Tip: click a paragraph to jump to the exact moment in the video. Unconditional Love in Adult Relationships (Family Insourcing and Outsourcing)
- 00:01 In a few minutes, those of you who survived the introduction will watch a video about unconditional
- 00:10 love, where we are all getting unconditional love in adult life wrong.
- 00:19 But before we go there, I would like to remind you of something and it has to do with screens.
- 00:30 About a 100 years ago, we started to congregate around a virtual campfire known as the cinema screen. It was a communal screen. Hundreds,
- 00:42 sometimes thousands of people watching the same thing, making out, eating
- 00:48 popcorn, smiling, crying. It was a communal experience. And then the screen has
- 00:55 shrunk became the television screen. 10 20 people could watch the same
- 01:01 television screen at once. The communal experience has dilapidated and
- 01:07 deteriorated. Following that the personal computer, two three people could work together and
- 01:13 then the smartphone whose screen allows only a single individual to interact
- 01:19 with it. So in a space of 100 years screens have transitioned from communal
- 01:28 community oriented to individual indivi individualistic to an individual thing.
- 01:37 At the same time, a curious inversion has happened with entertainment
- 01:43 screens such as the cinema screen. Prior to that, the theater stage, they
- 01:49 attracted crowds of people to share the same experience. Entertainment was a
- 01:55 communal effort. Entertainment was a communal experience. Entertainment was about the community.
- 02:02 even non-intellectual entertainment, for example, going out to the pub, to the
- 02:08 local pub, drinking with people, hiking, everything was outdoors, outside, away from home. Entertainment was associated
- 02:19 until well into the 1980s with exiting home, living home. Entertainment was
- 02:26 outsourced. It was out there. And then with the emergence of video games,
- 02:33 televisions, smartphones, laptops, personal computing, with the emergence of all these technologies, the home became the entertainment hub.
- 02:45 So even as our screens kept shrinking, excluding people from our personal
- 02:52 experience and remit at the same time it was the home turf.
- 02:59 the home territory that became the destination for entertainment. You remained at home if you wanted to entertain yourself. People people
- 03:11 stopped going out. The number of friendships declined by well over 90% between 1980 and 12 and
- 03:18 2018. According to studies, people are not having sex anymore, especially young people.
- 03:26 Human interactions and human interpersonal relationships have collapsed, basically have crumbled
- 03:33 in the face of the self-sufficiency offered by modern technologies and the
- 03:39 so-called smart home. Remember this as we discuss
- 03:45 unconditional love in the video you’re about to watch. My name is Sambakn. I’m
- 03:51 the author of malignance of love narcissism revisited and I’m a professor of psychology in seaps Cambridge United
- 03:59 Kingdom.
- 04:06 Good afternoon, Schwanpanim. Many of you have have written to me
- 04:12 gleefully and gloatingly about an alleged mistake in multiple
- 04:18 videos. And what has been my error? I used the phrase unconditional love and
- 04:27 applied it to adult relationships. Everyone and their dogs and their
- 04:34 mothersin-law wrote to tell me that adult relationships
- 04:40 never ever involve unconditional love. That love between adults is always
- 04:48 premised on conditioned upon some type of performance or the avoidance of some
- 04:55 types of acts and actions. For example, if your partner cheats on
- 05:01 you, it would be very difficult to love them. For example, if your partner refuses to carry the burden of your coexistence, if he refuses to contribute
- 05:13 to do his share, then it would be very difficult to love him or her. So love between adults is always conditioned on either performance or the
- 05:25 avoidance of certain acts which may undermine the intimacy and destroy the
- 05:32 delicate web of trust between the partners. Yes, I fully agree. This is what happens
- 05:40 when language is is at cross purposes. The way we use the phrase unconditional
- 05:47 love in psychology is not the way you guys are using the same phrase
- 05:54 in psychology. Unconditional love simply means the acceptance of another person
- 06:01 as he or she is. Not the acceptance of another person’s
- 06:07 performance. Not the unconditional acceptance of another person’s actions or inactions.
- 06:15 Not overlooking or forgiving egregious abuse and misconduct. No, that’s not what unconditional love means. Unconditional love means.
