Love Without Expectation: The Hardest Kind

It has not been obvious to me what love actually means.

For much of my life, I confused love with someone meeting or satisfying one or all of my emotional addictions. Learning to love without expectation changed that.

Projecting Onto Others

There were these pain points or anxieties that would arise in me when another person did not feed my emotional addictions. And rather than addressing my addiction, I instead projected that they just were not being loving towards me.

This was completely unloving on my part. Because love without expectation does not mean getting all your wants, desires, and addictions met.

I was keeping score without realizing it. Every act of kindness came with an invisible ledger. When people did not balance the equation, I felt wronged. But the wrongness was inside me. I was treating love like a transaction instead of a gift.

Challenging Without Requiring

I am starting to see that true love is actually about challenging someone to be better and yet never requiring or demanding that person change.

It is unconditional love that says I am going to show up for you because I want to show up for you, not because you are going to give me something in return.

I want to show up for people in this way. I do not always succeed.

The difference between challenging and demanding is subtle but crucial. When I challenge someone, I hold a vision of who they could become. When I demand, I am trying to control them into becoming what I need. One liberates. The other suffocates.

Loving Yourself First

But the desire to love without expectation is growing within me and I am looking forward to practicing letting people have their own experience without having to suffer my judgment.

Many of the decisions I have made over the course of my life have been unloving actions disguised as something benevolent. I was deceiving myself and others.

When I first discovered my unloving behavior I did not want to be seen. I felt I deserved to be socially punished.

But this was me not loving myself without expectation.

I was holding myself to the same transactional standard. Make a mistake, pay the price. Show weakness, lose connection. This is not how love works. Love sees the mess and stays anyway. It does not pretend the mess is not there. It just does not leave because of it.

The Challenge and Calling

How can I love others unconditionally when I cannot even love myself in this way?

And so that has been my challenge, calling, and new adventure.

How deeply in love can I fall with my true self, not the buttoned-up facade version of myself, but the raw, real, flawed, but deeply curious me.

This is not about becoming perfect before you can love or be loved. It is about recognizing that imperfection is the point. The cracks are where love gets in. When I stopped trying to earn love through performance, I started to feel it for the first time.

Love without expectation is not passive. It takes tremendous strength to give without keeping score. It requires you to be so full within yourself that you do not need anything back. That fullness comes from learning to love yourself first. Not in a selfish way. In a foundational way.