Unconditional love is a spiritual/philosophical ideal that humans cannot fully give or receive

Unconditional love is the highest form of love from a spiritual and/or philosophical viewpoint. Humans are not fully capable of unconditional love, because various forms of human love have conditions that must be met within varying degrees by each party in order for the expression of love to continue. The more conditions and the narrower the range for achieving them, the more difficult it is to give and/or receive unconditional love. Since unconditional love represents the highest level of loving and being loved, we can see why many times psychological anguish occurs when someone does not feel unconditionally loved and/or someone, who wishes to love unconditionally, finds it challenging or impossible to do so. For example, one of the highest levels of human love is expressed within a parent/child love relationship. Even if one or both parties in this relationship have a high level of love and devotion, harmful or hurtful behaviors from either or both parties will generally impact either party's ability to express unconditional love fully. This not does mean that either party cannot care or love the other party, but that the unconditional aspect may be difficult or impossible to give and/or to receive. Higher level friendships based on mutual caring and emotional connection also face challenges of varying conditions imposed by each party, which if not met within varying degrees will challenge the unconditional aspect of the relationship. Highly revered romantic love, which is the basis of the nuclear family, is based on various conditions, which would explain why couples break up so frequently and why divorce rates are high. Various conditions that begin a romantic love relationship can include sexual, personality, intellectual and emotional attractions. For many, these attractions include other subsets of conditions. Because this type of relationship is highly conditional, where each party expects certain conditions to be met within varying degrees, it is subject to pitfalls and failure with respect to unconditional love. Ultimately, it is important to understand that unconditional love is the highest level of love within a spiritual or philosophical context that is worthy of pursuit, but that in practice it is challenging to receive and to give on a daily basis, because of human imposed conditions. This reality would allow for a more authentic assessment of each person's role and contribution within a relationship. The realization of such truth, would allow each person to examine and acknowledge what conditions they have within all of their relationships, and what conditions other people have of them with respect to the same relationships. This allows us to choose to maintain, change or modify our conditions for others within our relationships. It also allows us to choose to accept or attempt to change/modify others conditions of us within our relationships. The roles of negotiation, acceptance and letting go are critical in this assessment. Finally, it would allow us to understand why various loving relationships from childhood to adulthood caused us to feel loved and/or unloved or how we may have made others feel loved or unloved. It then becomes obvious that it was not based on our worth as a person, but because we may not have met the conditions of the love we were receiving or others did not meet our conditions of the love we were giving.