The Transaction on the Table

Finding Unconditional Love After Forty and the Explosive Outcome

I met Mira in 2011.  We fell in love.  Nothing unusual about that.  I will save our story for another post, but the experience was new for me.

Prior to Mira, the people who "loved" me, loved me conditionally.  You might even call it transactional love.  But I think most people understand it as conditional love.  If they think about it in those terms.  And of course, most do not.  But most people do understand unconditional love.  And because of that, they can infer what conditional love must be.

Of course, it's not really love at all, is it?

Anyway, conditional love was all I had known.  This certainly includes my parents and later friends and girlfriends and later still my ex-wife.  Yes, they all supposedly loved me.  But there can be no mistake about it, it was conditional.  Conditional on what?  Well, whatever it was they expected.  And if I did not meet their expectations, well there was a price to be paid.

After all, there was a transaction on the table.

So Mira was the first person, ever, to love me unconditionally.  And this experience, this continuing experience, gave me the strength to say to all the others, primarily my parents:  No more.

See, now that I have experienced unconditional love, now that I know what real love is, I will not tolerate anything less.  It is sad that it took me so long to get here, but there it is.

Several years later, my parents, with typical impunity, tied their supposed love (well, our relationship anyway) to their irrational expectations, including my acceptance of their betrayals and their lies, and of their sheer nastiness and spitefulness and venom.  But by this time, I had the strength, or rather the experience, to say:  Oh no you don't.

The effect was explosive.

So be it.

I belatedly accepted their conduct and bad faith for what it was:  A termination of our relationship.  Which has been very hard for me.  I still have trouble dealing with it.  But for my parents?  Well, they have other children.  And their own self-righteousness.

Now my parents love their other children conditionally as well.  It is the only kind of love they know.  But I guess my siblings are more willing to tolerate it than I am.  And no doubt it helps that they have certainly done a better job at meeting parental expectations.

Me, I have always been a bit of a black sheep.  Even more so after depression set in almost immediately after completing college.  Thirty years later, I am finally coming to understand it all.

But without Mira, I would still be trying, and failing, to meet their expectations... their conditions.

The transaction on the table.

Their table.

So I crafted a new table.  And around my table, there is only unconditional love.

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