. It is about you, not them.
If you accepted that the thing you reject about this person would never, ever change, how would the relationship you have to this person need to change?
Think of it like this, if you were an item on a shelf that is being sold, you would want to go to the person who appreciated you the very most. Assume you were both blue and yellow. Would you like to go home with a person who said, “I love the blue and I love the yellow”? Or would you like to go home with someone who said, “I love the blue color, even though it has some yellow”? Also, if you love someone like this, you must consider you are depriving someone of the opportunity to be loved by someone who loves both the blue and the yellow. To stick with this metaphor, if it is hard to believe that someone could love your yellow, the reason you feel that way is because you were led to believe that parts about you are unlovable by someone and therefore will be unloved by everyone. You see parts of you as flaws and do not think those flaws can be loved. If you struggle with this, you would benefit by watching my video titled: How To Find Your Excellence (The Recognition of Excellence is 100% Dependent Upon Desire).
It is better to say “I love this about you and I hate this about you” than it is to say, “I love you even though”. It’s more honest. “I love you even though” is a gaslight of love in order to not have to see yourself. It is a form of passive aggression. A lot of people feel so guilty and so much shame about not really wanting who someone is, that they escape that guilt and shame by saying “I love you even though.” Which is a sister to “I keep you close even though I don’t really want to.”
To resolve this issue, you need to face the resistance you have to the things about a person that you really don’t like. What do you do with the things that you really dislike about someone? Do you sweep them under the carpet and secretly resist them? Do you consciously try to fix them, so the person is different? Do you hold on to hope for the day a miracle happens and they simply change? If someone is hurting you, directly address them with the way it hurts you, instead of making it about something that is messed up about them. Don’t fall into the trap of trying to fix someone so that they can be who you “know they are capable of being” and who you therefore want them to be.
If you really face the resistance you have to the parts of a person you don’t like, either you will discover that the resistance to that part of them is something out of alignment about you, or you will discover a truth about yourself that will mean you have to re-evaluate your relationship with that other person. You will have to do something about it. And that something is not flipping the power so the other person feels lucky to be loved “even though.”
We are terrified that if we really face what we dislike about someone, either we will have to face that something is out of alignment about ourselves or we will have to face that we are not compatible to the other person in the position they are in, in our lives. To understand about compatibility in relationships, watch my video titled: Incompatibility (A Harsh Reality In Relationships).
In order to actually love and especially in order to genuinely unconditionally love, we must stop falling for the disguise of unconditional love. We have to stop gas lighting each other with a façade of love. We have to be in a relationship with who someone is, not the overlay of who they are. We have to see “I love you even though” for the poison that it is and stop feeding that poison to each other.
