Everyday Canvas

Unconditional Love and Gone Girl

Prompt: “Unconditional love is unprincipled love… if love has no boundaries, no limits, no conditions, why should anyone try to do the right thing ever? If I know I am loved no matter what, where is the challenge?... It makes me think that everyone is very wrong, that love should have many conditions. Love should require both partners to be their very best at all times,” says Amy Dunne, at the end of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl.
What is your take on this different way of looking at unconditional love?

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Having just recently finished reading Gone Girl, I have to say I find it very difficult to take any input from Amy Dunne seriously. This is a novel in which both main characters are unreliable narrators. As such, I might have said she is talking unreliably, but there is some truth in her words, if not totally.

I do believe in unconditional love. If you love someone, you love them no matter what. On the other hand, not letting them walk all over you is part of that unconditional love because you don’t want them lose from their personality, decency, or ethics.

It would be wonderful if “both partners” could “be at their very best at all times.” This, however, is totally impossible because we are all humans and we are going to err at one time or another, and sometimes, very often. This is where I oppose Amy Dunne. To require that love should be this way or that way is wrong on its own. On the other hand, if people claim unconditional love, they should at least try to be at their very best, however unreachable a goal that might be.

True love, true unconditional love, doesn’t want to hurt the beloved. It doesn’t expect anything in return, be it the return of their affections. It gives anything one can give if what they give doesn’t hurt the loved one. In this way, unconditional love has its inbuilt condition of not hurting the beloved and not letting him or her hurt their own self.