Taken or Given? Rethinking How We Love

A few years ago, after a week-long retreat, a group of us were waiting for the coach to the airport. In the middle of ordinary conversation a single woman turned to a man she liked and said, “It’s a shame you’re taken — you’re just the type of man I’m looking for.”

His reply was quiet and precise: “I am not taken. I am given.”

That single sentence stayed with me. It raised a question most of us rarely examine with any seriousness: in our closest relationships, are we taken or are we given? And does the difference matter?

Most of what we call love contains two distinct elements. One is the internal feeling — warmth, affection, care, desire. The other is the set of external behaviours we treat as evidence that the feeling is real and safe. It is the second part that causes most of the trouble.

We watch for signs.
He looked at someone else.
She didn’t reply quickly enough.
He was irritable.
She criticised the shirt.
He seemed distant.

From these observations we construct a story about whether we are still loved. The story is rarely neutral. It is usually filtered through old insecurities, family conditioning and the protective personality’s need for certainty. The result is that another person’s ordinary human behaviour is given the power to regulate our emotional state. When the evidence looks good we feel secure. When it looks bad we feel threatened and begin the familiar work of trying to change them, reassure ourselves, or withdraw.

This is conditional love in action. It sounds like:

– I will love you if you love me back in the way I recognise.
– I will love you if you follow my unspoken rules.
– If you loved me you would have done X.
– If you loved me you wouldn’t have done Y.

Conditional love is essentially transactional. It keeps us in a state of quiet vigilance, monitoring the other person for proof that it is still safe to stay open. In that sense we are “taken” — our emotional stability has been outsourced.

Unconditional love operates differently. It is not naïve or boundary-less. It simply refuses to make the other person’s behaviour the source of our own self-worth or emotional regulation. It sounds more like:

– I choose to love you because that is the orientation I want to live from.
– There is nothing you need to do to earn this.
– I can still say no, create distance, or leave if the relationship becomes harmful — and I can do so without turning the other person into an enemy or myself into a victim.
– My care for myself is not negotiable, and neither is my basic respect for you.

This version is closer to being “given.” The giving is not a sacrifice or a performance. It is an expression of an already settled internal state. Because the person is not using the relationship to complete or regulate themselves, they create less drama. They do not need to control the other in order to feel safe. In their presence it often becomes easier to be ordinary, imperfect and real.

Most of us were not raised in this second mode. We learned early that love is something we receive when we are good enough, useful enough, or pleasing enough. The protective personality took notes and has been running the same programme ever since. Moving toward a more unconditional stance therefore requires more than a nice idea. It asks us to notice the old rules as they arise, to stop treating every fluctuation in another person’s mood as a referendum on our value, and to practise generating a basic goodwill that does not have to be earned in the moment.

This does not mean staying in damaging situations or pretending hurtful behaviour is acceptable. Clear boundaries and self-respect are part of genuine care — for both people. What changes is the emotional dependence on the other person’s performance. We stop needing them to be different so that we can feel okay.

The two questions remain useful:

Am I relating from a place of being taken, or from a place of being given?
Is the love I offer (to others and to myself) still mostly conditional, or is it moving toward something freer?

The shift is gradual and rarely pure. Most of us will catch ourselves monitoring for evidence of love many times. Each time we notice and soften the demand, something loosens. The nervous system spends less time on high alert. Relationships become less about management and more about meeting. And the quiet dignity of being able to give without needing to be filled in return begins to feel less like a spiritual ideal and more like simple common sense.