- 06:26 When you love someone for who they are, you love their essence, their core
- 06:33 identity. You don’t love love them because of who they might be. who they should be, who
- 06:40 they could be. You don’t strive or attempt to change them. You don’t condition your love on a transformation in traits or qualities or
- 06:53 behaviors or choices or decisions. You you love the person as they are.
- 07:00 At the same time, of course, you could discipline the person. You could set and
- 07:07 establish boundaries. You could and often do disagree with a person.
- 07:15 Unconditional love doesn’t mean that a free license, a blank check,
- 07:22 um allowing the partner to behave in any which way he or she wishes. That is not
- 07:28 unconditional love. That is submissiveness. That is codependency. That is people pleasing. which happened
- 07:35 to be the opposite of love. Unconditional love simply means when you
- 07:41 come across someone, you fall in love with their emanation,
- 07:48 their exudation, the light that they give out, their essence, their quiddity,
- 07:55 their core identity. The intricate and complex way that
- 08:01 various elements and ingredients and components fit together to create this
- 08:07 highly specific idiosyncratic never repeated unprecedented individual. And
- 08:13 that has nothing to do with behavior. That has nothing to do with discipline. That has nothing to do with boundaries. That is nothing to do with punishments. That has nothing to do with rewards.
- 08:25 That has nothing to do with the operational functional dimension of
- 08:31 interpersonal relationships. If you come across someone and for
- 08:38 example you fall in love with them or you get infatuated with them and the first thing that crosses your mind is
- 08:45 I’m going to change that person. I’m going to make that person better. I’m
- 08:51 going to improve upon this person. I’m going to help him or her self-actualize,
- 08:57 realize their full potential. By the time I finish with them, they’re not going to recognize themselves.
- 09:03 That is not love. That is control. That is manipulation.
- 09:10 If you are not in love with your partner as they are 100%. If you wish they were
- 09:17 different. If you fell in love with who they could be with their potential with
- 09:23 who they should be or ought to be. If you fell in love with the an idealized version of them, that’s not love. That is narcissistic gratification. That is
- 09:34 the foundation of the narcissist shared fantasy. Idealization. Unconditional love therefore
- 09:41 is the embrace, the unconditional embrace of your partner as he or she is
- 09:52 with no wish to change them, no wish to improve them, no fantasy or dream of
- 09:59 transforming them somehow and no idealized version of them. At the same time, of course, you should set boundaries. You should penalize for misbehavior. You should communicate your wishes assertively. This has nothing to do with
- 10:16 unconditional love. This actually discipline and unconditional love often go hand in hand. For example, mothers love their children unconditionally. And yet they discipline their children. accepting a person as he or she is,
- 10:34 not accepting all their behaviors, not accepting all their transgressions,
- 10:40 including a modicum of discipline. This is unconditional love. So how come we
- 10:46 are having this argument? I blame of course the Germans.
- 10:52 I always blame the Germans. In the 18th century, there was a movement which started basically in Germany and it came
- 10:59 to be known as romanticism, especially when it was adopted and metamorphosis
- 11:05 metamorphosized into an English version in the Victorian age.
- 11:11 Romanticism corrupted relationships by corrupting the expectations of the parties in interpersonal relationships by eliciting the kind of imagery or the
- 11:24 kind of ideals which were unrealistic and fantastic. The romantic movement told you your partner should be a perfect solution to
- 11:36 all your problems. Your partner should cater to all your needs.
- 11:42 Your partner should be a panacea, a cure all. Your partner should take care of
- 11:48 your sexual desires, of your intellectual stimulation and pursuits.
- 11:54 is the your partner should be your best friend, your business partner, a father
- 12:00 or a mother, a husband or a wife and then at the same time a girlfriend or a
- 12:07 boyfriend. There should be a lot of sex, a lot of romance, a lot of joint activity, pursuit of common goals and so on so forth. In the romantic movement,
- 12:20 the image of the partner was a raification of perfection.
- 12:27 You were looking for a perfect partner. A partner who once and for all will
- 12:34 solve all the riddles of the universe will straighten out your life. Will make
- 12:40 you feel as if you’re in Disneyland throughout your lifespan. A partner who
- 12:46 will take care of your body, your mind, your intellect, your past, your future,
- 12:52 and your present, your family, your friends, your decisions, your choices, your work, your business. A partner who
- 13:00 would provide all of these in one neat package.
