The Selfishness of Love

By: Kelly

So I recently finished reading Atlas Shrugged and all I can say is, wow. I always joke that becoming a radical is an integral part of the college experience but I honestly think Rand is misinterpreted as extreme by people who haven’t read her work. She’s not “conservative” by today’s standards; she doesn’t fit into any mainstream ideology. She just trumpets rationalism and individual freedom above all else. I’m not going to get into the politics of it all (even though it’s tempting) but I wanted to post some of her quotes about love and relationships. Her opinions on romance reflect her entire life philosophy.

Arguably the most famous line of the whole book is the solemn promise that defines Rand’s moral code:

“I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”

This is where people incorrectly perceive Rand as celebrating “greed” and “selfishness.” She makes a convincing argument that these terms have been twisted to mean something else and that in reality, it is our greed and selfishness that is the saving grace of humanity. We call our values “values” for a reason- in order for them to have meaning, they must be earned. In order for us to live by our values, we can never just give or take based on need. Love is not an act of charity. She says, “The symbol of all relationships, the moral symbol of respect for human beings, is the trader. We, who live by values, not by loot, are traders, both in matter and in spirit. A trader is a man who earns what he gets and does not give or take the undeserved.”

How exactly is love a transaction? The price we pay is our emotional attachments and the reward is “the joy we receive from the virtues of another.” Therefore, she turns the popular idea of morality on its head. In reality, love requires no sacrifice and it is not unconditional. Real love is NOT blind, contrary to popular opinion. One of the most asinine characters in the book illustrates this popular notion in the following dialogue:

“I want to be loved for myself- not for anything I do or have to say or think. For myself- not for my body or mind or words or works or actions.”

“But then…what is yourself?”

“If you loved me, you wouldn’t ask it.”

Later on, the same character says, “Love is its own cause! Love is above causes and reasons. Love is blind. But you wouldn’t be capable of it. You have the mean, scheming calculating little soul of a shopkeeper who trades, but never gives! Love is a gift- a great, free, unconditional gift that transcends and forgives everything. What’s the generosity of loving a man for his virtues? What do you give him? Nothing. It’s no more than cold justice. No more than he’s earned.”

I always hated when people said, “If you loved me, you would ______.” That is someone demanding you live for them rather than for yourself on the basis of nothing. That suggests that love is unthinking and irrational. A man who sacrifices his values, or anything he deems just and good, for the sake of someone else, has committed the greatest of follies.

It is the just nature of love that makes it beautiful. When we love, we are celebrating ourselves. We’re saying, THESE are the qualities and ideas that I hold most dear. When I look at you, I see the embodiment of the traits that I’ve chosen to govern my life. In order for the words “I love you” to have any significance, the “I” has to hold meaning. Otherwise, who cares? This is why pride is important and not something of which to be ashamed. Rather, “pride is the recognition of the fact that you are your own highest value, and like all of man’s values, it has to be earned.”

She says that any time we doubt ourselves, “every feeling of inferiority and secret unworthiness is man’s hidden dread of his inability to deal with existence.” We reject our ability to live, to fight, to make decisions and face the consequences- in essence, what it means to be human. This is why honesty as key. Honesty is “the recognition of the fact that the unreal is unreal and can have no value, that neither love nor fame nor cash is a value if obtained by fraud.” She says there can only be freedom in honesty. “People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I've learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one's reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one's master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person's view requires to be faked.”

She also says that our physical and emotional desires are permanently intertwined. Our rejection of one set results in a failed attempt to compensate with the other. By choosing to live in a constructed dream world rather than having the strength to face life as it is, we make ourselves slaves to a delusion and live a veiled existence. If we reject our physical desires and the material world, we search for solace by seeking an alternative emotional release. An example is the woman who receives no sexual fulfillment from her husband and throws herself into church or work. If we ignore our emotional desires, we turn to physical pleasures for an escape. An example of this is the man who cannot face the broken feelings of his family and turns to drugs, alcohol, or an affair for temporary satisfaction. Unless the twin desires remain intertwined as they are meant to be, you can never be satisfied. And they can only remain intertwined if you accept the responsibilities of observing, analyzing, and responding to the world around you, even when it’s hard and it hurts. Rand says, “Only the man who extols the purity of a love devoid of desire, is capable of the depravity of a desire devoid of love.”

This connection between the physical and the emotional is best described in this quote, which also sums up the point of this post:

"Love is blind, they say; sex is impervious to reason and mocks the power of all philosophers. But, in fact, a person's sexual choice is the result and sum of their fundamental convictions. Tell me what a person finds sexually attractive and I will tell you their entire philosophy of life. Show me the person they sleep with and I will tell you their valuation of themselves. No matter what corruption they're taught about the virtue of selflessness, sex is the most profoundly selfish of all acts, an act which they cannot perform for any motive but their own enjoyment - just try to think of performing it in a spirit of selfless charity! - an act which is not possible in self-abasement, only in self-exultation, only on the confidence of being desired and being worthy of desire. It is an act that forces them to stand naked in spirit, as well as in body, and accept their real ego as their standard of value. They will always be attracted to the person who reflects their deepest vision of themselves, the person whose surrender permits them to experience - or to fake - a sense of self-esteem .. Love is our response to our highest values - and can be nothing else."

So what is the application of this knowledge, that love is selfish? It’s not to say that in a disagreement with a significant other, you demand my way or the highway. It doesn’t mean you should only consider what you want, rather than what the other person wants. This is the standard definition of selfishness, not Rand’s. Instead this allows us to recognize that the reason you "put others before yourself" is because seeing the person you love unhappy will make YOU unhappy. At the end of the book, two characters that are in love face a dilemma. The man is wanted by the police and when his lover goes to him, she is tailed and they arrest him. Before the police arrive however, he tells her that she must pretend she hates him and had every intention of turning him in. If the police were to find out that he loves her, they would torture her to get him to obey their commands. He says that if that ever happened, he would kill himself immediately because he would rather die than see her in such pain. Rand’s point is, that would be an entirely selfish act of love. If you choose to honor the wishes of someone else because you love them, it is not a sacrifice. It means that the joy you receive from seeing them happy is greater than the joy you would receive from pursuing your own desire. The benefits outweigh the costs. Or in the example I just used, the costs of seeing your lover suffer is not worth the benefits of staying alive. I’ll end this with a conversation I had a while ago with my boyfriend. He was asking me about this guy I used to like and why it didn’t work out. I told him, “He was too selfish to care about me.” He smiled knowingly and said, “I’m too selfish not to.”