You recently, briefly, opened up to me about your understanding of unconditional love and how it applies to you now and in some of your past relationships. In particular, you stated that your heart is challenged by what it truly means to love someone in an unconditional form. You said that you understand it with your children but that you need to get it back with your life partner. 

   Then in our phone conversation you elaborated on how you dislike the term unconditional love because of how it has been used in your past relationship(s) by way of a statement from your partner of, "If you love me, you would . . ."

   After our phone call, I began to receive information about love and unconditional love, what they are, what they aren't, and the concepts of love and self-love, your beliefs about them and as they apply in your situation(s).

  I wrote down this information that I received the following day in order to share it with you. Here it is. I offer this information for your deep reflection on it in regards to yourself with no expectation on my part that it be received. You must use your own intuition to determine if there is resonance with all or any of it within you.

"If you love me, you would . . ."

   The person who believed and said that phrase to you, somewhere along their path they encountered experiences that encouraged them to equate love with an action. They began to believe that love equals receiving what they want from the person who loves them. Which is not truth. Love is a state of being, and that state of being will be constant regardless of how (or if) it is expressed as action to please their partner.

   When one's expectation does not align with your own, what that one is really asking of you by making the statement of "If you love me, you would . . ." is that you choose to fulfill their desires over your own, that you make their desires and their feelings more important to you than your own. In some instances they are asking you to not be true to yourself. That if you truly love them, you would do so. Yet, the truth is that if you truly love yourself, you would be true to yourself.

   It is not for lack of love of the asker that you would choose to be true to yourself. It is for the love of yourself first in ensuring that what is important to your own well being and what is in alignment with the life that you wish to experience is fulfilled. 

   It is up to each to ask themselves whether within their relationship, while each are being true to themselves, they are able to be in alignment with what each wishes to experience and how they wish to experience it.

   Pleasing your partner through giving them what they desire, though it is not in alignment with what you desire and at odds with you being true to yourself in what you wish to accept as your experience, is not a demonstration of your unconditional love for them. Love of your partner has nothing to do with it. It is either a neutrally felt act of compromise on your part or it is an act of not being true to yourself for the sake of acquiescing to your partner's manipulation (conscious or unconscious), under the guise of and misguided belief that you are performing the act of loving her unconditionally by doing so. 

   In actuality, when you act out of alignment with being true to yourself, your integrity, your desires for your experience, when you are trying to be satisfied with something that is unsatisfactory, you are not loving yourself. Self-love is essential. Only you can fulfill your needs and desires and self-love is essential to that. Loving yourself is not an act of selfishness. That is another misconception. You can be a giving person to others when you love yourself, and in fact you will have more to give. Loving oneself and being loving to oneself is essential to being the wholeness and fullness of what you are as a Spark of All-That-Is within this human experience. Giving of yourself should not be at the expense of yourself.

   No one needs to apologize for the experience they want to have in this life and how they want to experience it. Source gave us free will to make those choices. We must do what is right for us. When we choose to have a partner, knowing that that togetherness will require some compromise as well as autonomy, the key is to choose the partner who is closely aligned with your own desires and needs and someone who has gained emotional maturity through their life experiences. One needs to determine what needs are essential to them in the partnership and which ones are nice-to-haves.

   Unconditionally loving is loving no matter what. For instance in this case, loving your partner regardless of whether they fulfill your desires. How you love your children is unconditional because it is constant even when you do not agree with their actions or beliefs. You may not like your kids' choices or actions, but your love is always constant no matter what. Even when their actions give the appearance that they do not love you in return. In other words, you may not like someone in a given moment or moments, but you will always love them. When you truly love your partner, the same is true.  

   Throughout it all, if one is able to stop loving the other, truly what one has "loved" was the construct of the idea of the person that they have been interacting with. When the construct of the one that is loved proves to be incongruent with the actual experience of them, one can feel that they have stopped loving the other. In actuality, what they are no longer loving is the idea of who and how they believed their loved one to be. It was their own projection that they were loving, or not.

   The love of one soul for another does not die. It continues on, even when there is not the recognition of the human that such is true.