Wait. Unconditional Love has no price, right? It depends on who you ask.

Receiving unconditional love has no cost. Giving it can be huge.

Another healer got me thinking about unconditional love. She mentioned that when things were bad for her, she made it a point to connect to the universal source of unconditional love. It helped her get through whatever was happening at the time. It got me thinking about a friend whose father left to move in with his girlfriend. If I remember the story correctly, he paid the rent every month, and that was it. My friend was alone at seventeen. Her mother was out of the picture by then. My friend told me in a voice full of conviction that her father loved her unconditionally. I stayed quiet even though I wanted to tell her that a father who loves their daughter would never abandon her at seventeen to fend for herself. She wouldn’t have heard me. She had grown up with a lot of abuse, and the idea of what love looked like for her was vastly different from what I had experienced. Not that my childhood was roses and ponies, but my mother supported me until the day she died.

Another friend told me about how her son had gotten into alcohol and drugs. She and her husband had done their best to try to help and support him as much as they could, but the addiction was tearing their family apart, and they asked him to leave. He’s still alive, but they have no contact with him. Another friend’s son was a raging alcoholic whom she also tried to help until his addiction caused him to lose his home and nearly his life due to health reasons. Each of these people, in their own way, did their best to love their family members without conditions, willing to stretch the boundaries of what they were willing to do for their loved ones until they couldn’t do it any longer.

Unconditional love is difficult. Those attempting to give it stand at the precipice of insanity, trying to support others. They stand with open arms, willing to do whatever is necessary to help, nurture, heal, and balance another person, but they have to do so with the full knowledge that they could be taken advantage of and betrayed. That the sacrifice they are making for another may all be for nothing. That’s a huge sacrifice to make, and for some, the price is too high.

The other side of that is some have been manipulated by the promise of love. “I will love you if you do what I say.” Many people have been led astray by words like that.

So where does that leave us? Does that mean unconditional love doesn’t exist, that humanity is not capable of giving and receiving it? I don’t think so. I think we are, and we do, just not on the grander scale that we all are looking for. We all want and deserve unconditional love. Whether we are capable of freely giving it or graciously receiving it is a different matter altogether. Can we feel love? Yes. Can we send or express love to another? Yes. Are we capable of receiving love in the manner in which it was meant? Certainly.

I think the answer lies in our discernment. Are there people who will use love and emotional attachment for their personal gain, yes, and we can still love those people, but it doesn’t have to take an emotional toll on us. We can still love someone like that and tell them no when they want us to do something we don’t want to do. Some people can speak with sincerity and say, “I love him, but I don’t like him.”

Giving someone unconditional love doesn’t mean you have to be a doormat or that you can’t tell them off once in a while. It means that you hold them in love at all times, even when they’re getting on your nerves.

How do we get unconditional love for ourselves when no one around us is able to give it to us? We are capable of giving it to ourselves. Again, hold the thought that you love yourself regardless of the list of faults and shortcomings you remind yourself of daily. Going back to the healer who connects to the universal source of unconditional love, she reminded me that even the worst human being on the planet, one that is completely hated for whatever they said or did, is still deserving of unconditional love. Regardless of who you are or what you have done, you deserve unconditional love. Who better to give it to you than you?

We are human, and life presents us with many challenges. I think unconditional love is one of them. The challenge is not only to give it but also to receive it. We are flawed and often have skewed opinions of what constitutes unconditional love, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. In the meantime, know that you can connect to the universal source of it and feel it. Do your best to receive it graciously and with gratitude. To do this, you can ask the unconditional love of the universe to connect to you and to let it be a strong enough connection to feel it. It may feel like a hug or being covered in a warm blanket. It may also be a sense that you are not alone. Whatever it turns out to be will be right for you. If you can’t feel it right away, give it some time. It may work in your life in other ways that will soon become apparent.

The price of unconditional love can be high, but its value is priceless.