Like many women, I have entered into past romantic relationships with the notion that if I could just fix a few things about my significant other, everything would be perfect. I believed that I could essentially choose to love the future version of that person I had crafted. I think part of me thought that loving that future person would somehow make everything okay. Not surprisingly, some of those relationships blew up in my face. I have asked myself since if I truly loved those people. The only honest answers I can give are that I definitely thought that I did at the time and that perhaps I had no idea what love really meant. (If you are one of those people, and you are reading this, I sincerely apologize for not loving you better.) I often see relationships like this now, both in my own life and in relationships around me.
I am not claiming that now my views on love are perfect or that I always love perfectly. That would be far, far from the truth. I enter into this post with as much humility as I can muster, in the hopes that sharing these observations may refine my perspective and perhaps offer clarity to others.
I have noticed a great deal of conditional love of the LGBT community. In the movie Milk (a very worthwhile film, if you haven't seen it), a character asserts that she loves gay people enough to tell them the truth about their sinful lives. I find this to be overly patronizing, particularly in this context, because often people who say this (and I have heard more than a few) have never gotten to know a gay person before judging them. And in the case that people do know the LGBT person they are judging and claim to love, I often find that the (often unintended or unexamined) implication is that if the gay person were just straight/cis, he/she/ze would be loved more or better.
This cuts the opposite way, too. I believed for a long time, and others have suggested the thought also, that my family would "come around" to my marriage, accept Rebecca, realize that they are wrong, etc. Some of them have known for years now, long enough for things to change. A few people have perhaps grown in some way, but not nearly to the extent I have hoped. Loving them unconditionally does not mean loving the future accepting/affirming version of them that may or may not ever exist. It does not mean that I cannot protect my marriage or make decisions that disagree with their beliefs. It does not mean that I would allow them to share these beliefs with my future children. But if I believe that they should stop trying to "fix" me, or that churches should in general give up reparative therapy, then I also must choose to love people who have not arrived to the same views as I have.
I will leave you with a question: Whom do you love unconditionally? How do you know?
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