There's a reason "I like a controversial person" makes people flinch before they've even heard the rest of the sentence. We've built an entire social reflex around loving people based on whether they've earned it — whether they said the right things, held the right opinions, stayed inside the lines. The second someone crosses one of those lines, the reflex is to withdraw the love entirely, as if love was rent being paid on good behavior instead of something more permanent.
Psychologist Carl Rogers spent his career studying exactly what happens when you remove that condition, and it's one of the most replicated findings in humanistic psychology. He called it Unconditional Positive Regard — accepting and supporting a person fully, without the acceptance being contingent on them agreeing with you, behaving a certain way, or being "good" by your own personal scorecard. Rogers found this wasn't just a nice idea for therapy rooms. It was one of the core conditions that actually allowed people to change, to grow, to stop defending themselves long enough to look honestly at their own life. People don't tend to improve while they're busy feeling judged. They improve once they feel safe enough to stop performing.
The ancient Greeks had already carved this distinction into their language centuries before psychology existed as a field. They had four separate words for love: eros for romantic/physical attraction, philia for the mutual affection of friendship, storge for the familial bond, and agape — the one this piece is really pointing at. Agape is love that isn't transactional. It doesn't ask "what do I get back" and it doesn't require the other person to have earned it through good behavior. It's offered because the other person exists, full stop, independent of whether you'd choose them as a friend or agree with a single thing they've ever said.
Here's the uncomfortable part, though: agape was never designed to be easy, and it was never designed to apply only to people who make it easy to love them. Loving the people who are simple to love isn't agape, it's just philia with extra steps. The entire point of the concept — the reason it shows up in nearly every major spiritual tradition on earth under a different name — is that it's specifically supposed to stretch toward the person you'd rather not extend it to. The controversial name. The person whose opinions make your stomach turn. The relative you've been avoiding at holidays. Agape doesn't ask you to agree with them. It asks you to hold their humanity as non-negotiable anyway.
That's a much harder practice than posting a nice quote about love. It means sitting with someone whose views you find genuinely wrong and still recognizing there's a person in there worth caring about, separate from the opinion. Rogers would tell you that's also the only path that ever actually changes anyone's mind — nobody's ever been shamed into growth. They've occasionally been loved into it.
Go love somebody that you don't like. I love y'all. 🙏
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