You have to make peace with the fact that, sometimes, people don’t do it on purpose.

They can love you and still hurt you, not because of you or something you did, but because of their nature.

And although they can still love you, I wonder if they love you less. If that is the type of love that is not enough, that is conditional.

It needs to be different from unconditional love, right? And I am not saying that people who love you unconditional cannot hurt you -, yes they can. But I have to believe unconditional love is more careful. Unconditional love learns from mistakes, adapts and acepts, avoids hurting again, and puts the objective of that love above all else.

Conditional love try-out to see if it really hurts. Forget that it hurt before and do it again. Do not pay much attention, don’t change, don’t love in a permanent state, even when the other person is unbearable. And that is the difficulty, isn’t it? Conditional love is still love. Some might even say it’s better than no love at all. But it hurts on those occasions when you notice the difference.

And if you only received conditional love, how do you know how to love unconditionally? How do you know what unconditional love feels like?

The first answer is simple, you just do it. It happens beyond your control in the day-to-day ordinary life. You give and ask nothing in return except the happiness of the other(s).

For the second question, I do not know the answer. I assume is intuition and attentiveness. Or you believe it’s unconditional love until that day; the day the condition crashes all over you and handcuffs you on the stop.

It’s funny, isn’t it? How human beings crave just that, being unconditionally loved by someone and loving someone unconditionally, even knowing that is the only thing that can destroy them. That in itself is a reason to never do it. It’s evolutionary stupid to make oneself go over the potential pain of love and not be loved the same way in return…

So love has measure after all. Not by comparison, because each love is as individual as the people inside that love. But inside the love itself. And as soon as you acknowledge this and learn what is and what isn’t, it stops hurting. Acceptance makes the pain stop.

No one is entitled to unconditional love. Although I have in me that, it is catastrophic when a child is not loved unconditionally by at least one person. And while I know by experience that you survive, I also know that the scars run deep and hurt long beyond childhood. Hurt for a long time and initiates a quest to find love, mostly in the wrong places.

For there is only one place where we can search for unconditional love when it is not given to us willingly. And that place is inside. When you learn to love yourself unconditionally the search ends. You love yourself today and you love also the child you were. She keeps hurting from time to time, but you love her enough now, to not let it linger.