What’s the difference between a partner looking at you with conditional versus unconditional love? It’s all the difference in the world. It’s the difference between someone who wants to guide you to look like something that will adorn them, versus someone who thinks you are gorgeous the way you already are. You don’t want someone who thinks you look great because you’re all decked out for some important event. You want someone who thinks 
you’re the most gorgeous thing on the planet because you’re the mother of their beloved children—that whole new people that were created by your intense attraction to one another. It’s a totally different thing and you can look like anything and be from anywhere and have unconditional love happen to you.
Below are two examples. The first is common and was easy for me to create. The second is concocted from an amalgamation of things that either happened to couples I know or they’re things that couples have told me about in their process with me. But everything in each example is actually something that I’ve either witnessed or it’s something that someone told me they’ve experienced or done. So if you’re in the first group and want to be in the second, know that there are people walking all around you who have achieved that status, and if you stop looking at all of the people that conform to advertising standards you’ll end up seeing a lot of the people who have found true, unconditional love.
Conditional Love
He looked carefully at each of the ladies there and yes, there were some extremely impressive figures moving about the room but in comparing them he felt his fiance was indeed the most beautiful there that night. She was waiting on the other side of the theatre lobby for him 
when their eyes met. When he looked at her his eyes snaked up her body, starting at her shiny super-high spiked heels, on past the long straight and narrow legs that her diet and daily jogging had helped to maintain.
He motioned for her to twirl in the dress he’d chosen for her and she did, and that twirl showed off that ass she worked so hard on every day. Her stomach was perfectly anorexia-flat and yet gave way to large, perfectly placed, absolutely identical breasts that cooperated perfectly to create substantial cleavage that she further used makeup to enhance. She wore the very large and prominent diamond he gave her on her left hand, the matching earrings dangled from her delicate ears like neon signs pointing at his wealth. She was relived about the earrings. He had always told her the story about how he had broken up with his first girlfriend because of the weird shape of her ears. He used to tease her all time time about them but she never wore hairstyles that covered them, which embarrassed him. His fiance was another story. Her ears were perfect little Disney Princess ears, drawn as a perfect set by the universe. Her voice was 
beautiful, her jawline sharp and very sexy.
Her father was a wealthy dentist and every single tooth was a perfectly shaped electric-white chiclet. She smiled, knowing he approved of her extremely provocative dress. He liked to show her off and that made him feel good. Her high cheekbones and perfectly shaped, symmetrical eyes looked back at him, pleased that he liked how she looked. She’d just changed her hair to style he’d asked her to switch to and it made her happy that it turned out the way he wanted. For his part, he took her all in and felt as though every other man in the room must be incredibly jealous of him for having such a Playboy-bunny girlfriend. He walked up to her, pushed a bit of hair off her face, smiled and he lead her back into the darkness of the theatre.
Unconditional Love
They were on opposite sides of the theatre lobby. She was waiting in a line to get them wine and he was in another to get her something to eat. The moment their eyes met the whole 
room disappeared for him. That always happened as he fell into her beauty. Her smile lit up a room, and she had such a warm and gentle spirit that she made everyone around her comfortable. Whenever he looked at her he could see the faces of their beloved children, each who had emerged not out of a plan, but directly out of love. She was the only woman he had ever slept with where he felt his love was so intense, so massive, that his orgasms would need to create an entirely new human being just to contain the amount of love he felt.
Despite her colourful and artful attire, on her finger was a plain old rubber O-ring—a match for the engagement ring she had given him one day when she spontaneously proposed to him in the aisle of a hardware store. Every time he looked at her smile his heart leaped. His eyes welled with tears as he tried to contain how much he loved her. How her skin seemed to glow from within, and how it was oddly magnetic. He couldn’t stop himself from touching it. When they made love he wiggled and worked to position himself as though his goal was to get as many molecules as possible of him to touch as many molecules as possible of her. He wanted to be near her cells. He wanted to embrace her so deeply that the border between them would melt and waver in that beautiful way that always 
took her breath away. He loved how in bed he could snuggle behind her and reach around and his hand would fit perfectly around the wrinkly roll of post-pregnancy skin on her belly. He loved how it allowed for even more molecules of him to touch even more molecules of her.
He loved how she smelled, how she tasted and it was as though Mozart has written a lullaby based on her breathing. She enchanted him. She had taught him so much and she had always brought out the best in him. Just her smile alone would have him basking in how fortunate he felt to be with her. And whenever he was, it was as though there was no one else in the room. And every woman in the room who saw him looking at her thought to herself, “if only a man looked at me like that…” And as everyone headed back into the theatre for the start of the second act, instead he turned to her and said, “The play’s fantastic I know. But would you mind if we skipped the second act? I’d really rather just be with you.” And together they walked out of the theatre and off into the darkness, together, with the hopes and wishes of every other woman there trailing off behind them.
*
What kind of relationship does your partner want? What kind of relationship do you foster with your words and behaviour? You can pose for the world with an ego-based relationship, or you can dive deeply into the world of unconditional love. It’s really only a matter of which search you enact with the way you live your life.
For your sake I hope you get to feel the intense approval and acceptance that goes with unconditional love. It is a wonderful environment in which to thrive. At the very least I hope you will join me in creating for yourself a life in which your qualities are being acknowledged regularly, even if that’s the unconditional self-love that we should all be giving ourselves. Be kind to you and you will model the behaviour for others. If we all lower our ego-expectations it becomes much easier to see that there is a large number of people with whom we can meaningfully connect. Here’s to you creating more of those sorts of connections in your life.
With love, s
A serious childhood brain injury lead Scott to spend his entire life meditating on the concepts of thought, consciousness, reality and identity. It made others as strange to him as he was to them. When he realized people were confused by their own over-thinking, Scott began teaching others to understand reality. He is currently CBC Radio Active’s Wellness Columnist, as well as a writer, speaker and mindfulness instructor based in Edmonton, AB where he still finds it strange to write about himself in the third person.