Genuine love is selfish

[Henrik Unné 0]

The essay below is a translation of a debate article which I wrote for a Swedish debate site. The article attempts to demonstrate the fallacy of the ancient idea that true love is unselfish.

GENUINE LOVE IS SELFISH

For 2.000 years we in the West have heard that genuine love is unselfish. You should – “think of others, not of oneself”. A man who loves his wife does not do it for his own sake, the song goes. He does not love his wife because he gets pleasure from sleeping with her. His love is, if it is pure, “spiritual”, unselfish and clean, not “carnal”, selfish and vulgar.

But is love unselfish? *Can* love be unselfish?

Well, try to imagine what it would mean to love another person without there being “anything in it for you”.

You meet a woman. She is fat. She has pimples. Her clothes are dirty and unkempt. You feel no attraction to her at all.

But you feel sorry for her. You think – “According to the Christians and socialists I should think of *other* people´s happiness, and not my own. I should sacrifice myself in order to make others happy. And I should “lift up” the lowly and depraved. This woman does not care. She does not bother to make herself attractive for a man such as me. So I must help her. I must give her a hand. I must say to her that I love her. I must be kind to her. I must be unselfish. I shall put her happiness above my own. I shall give her a happy life, without there being anything in it for me. I shall be a good person, according to the altruist conception of the good.”

So you take this woman out to dinner. You give her flowers. You whisper sweet words in her ear. You date her. Eventually you propose to her. And she does not realize that you are unselfish. She takes it for granted that you would not propose to her, unless you *wanted* to marry her, because she made *you* happy. So she answers – “yes” – to your proposal.

You marry each other. And you yourself are not happy. You are barely able to carry out sexual intercourse with her, since it does not give *you* any happiness to sleep with her. You feel that each day that goes by in her company is bleak. You begin to become depressed. But you pretend that she makes you happy. You keep up a front. And it is all because you want *her* to be happy.

What do you think will happen? This unselfish “love” will not accomplish anything good. Sooner or later your wife will realize that you only married her because you pitied her, and because you wanted to make *her* happy. Do you think that she will thank you for it, when she discovers the truth? No, she will curse you all she can. She will think that you were a dirty rotten swine. Her heart will break.

So you see? Unselfish “love”, by its nature, is an impossibility. But you may say – “No, it was not the *unselfishness* which was the problem in the scenario above, but rather the *dishonesty* and *duplicity*.” But the truth is that the concept of “unselfish love” itself *cannot* be anything but a lie. Because selfishness is an inseparable part of all love. To love another person is one of the most selfish actions that a person ever can commit.

When you love a man or a woman, you care about him or her because his or her happiness respectively, means everything for your *own* happiness. A man or a woman, who loves his or her partner, is grieved and depressed, if and when the partner gets cancer, or dies in a fire, or develops Alzheimers. As these examples demonstrate, it is obvious that when you love your partner, the partner´s wellbeing means enormously much for *your* own happiness.

The Christians and the socialists devalue and despise love when they say that it should be “unselfish”. To pick a man or woman to be *the one* who means more for your own happiness than any other person besides yourself, that is to confer a sublime honor on the other. But to say to a man or woman – “I love you without having any interest in your fate. My happiness does not depend in any way on your happiness. I love you without any gain. I do not become happier when you do.” – does that sound appealing? No, it is a way to drag love down into the mud.

No, when 2 people love another, the one of them becomes happier when the other does. Love is an expression of mutual self-interest. When you love another, your own happiness becomes intimately intertwined with the loved one´s happiness. Your own happiness comes to depend largely on the other´s happiness. That is why a man or a woman is often willing to die for their loved one´s sake. A selfish person safeguards the things that he values. So when a man risks his life to save the life of his wife, for example if she is drowning, he demonstrates that he is selfish, and that his wife is one of the few values which he ranks as being as important as life itself.

If a man values an antique car which he owns, then he will show it with the extensive care which he devotes to the car for the sake of his own happiness. He devotes several hours every Saturday to waxing and polishing the car. He washes the windows of the car carefully. He spends many thousands of dollars a year keeping the car in good shape. In a similar way a man demonstrates that he values the woman whom he loves, when he showers attention on the woman for the sake of his own happiness. He takes the woman out to fine dinners. He gives her beautiful flowers. He always remembers her birthday. He spends thousands of dollars buying her beautiful clothes and jewelry. He gives her tender kisses and caresses every morning when she wakes up. The only difference between a man´s love for his antique car, and his love for the woman that he loves, is that of course he loves his woman enormously much more than he loves his car. Many men would give their lives for their woman´s sake, but there is hardly any man who would give his life for the sake of his antique car!

The philosopher Ayn Rand expressed this principle eloquently in her novel The Fountainhead. One of the heroes says there – “In order to say `I love you´ you must first be able to say `I´”.

The philosophical principle is that a *value* presupposes a *valuer*, i.e. a subject for which the value is good. A man or a woman cannot be a value, cannot be loved, unless there is a woman or man for which she means something. For to value and love someone, you must yourself derive some value from the love, otherwise the “love” would be indifferent. And “indifferent love” is a contradiction in terms.

So genuine love *cannot* be anything but selfish.

[Arnold 0]

Good one. I can imagine imagine the scene at a wedding anniversary, where the husband says his wife's happiness was all that mattered to him, and the fact that he had been miserable only reflected that he was not selfish. What an insult that would be.

[B. Royce 0]

Good one. I can imagine imagine the scene at a wedding anniversary, where the husband says his wife's happiness was all that mattered to him, and the fact that he had been miserable only reflected that he was not selfish. What an insult that would be.

But this is only "half' imagination. If they are both living in a society where selflessness is the ideal, they both will regard the other's happiness as more important than their own. Their selflessness will be mutually, as well as universally, expected, and the idea of insult won't arise in anyone's mind. In fact, in such a society the expression of selfishness would be an insult. "Horrors! He loves her for himself! What abomination! What perversity! It is time for an inquisition! Pile the faggots! Fan the flames! Down with the devils!"

[Arnold 0]

Good one. I can imagine imagine the scene at a wedding anniversary, where the husband says his wife's happiness was all that mattered to him, and the fact that he had been miserable only reflected that he was not selfish. What an insult that would be.

But this is only "half' imagination. If they are both living in a society where selflessness is the ideal, they both will regard the other's happiness as more important than their own. Their selflessness will be mutually, as well as universally, expected, and the idea of insult won't arise in anyone's mind. In fact, in such a society the expression of selfishness would be an insult. "Horrors! He loves her for himself! What abomination! What perversity! It is time for an inquisition! Pile the faggots! Fan the flames! Down with the devils!"

What you say has a logic, but they are not that logically consistent in their philosophy - their survival won't allow it. It would have to be a altruist in the extreme who on being told this on his anniversary, would not be offended. That they made their partner miserable, is not something most altruists would delight in regardless of lip service to sacrifice.