selfishness/love

There is a place between sympathy and selfishness where you start to feel sorry for yourself because you're feeling sorry for someone else.

There is a place between remorse and selfishness where it starts to matter more that you're forgiven than that you're truly apologetic.

There is a place between regret and selfishness where you hold onto things you ought to go in order to use them as canon fodder in the war of "who has had the worst time of it."

Is love a truly selfish act? Do we simply strive for that connection because of the way it makes us feel and not at all for how it might affect the other person? Of course, we can never exactly know how the other feels, and even if we make them feel the way we want them to, how can we help but get something out of it? I could argue the mutuality of it, but one might in response point to symbiosis--a mutual relationship, but would we want to call it love?

So, perhaps the sign of true, selfless love is the willingness to give one's life for the other.

There is a place between willingness to self-sacrifice and using someone to get want you want where all you want is for them to feel the same way about you that you do about them, where you want to evoke the same feelings in them that they do in you.

(Hitchcock 421, 3.7.06)