Conditional:
Subject to, implying, or dependent upon a restricting or modifying factor.

Personally, I don’t believe that all people have the ability to love unconditionally. We are all born with free will – therefore we all have a choice whether or not to love someone, and in whatever way a particular person understands it. For example, if a child is raised in an abusive home, what perspective will that child have as an adult about loving someone compared to a child who has not been raised that way? Each person’s outlook on love will be different. I do believe that unconditional love is a practical teaching. We learn it very early in childhood. The way our parents demonstrated love to us is the way we will show it to others, unless there is an objective intervention of some kind (psychological help). Many parents show unconditional love to their children, but not all parents do. My parents coerced me to “earn” their love when I was growing up through a series of means by doing difficult chores (chopping wood every day, mowing their acre of land when needed, cleaning their vehicles inside and out once a week, etc), getting completely perfect grades in school, joining only biblically centered organizations, never talking back or raising your voice for any reason. I think you get the picture. If I did well, then I was good. But I did not receive praise or any kind of compliment. It was just expected. I’ve never heard my mother say she was sorry to me or to anyone in her entire life. I ran away from home at age 15. To this day, my parents do not call or visit me (they have a couple times because they wanted something from me). I have not seen them in over 10 years.

I hope some of this has helped you.

Conditioned love is seen through emotion. If you wait around for an emotional reaction, that feels like love, then you are choosing to love based on a chemical reaction alone.

Unconditional love is seen through the filter of choice. You literally choose to understand that under the right conditions, you can have love for anybody. You choose to love another, based on the knowledge that we all feel love and are capable of being loving. Therefore, you treat them as you yourself would desire to be treated. You choose to have a connection with all human beings, even before the connection is felt through the emotional charge of a chemical response.
Through unconditional love, you stop judging people and it affects the nature of others to stop judging you through your example. Being unconditionally loving, is about loving yourself unconditionally first. You cannot love another without first knowing love within yourself.

Therefore, if someone is treating you harshly (emotionally, mentally, or physically), then you do what you can to treat yourself the way you would like to be treated, by not allowing relationships that are destructive to self. Sometimes the best way you can unconditionally love somebody, is to empower them to help themselves without you.

When we love others without expecting anything in return, or someone loves us despite our shortcommings than that’s unconditional love.

As for what conditions do people put on love – that could be anything!! When you love with conditions then it makes it about you, and not about caring for the other person.

I think unconditional love is a practical teaching. Is it always easy to practice it, no. But people do it. A great woman in recent history comes to mind. Mother Teresa. Whether one is a religious person or not, anyone can see she lived out unconditional love. Mother Teresa helped sick and dying in a very poor area of India. She took care of those people and did so without expecting anything in return. She wanted to give them comfort and peace and she never put herself first. She is a great example of this. On a more individual scale…there are parents across the world that would do anything for their children out of sheer love for them, and many do – without even a thank you.

There’s lots and lots of sources on the web. You should look into it and read whats out there.

Unconditional love is hard to do. It can sometimes be hard to love someone if they frustrate you, if they change, or if they do something you don’t approve of. Unconditional love is possible, but it is a constant work in progress to choose to keep loving someone, regardless of circumstances.

I think very few people are conscious of putting conditions on their love. But they are often there; most people do not bother to love people who do things that annoy them, or who have hurt them in the past, or whose company they do not always enjoy. All of those are a sort of conditional love–and those are the areas where unconditional love is needed.

I think unconditional love is a great teaching. Like everything else, it is hard for humans to do perfectly–but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. Unconditional love makes for the best world; a world in which we don’t hold grudges, we take care of each other, and where people can be secure because they know that being loved does not depend on their performance or on being “good enough.”