Love is simple. Like most other concepts, it’s us humans that make it complicated, much more complicated than it needs to be.

At its core, love is two main things: caring about someone and wanting to support them in whatever way you can. That’s it. Really.

Just think about it. The people in your life that you love – your family, your friends, your significant other(s) – you just want them to be happy. You want them to do well in life and you want to be there to help them when they might not being doing so well. You want to make it easier for them to get through the day, especially when it’s a more difficult day to get through.

The part that makes it complicated is the expectations, the conditions, that we impose on the people we love. We believe that they belong to us, that we possess them. We enforce limits and labels to claim them as our own and no one else’s – not even their own self – in exchange for our love. We feel entitled to receive something back for our caring and support. We expect it. And when it doesn’t pan out exactly the way we envision it to, when it doesn’t meet our expectations, we feel let down and disappointed.

And, more often than not, we punish the people we love for failing to meet those expectations that we set out for them. Maybe not directly, maybe not even consciously, but we do. We get mad, we get sad, we yell and scream and push them away because we’re hurt that they let us down. It doesn’t even matter to us in that moment that perhaps they didn’t mean to. Perhaps their intention was never to disappoint us, but life got in the way and shit happened, as it does, and the result was less than optimal. In our disappointment, we tend to solely focus on being hurt and, in turn, we usually end up hurting those people back as some form of vindication.

As a result, we become selfish with our love instead of letting it flow freely. The bottomless well of pureness that we started out with becomes poisoned by resentment. And, over the years, we fill up our mental scoreboards for each of the people we love with all of the ways they’ve done us wrong. We hold grudges, we lash out, we subscribe to the age old adage of an eye for an eye.

But, as entitled as we may feel to some reciprocal, equal ideal of love, the fact of the matter is that we don’t stop loving people just because they let us down. At least not right away. We all have a limit to how willing we are to be hurt by the people that we love. And, as the resentments start piling up and the scoreboard gets tallied, we decide whether or not that particular person is still worthy of our love. We decide whether or not they are still deserving.

Because that’s what us humans do. We take a simple concept that is pure and good and we turn it into something twisted and warped based on our own individual life experiences. We let our expectations and inevitable disappointments taint us and change us and harden us against each other, against the world.

And then we’re surprised that we feel so alone, so unsatisfied, so unloved. We’re surprised that our conditions for loving and being loved turn that pure, unconditional love that we started with into nothing more than a checklist, a scoreboard, a way of keeping track of our unfulfilled expectations.

But is it really that surprising?

Love is simple. Don’t complicate it.