If people must meet my ideals before I can love them, then I can never truly love. If my love must be predicated by certain check boxes, then it is not truly love of a person, but of an ideal. A love rooted in ideals or ideas is a love rooted in the abstract, and not in reality. The abstract is lost in this world. Marriages, friendships, families, and business relationships are lost due to love being rooted in our ideals and abstracts of what "should be" rather than what truly is. The love of an ideal is a love without grace and mercy, and without grace and mercy, there can be no forgiveness or pardoning. How can anyone measure up in this system of selfishness? It doesn't matter if its romantic or if its your own brother: if our love is not rooted in a reality, in a desire and willingness to truly love with our whole hearts, our relationships can not be sustained.
Here comes a long and deeply profound quote:
"If a person has to be pleasing to me, comforting, reassuring, before I can love him, then I cannot truly love him. Not that love cannot console or reassure! But if I demand first to be reassured, I will never dare to begin loving. If a person has to be a Jew or a Christian before I can love him, then I cannot love him. If he has to be black or white before I can love him, then I cannot love him. If he has to belong to my political party or social group before I can love him, then I cannot love him. If he has to wear my kind of uniform, then my love is no longer love because it is not free: it is dictated by something outside itself. It is dominated by an appetite other than love. I love not the person, but his classification, and in that I love him not as a person but as a thing. I love his label which confirms me in my attachment to my own label. But in that case I do not even love myself. I value myself not for what I am, but for my label, my classification. In this way I remain at the mercy if forces outside myself, and those who seem strange to me to be neighbors are indeed strangers for I am first a stranger to myself." -Thomas Merton