- 13:06 This idealization of the romantic partner, this set of impossible expectations was a very bad transition. Prior to the romantic period, prior to the to
- 13:22 romanticism, usually intimate relationships were mostly transactional.
- 13:30 They involved the common pursuit of common goals. The goals could be money, children, the
- 13:38 unification of assets of two families, the mutual enhancement of of various
- 13:44 properties. And so there was a lot of business going on. Marriage was a business and that is why marriages were
- 13:52 longived because interests die hard. Love dies much sooner. Love expires.
- 14:00 Interests never do or rarely do. And then came the romantics in the 18th
- 14:06 century, especially as I said in Germany and later on the United Kingdom. And the romantics told you that it was all
- 14:12 wrong. You should follow your heart. You should get married to someone you love.
- 14:19 And love should rule everything else. Love should be the preeminent and predominant consideration, a determinant of whether to engage in a relationship or not.
- 14:31 Never mind how ephemeral, how fleeting, how vicissitudinal, how labile
- 14:38 love became the foundation. And of course, love involves initially idealization.
- 14:44 And so your partner should be ideal. And if your partner is not ideal, you should idealize him.
- 14:50 This was the worst conceivable idea ever.
- 14:56 It ruined the institution of marriage in my view. And it distorted
- 15:03 interpersonal relationship, intimate relationships. It made them impossible. Because if you expect too much from your
- 15:09 partner, you are setting your partner up for failure. Your partner is never going
- 15:15 to succeed, never going to meet all your all your needs, never going to cater to all your expectations. Your partner can
- 15:22 never ever fulfill all your desires and urges. You’re never a partner can never
- 15:29 stimulate you in an infinite spectrum body, mind, intellect and rest so social
- 15:36 aspect, social dimension and so on. You need to compromise. Interpersonal relationships are about negotiations and compromise about conjuring and forging a
- 15:48 consensus. But that’s not what the romanticist told you. The romantic movement insisted that
- 15:57 to compromise to for relationships to become consensual is to kill the fire, to
- 16:04 destroy love. And so people over the past 200 years,
- 16:11 maybe more, maybe longer, people have been looking for the ideal partner, for the one, for the soulmate, for the twin flame, for the other half.
- 16:22 And this led to enormous disenchantment and disappointment
- 16:29 and people broke up and people are breaking up because they idealize
- 16:36 and then they wake up the fantasy dissipates and they devalue.
- 16:42 The romantic movement, romanticism is the forefather and the ancestor of
- 16:49 narcissism. Actually, unconditional love therefore in the eyes
- 16:55 of the romanticis was the kind of love that is willing to accommodate anything and everything. If
- 17:04 you love someone, you’re bound to become selfsacrificial.
- 17:10 If you love someone, there is nothing you wouldn’t do for that person. If you love someone, you ought not to place boundaries. You ought not to make
- 17:21 demands. You should not definitely punish the partner for transgressions
- 17:27 and misconduct. You should not express the kind of expectations which are not
- 17:33 fantastic, which are realistic, which are transactional, which are business-like. because if you are then
- 17:39 you are a gold digger or worse. So the end result was that people
- 17:49 tried and still do try to engage in this distorted completely sick version of
- 17:56 unconditional love. They’re trying to overlook, to ignore, to repress and to
- 18:02 bury any information or data which implicate the partner somehow. The
- 18:09 partner has shortcomings. Every human being has shortcomings. The partner is
- 18:15 limited. Every human being has limitations. The partner may be a bit antisocial or psychopathic or
- 18:21 narcissistic. Some people are. And yet the romantic movement have taught has
- 18:28 taught us to ignore all this because love overcomes everything.
- 18:35 Love conquers all. Vincia amo.
- 18:42 And so this was the best relationships relationship advice ever.
- 18:50 Unconditional love. To summarize before I move on, unconditional love is about
- 18:56 accepting the person in your life as they are, even as you insist on your
- 19:02 boundaries, communicate your expectations, and impose penalties for transgressions.
- 19:10 Even when you discipline your partner, you still love them as they are.
- 19:16 Behavior is not the same as personality. Behavior is not the same as the c as
- 19:24 core identity. Behavior behaviors are not the same as who the person is.
