All My Affection – An Unconditional Love Poem

I have learned about love
from the way you have loved me –
embracing my flaws and imperfections,
even when I crumble in self-loathing, ready to accept defeat.

Your compassion dances around me,
turns attention away from my often clumsy feet.
Its rhythmic motions sway in a relaxed manner,
abounding even when I fall and never miss a beat.

Eyes like a campfire radiating loving warmth,
they let me know you take me as I am.
No need for perfection or a false self –
faithfulness and my love are your only demands.

Your ability to love me as broken as I am
gives me the confidence to embrace my own imperfection.
Your grace outweighs this lead-filled bag of failures,
and your heart has all my affection.

-Poem Written by Justin Farley

About the Poem

It’s easy to say, “I love you”. It’s quite another thing to act out, “I love you”. We live in a world where divorce and infidelity are rampant. Love has lost its meaning and has become only something you say to someone you care about, but is not unconditional. Unconditional love is much stronger than the weak adjective you use in the beginning of a relationship to describe your feelings. It is a verb that acts even when the adjective is missing.

There are circumstances that demand that your love be conditional, such as domestic abuse, because you love yourself and your children; however, far too often we quit on love because we think it is meant to be easy…that wonderful adjective that we first felt. We forget that true love, unconditional love,  is meant to stretch our character – to learn how to forgive, learn how to give grace to another, and ultimately to act out love’s true meaning.

We all want unconditional love, but in order to get it we must give it. Unconditional love doesn’t ignore a partner’s flaws or pretend that they don’t exist, but loves despite those things and helps provide support in overcoming those imperfections as a unit.

Everyone has deep flaws, no matter how good their strengths are. Weaknesses in either partner should not be held in solitary confinement – never spoken of and never visited. Elimination of those weaknesses should be the goal, but never the condition. If you love with the expectation that your partner will change someday, you’re not really loving at all.

A partnership can be dissolved anytime one of the individuals involved fails to meet the terms of the agreement. Unconditional love, on the other hand, is something entirely different. When you love someone unconditionally, you love them even when they aren’t meeting the terms of the agreement. And in turn, hopefully they love you when you aren’t.

But loving someone unconditionally doesn’t depend on them loving you back unconditionally. You can’t control another person. All you can do is do your best everyday to love without demands or requirements. We all fail at love. Sometimes you fail. Sometimes they fail. Sometimes you both fail together. But when unconditional love is the ultimate goal – when you define love as a verb and not an adjective – love provides the strength to carry one another and transcends the imperfections that we all have inside of us.

Do you want a partnership or unconditional love? You can’t have both. We all want to be unconditionally loved, but often only want to give a partnership. It’s easy to make a list of the ways they are failing us. It’s much more difficult to inventory the way we are failing them. There are circumstances where the person you love has betrayed you so deeply that the relationship may not be sustainable. But in today’s society, I think we are all too quick to point fingers and point out each other’s flaws instead of looking at ours and theirs, together as a whole.

You may also like my romantic love poems,“The Wings of a Fighter” and “I Want To Walk With You”

Thorns of Love – Sad Love Poems About Heartbreak and Break Ups by Justin Farley

A Voice in the Wilderness – A Chapbook of Poems About God by Justin Farley

Nature’s Bounty – A Chapbook of Poems About Nature by Justin Farley

My current collections of poetry, all available on Amazon, all written by me, Justin Farley. A Voice in the Wilderness is a chapbook of Christian Poetry, written about the joys, doubts, struggles, and sorrows of the Christian life. Nature’s Bounty is a collection of nature poetry celebrating my love for the outdoors. And Thorns of Love is the first book of three in a series of poems about love, this one being sad, breakup poems.

I write to reach the hearts of the searching, the suffering, the still fighting. I write to soothe my soul and hopefully to soothe yours too. I write to celebrate and attempt to put words to the beauty of life. Here are my published books on Amazon. More to come. A huge, humble thank you to anyone who supports my work.

-Justin Farley