By Gary Hull PHD
Date: 21 September 1998

Love and Selfishness

Romantic love represents an exalted exchange between a man and a woman. 
It is a selfish response to the value of someone else to you. The contrary view, 
that love is selfless, destroys love itself.



Love and Selfishness

The False View of Love as Selfless and Unconditional Destroys Its Sublime 
Value

By Gary Hull, Ph.D
.

Every Valentine's Day a certain philosophic crime is perpetrated. Actually, it is 
committed year-round, but its destructiveness is magnified on this holiday. The 
crime is the propagation of a widely accepted falsehood: the idea that love is selfless.


     Love, we are repeatedly taught, consists of self-sacrifice. Love based on 
self-interest, we are admonished, is cheap and sordid. True love, we are told, is 
altruistic. But is it?

     Imagine a Valentine's Day card which takes this premise seriously. Imagine 
receiving a card with the following message: "I get no pleasure from your 
existence. I obtain no personal enjoyment from the way you look, dress, move, 
act or think. Our relationship profits me not. You satisfy no sexual, emotional or 
intellectual needs of mine. You're a charity case, and I'm with you only out of 
pity. Love, XXX."

     Needless to say, you would be indignant to learn that you are being "loved,"
 not for anything positive you offer your lover, but — like any recipient of alms — for 
what you lack. Yet that is the perverse view of love entailed in the belief that it is 
self-sacrificial.

     Genuine love is the exact opposite. It is the most selfish experience possible,
 in the true sense of the term: it benefits your life in a way that involves no
 sacrifice of others to yourself nor of yourself to others.

     To love a person is selfish because it means that you value that particular 
person, that he or she makes your life better, that he or she is an intense source 
of joy — to you. A "disinterested" love is a contradiction in terms. One cannot be neutral to that which one values. The time, effort and money you spend on 

behalf of someone you love are not sacrifices, but actions taken because his or
 her happiness is crucially important to your own. Such actions would constitute
 sacrifices only if they were done for a stranger — or for an enemy. Those who 
argue that love demands self-denial must hold the bizarre belief that it makes no 
personal difference whether your loved one is healthy or sick, feels pleasure or

 pain, is alive or dead.


     It is regularly asserted that love should be unconditional, and that we should
 "love everyone as a brother." We see this view advocated by the 
"non-judgmental" grade-school teacher who tells his class that whoever brings a
 Valentine's Day card for one student must bring cards for everyone. We see it in
the appalling dictum of "Hate the sin, but love the sinner" — which would have us
 condemn death camps but send Hitler a box of Godiva chocolates. Most 
people would agree that having sex with a person one despises is debased. Yet
 somehow, when the same underlying idea is applied to love, people consider it
 noble.


     Love is far too precious to be offered indiscriminately. It is above all in the 
area of love that egalitarianism ought to be repudiated. Love represents an 
exalted exchange — a spiritual exchange — between two people, for the purpose 
of mutual benefit.

     You love someone because he or she is a value — a selfish value to you, as 
determined by your standards — just as you are a value to him or her.

     It is the view that you ought to be given love unconditionally — the view that 
you do not deserve it any more than some random bum, the view that it is not a 
response to anything particular in you, the view that it is causeless — which 
exemplifies the most ignoble conception of this sublime experience.

     The nature of love places certain demands on those who wish to enjoy it. 
You must regard yourself as worthy of being loved. Those who expect to be 
loved, not because they offer some positive value, but because they don't — i.e.,
 those who demand love as altruistic duty — are parasites. Someone who says 
"Love me just because I need it" seeks an unearned spiritual value — in the 
same way that a thief seeks unearned wealth. To quote a famous line from The 
Fountainhead: "To say 'I love you,' one must know first how to say the 'I.' "

     Valentine's Day — with its colorful cards, mouth-watering chocolates and silky
lingerie — gives material form to this spiritual value. It is a moment for you to 
pause, to ignore the trivialities of life — and to celebrate the selfish pleasure of 
being worthy of someone's love and of having found someone worthy of yours.


Dr. Gary Hull is a senior writer for the Ayn Rand Institute in Marina del Rey, Calif;
 http://www.aynrand.org