Everything I know about love is wrong

11/17/2011

I got this from friend yesterday. As I read it I felt my world shift on its axis.

Everything I know about love is wrong.

My experience, or rather, my interpretation of my experience, is based on a soft, pasty, and marshmallow expectation of love.

Today, I awake, fully conscious to the fact that the love I seek has many more sharp edges, dark deep places and dangerous paths than I have been willing to admit.

PLAYBOY: Where, would you say, should romantic love fit into the life of a rational person whose single driving passion is work?

RAND: It is his greatest reward. The only man capable of experiencing a profound romantic love is the man driven by passion for his work -- because love is an expression of self-esteem, of the deepest values in a man's or a woman's character. One falls in love with the person who shares these values. If a man has no clearly defined values, and no moral character, he is not able to appreciate another person. In this respect, I would like to quote from The Fountainhead, in which the hero utters a line that has often been quoted by readers: "To say 'I love you' one must know first know how to say the 'I.''

PLAYBOY: You hold that one's own happiness is the highest end, and that self-sacrifice is immoral. Does this apply to love as well as work?

RAND: To love, more than to anything else. When you are in love, it means that the person you love is of great personal, selfish importance to you and to your life. If you were selfless, it would have to mean that you derive no personal pleasure or happiness from the company and the existence of the person you love, and that you are motivated only by self-sacrificial pity for that person's need of you. I don't have to point out to you that no one would be flattered by, nor would accept, a concept of that kind. Love is not self-sacrifice, but the most profound assertion of your own needs and values. It is for your own happiness that you need the person you love, and that is the greatest compliment, the greatest tribute you can pay to that person.

http://www.ellensplace.net/ar_pboy.html - go here for the whole interview.

Comments

Chloe Hoeben

11/17/2011 13:33

That is so deeply profound - and makes so much more sense than any Freudian or other explanation of love.
Does it help you move forward? I mean in search of your "I"?

Sam Walt

11/17/2011 13:40

Sarah this is my first visit to you blog and I love it! Consider me a fan. On the Ayn Rand front - the woman is my hero. I re-read The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged every few years. She believes in the individual and not all this collective bullshit, PC world we live in. So viva Ayn Rand. And your hears to your mid life crises - the which incidentially is the best anicdote to spur on creativity and meaning.

Sarah link

11/17/2011 20:40

@Chloe - well. I know where I live so hopefully I will find myself there... but its hard to know :)

@Sam - thanks man! I know - we have lost our edges. we all just blend and bleed into one another these days. Its bullshit. Time to push out into the frontiers of our selves and claim what we know to be true.

Thanks for the comments - always so great to know I am not just prattling into the darkness.

Louise van der Bijl link

11/18/2011 08:52

very deep sis. you are wonderful. love you

Pam

11/18/2011 13:38

I declare myself a contrarian. Do you see that false dichotomy she sets up in the second answer? She suggests that the only alternatives are narcissist or doormat, when of course life is just a little bit more complicated than that. Of course one must first learn how to say the "I" - but there's a long journey to go past that once it's achieved. Beyond the "I" of individualism and the "you" of self-abnegation is the "we" of inter-dependence (never to be confused with co-dependence). People who get stuck in the "I" turn in to assholes like Howard Roark (honestly, just about the only thing I can remember about The Fountainhead is just how unlikeable I found him). So go ahead and assert your "I" as much needed, but please don't stay there forever....

Sarah Rice link

11/18/2011 13:58

Hey Pam.

Ah - the other view. I am not an Ayn Rand reader actually so don't have any history that I bring to reading her responses.

What I connected with was that in order to stand tall in a love relationship you first need to be able to stand tall on your own. Its only from self that you can love.

That has not always been my starting point for love actually - so this clarity was a bit of a revelation :)
I love your view of it as well. Start with I but end with We. I must still find I -then I can move to a version of We that works.

s

Nathaniel Borenstein

11/30/2011 19:48

Like most things Ayn Rand ever said, this strikes me as dangerous sophistry, nonsense dressed up to sound intellectually credible.

Throughout history, people have sacrificed their lives to protect someone they love. I think you really have to twist logic into knots to claim that this is an example of selfishness, or to deny that it is a sign of deep love.

The fact that loving someone gives you pleasure does not imply that it is fundamentally selfish, but rather that selfless love can be a source of great pleasure as a side effect. In Ayn Rand's world, everything is black and white, but reality is filled with shades of gray.

Sarah link

12/01/2011 09:07

Hi Nathaniel,
Yes. I agree with you and Pam's caution around wholeheartedly embracing the Ayn Rand view of the world.
What I like about this is that it turns the traditional concept of what love is on its head and gives a different view. Neither view is perfect but without a sense of what else it out there I sometimes can't find myself in the idea.
Her view helped me see another way.
s

Everything I know about love is wrong

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