His girlfriend's answer never had a reason, and that changed everything

Joseph Nguyen has always been the kind of person who needs a reason for everything. So naturally, about a year into dating his girlfriend Makenna, he asked her why she loved him. She said she didn't know, she just knew that she did. He, in turn, rattled off a long list: her smile, her laugh, how she treated her family, how intelligent she was, on and on. He asked her the question again every few months for years, and her answer never changed. Six years in, she still says the same thing: she doesn't know, she just knows she loves him, a lot.

For a long time this bothered him. He could produce fifty reasons for his love; she couldn't produce a handful for hers. It wasn't until recently that he had the insight that flipped the whole thing. He started interrogating his own list. Did he love her because of her laugh, or because she liked helping people? What happens on a day she doesn't laugh, or doesn't help anyone? If those things are the reason, then the love is only there when the reasons are present, and gone when they're not. That, he realized, is not really love at all; it's a transaction with a very generous interest rate.

Makenna's inability to list reasons wasn't a gap in her love. It was the absence of conditions on it. She wasn't loving him because of what he did or how he behaved that day; the love was simply there, independent of performance, an overflow rather than a payment for services rendered.

Nguyen argues that this unconditional love isn't unique to one relationship; he describes it as something we're all already connected to at a deeper level, and the only thing that blocks it is our own thinking, which insists on attaching reasons, conditions, and expectations to what would otherwise flow freely. Once you set conditions for when you'll love someone, you've also, without meaning to, set the conditions for when you won't. The alternative he arrived at with Makenna wasn't to stop noticing her good qualities, but to stop making his love depend on them.

Start by writing down the reasons you tell yourself for loving someone close to you, and then ask honestly what would happen to that love if the specific trait behind each reason disappeared tomorrow. Pay attention over the next few days to moments when your warmth toward that person visibly rises or falls with what they do, and simply notice it without judgment. Try doing one small thing for them with no expectation of being thanked, remembered, or repaid, purely because you want to. And the next time someone asks why you love them, see what it feels like to say you don't fully know, you just do, instead of reaching for the usual list.