- 19:31 You love people for who they are even as you may disagree with them or be angry
- 19:37 at them or penalize and discipline them for what they’re doing. Who they are and
- 19:45 what they are doing. Who they are and the choices they make. who they are and the decisions they
- 19:51 take, who they are and the transgressions they engage in. This it’s not the same. These are not the same.
- 20:00 These are not cotminus. Owing to the owing to romanticism,
- 20:10 we now have this intuitive perception that love and obligations don’t go
- 20:18 together. Love and compromise don’t go together. Love and negotiations don’t go together.
- 20:25 Love and consensus don’t go together. Love is not a business. The romanticis
- 20:32 insisted that love is not a business. It’s not transactional. It’s not transactional. It’s not goal oriented.
- 20:40 It’s this force of nature which consumes everything and everyone.
- 20:46 And so gradually the family died because what is a family?
- 20:54 To have a family is to work very hard. A family requires drudgery
- 21:02 requires investments. Investment of resources to to have a family, to maintain a
- 21:08 family, to create a family, to bring a family to fruition and maturity,
- 21:15 to look after your your spouse or your significant other or your children. That
- 21:22 requires a lot of tidium. It is pedestrian. It is mundane.
- 21:29 It demands of you to be grounded in reality. And reality is often drab and often
- 21:36 boring and often demanding and often exhausting. In short, to have a family and to rear
- 21:45 bring up children sucks. It’s really horrible. It’s not pleasant. And the romanticist told us that love
- 21:57 is ideal, that love is wonderful, that love does not have any aspect
- 22:03 that is boring or tedious or demanding or that’s not love. And so what the romanticists have done, they created a dichotomy.
- 22:14 They rendered the family the antonym of love, the opposite of love. Like if you
- 22:21 love you can’t have a family and if you have a family you’re not in love and so
- 22:27 the family died. The more we adopted the romanticist the romanticist view of love
- 22:35 the more we embraced their framework for relationships the more the family died. Initially
- 22:42 the functions of the family were outsourced. The family was hollowed out
- 22:49 in the 19th century. In the 18th, 19th century and in the 2,000 years before or
- 22:55 10,000 years beforehand, many many functions were carried out inside the family. It was a family which
- 23:02 provided education. It was the family that took care of the old and the infirm. The family provided health care.
- 23:08 The family provided caregiving for senior citizens. It was the family that
- 23:15 was the core functional unit in society. And then gradually as the family beca
- 23:22 became the enemy of love it was hollowed out. Many of its functions were transferred were outsourced. So for example today
- 23:33 education does not happen within the family. It happens in schools and universities. Health care doesn’t take place within the family. It has been transported or
- 23:44 teleported to hospitals and clinics. Essentially the family does nothing anymore. The
- 23:51 family is completely dysfunctional or a functional. I cannot think of a single do a single
- 23:57 thing that you do in a modern family. Perhaps I don’t know watch television together.
- 24:03 Even this is not done anymore. The family is completely disintegrated and its members became atomized. they
- 24:11 don’t do anything together anymore because the family
- 24:17 um is not needed is unnecessary. We have schools, we have hospitals, we have entertainment outside the family. I mean why bother?
- 24:31 And so at some point around the 19 late
- 24:37 1980s and early 1990s, there was a bit of a backlash
- 24:43 as the family became more and more dysfunctional
- 24:49 as it was perceived more and more is a as a transactional business unit which is the enemy of
- 24:58 love. As the family be was frowned upon and mocked and ridiculed, as divorce rates skyrocketed and so did infidelity.
- 25:10 As a family seemed to be falling apart in the 1990s, there was a resurgence.
- 25:17 But something very interesting happened. Many of the functions which were outsourced, many of the functions the
- 25:24 family has lost to other outside institutions could never be recovered.
- 25:30 There was a movement of homeschooling, but it was a fringe movement. It still is. It’s a minority.
- 25:38 Uh there’s a movement of um giving birth at home. That’s also a tiny fringe
- 25:46 minority movement. Basically the family is still completely empty of its urile functions in history. But in the 1990s
- 25:58 one function reverted to the family and it was mainly owing to technology.
