Family. For the past few weekends, I’ve been going on adventures and spending time with my family, and it has been such a blessing. I’ve been genuinely happy. There really is no better feeling than being surrounded by the people you love, sharing moments together and creating new memories. I wanted to write about that feeling, about the pure happiness and love I feel when I’m around my family. But the more I thought about family, the more I realized there was another side to it too.

When I think about family right now, I think about love, but I also think about obligation. I think about the things we do in the name of family because we're taught that family is supposed to be the one place where love is unconditional. I think that's part of why family has always meant so much to me. It meant there were people in this world whose love I never had to question.

But lately I've been questioning what that actually means.

Sometimes I find myself doing things simply because I want to make sure my family stays together. Then I think about the families I grew up watching, including my own, and how much people will endure for the sake of keeping a family intact. It makes me wonder how much of that instinct I've inherited. How often do we unknowingly repeat the lives we grew up watching while expecting our own lives to turn out differently? Why are we sometimes willing to live through unhealthy situations to keep a family together instead of accepting that being apart could create something healthier?

At first, I thought the answer was simple. When you love something, you fight like hell to keep it. But then I had another thought: why do we love something that we have to keep fighting so hard to hold together?

I'm fortunate enough to have been born into a family that loves me unconditionally, and I don't question that. But sometimes I wonder, what if I were a stranger? What if we met at school or at work? Would you still love me the way you do? Would you choose me if being related to me wasn't the reason you had to?

Maybe that's what I'm really trying to understand. The older I get, the more I realize that unconditional love and obligatory love aren't necessarily the same thing. "You're my family, so I love you" sounds beautiful, but sometimes I wonder about the other side of that sentence. Do I love you because you're my family, or are you my family because we continue to love and choose each other?

And now that I have a son, I think about what I want family and love to mean to him. I never want him to believe that love means enduring anything simply because someone is family. I don't want him to feel obligated to love someone at the expense of himself, and I don't want him to believe that being family means you never have to choose each other because the relationship is guaranteed.

Honestly, I'm still trying to figure out this love stuff myself. I don't know if I completely understand what unconditional love is supposed to look like. I just know what I would like for it to be and what I want it to feel like.

I want love to feel like being chosen over and over again, not out of obligation, but out of will.