- 26:07 modern technologies, new technologies starting with a personal computer and then the iPod and then the iPad and then
- 26:13 the the smartphone and then all these technologies allowed the family to regain its
- 26:20 function of entertainment. So now all family functions are
- 26:26 outsourced but excitement, thrills and entertainment are insourced.
- 26:33 Today, if you want to gain, if you want to be entertained, if you want to be excited,
- 26:39 uh what you do, you use your devices, you use modern technology. And this is
- 26:45 usually done done within the family or at least within your abode, your home.
- 26:52 So now home has became the entertainment hub, the center of excitement where
- 26:59 thrills and risks and are intermingled. It is within the family that you
- 27:06 entertain yourself and excite yourself and arouse yourself. Whereas everything else is still outside the family.
- 27:14 And because this happened, because now the family is the main source of entertainment and excitement, love is again associated gradually with
- 27:28 the family because love is about excitement and love is about entertainment and love is about arousal
- 27:36 and these functions came to be reassociated with the family. Gradually love is regaining its foothold in the family. In other words,
- 27:48 modern people in postmodern societies regard love and falling in love and
- 27:54 infatuation and lirance as forms of entertainment, as a way to get excited, as a thrill, as a roller coaster ride.
- 28:06 It’s a borderline view of love. And all this is done within the family
- 28:12 because now the family is where you go when you want to obtain entertainment.
- 28:18 And so now we are seeing a bizarre confluence of love and the family. And
- 28:25 yet the family is transactional. The family is businesslike. Whereas love is according to the romanticis the exact anathema. Love is
- 28:38 not transactional. Love is not business life. So how do people reconcile these two? By misusing the phrase
- 28:46 unconditional love. They’re saying unconditional love means
- 28:53 that I exert no control, no influence, no
- 29:00 limits and no boundaries on the behavior of the loved one. And so this
- 29:07 amounts to a transactional business-like approach.
- 29:13 It’s not about the kind of love that accepts and embraces the other.
- 29:20 It’s about a It’s about consent. It’s about It’s very legalistic. It’s like
- 29:28 saying, “Listen, we’re going to be in love.” And nowadays to be in love means
- 29:34 entertainment and excitement. And entertainment and excitement belong again in the family. So we’re going to
- 29:41 create the equivalent of a family, a kind of committed relationship. And we’re going to do it transactionally. I’m going to accept you 100% as you are. You’re going to accept me 100% as I am. We’re going to pull
- 29:53 resources and we’re never ever going to criticize each other, disagree with each other, put boundary, place boundaries
- 30:00 and punish each other. So this is the end result of the impossible conflation of romanticism and the family. And this is of course the
- 30:11 source of the confusion. When people write to me, there is no such thing as unconditional love in adult
- 30:17 relationships. What they mean to say is that the kind of unconditional love
- 30:24 which is transactional and business-like should not have a place in adult relationship and I fully agree with
- 30:31 them. So there’s a confusion in terminology
- 30:37 and there is a set or series of psycho
- 30:43 sociohistorical trends that culminated with the reintroduction of love into the
- 30:52 family cell or the family unit. and at the same time a desperate failing
- 30:59 and flailing attempt to reconcile the romanticis view of love with the
- 31:05 exigencies, vagaries and transactional business-like demands of the family. And
- 31:12 this is a source of enormous confusion and why many many people don’t
- 31:19 understand what unconditional love means. And so this is the background.
- 31:27 I will remind you um in conclusion, as an adult, if you’re mature, if you’re mentally healthy,
- 31:39 you should love your intimate partner unconditionally. What does it mean? You should accept
- 31:46 your intimate partner as he is or as she is. You should not attempt to change
- 31:52 them, transform them, or improve upon them. If you love someone, you love them as they are. That’s unconditional love. And it’s the only type of healthy love.
- 32:04 All other types of love, the kinds of the kind of love that demands that the partner somehow modifies himself,
- 32:11 changes herself. This is not love. This is control. This is manipulation. This
- 32:17 is narcissism. However, throughout your relationships, intimate
- 32:23 or not, you should always be boundaried. You should always communicate your boundaries. And you should exact a price
- 32:31 if your boundaries are deliberately and repeatedly breached by someone, even by
- 32:38 the person you love most, unconditionally.
