love & selfishness

"Love is the extent to which we're willing to indulge someone else's selfishness"
-Dr. Jane Aloysius O'McCorkleschlatt

The preceding quote is true...but not to be confused with a comment on human nature. Such a state of affairs could only happen in a human society which had horribly degraded. Since anyone reading this today lives in just such a society, it behooves us to understand what we're getting into when offering or seeking love.
The quote applies to any sort of love, but is most apparent in affairs of the heart (or other organs). Any understanding of love, any ability to navigate its byways, is contingent upon understanding selfishness, for we live in a fear-driven society. The fears of want, loneliness, aging, ridicule, violence, meaninglessness, death...these fears (and many others) are at the innermost core of our subconscious. We are so fear-driven, that we spend much of our lives with these fears as our CONSCIOUS companions. A creature experiencing fear can think of little other than its own needs. Hence, selfishness is fear's little brother...sometimes quiet, sometimes loud, but always tagging along, close at hand.
The desire for love...to be held, listened to, cared for...touches the most primal center of what it is to be human. Yet we construct our society so that these most basic needs are never a given - never a facet of daily existence we might simply take for granted. We senselessly confine the overwhelming bulk of our meaningful intimacy to the realm of romance, then make romance a commodity to be competed for. So we always live in the fear that our most basic human needs might be taken away from us, by someone younger or richer or smarter or comelier or more fun.
That's for those lucky enough to have love in the first place.
Any understanding of love starts with the awareness that selfishness is an almost inescapable state of being in this society. Yet this is one of the few contexts in which the word "selfish" is not negative. To be human is to exist in a profound state of need - emotional needs, social needs, sexual needs, touch needs. We downplay or deny these needs at extreme peril to our health and sanity.
To ask someone to love us, is to put forth our most basic humanity...the very heart of our most naked vulnerability.
All too often, when we offer ourselves in love, we aren't simply focused on how qualified our intended might be for the task at hand. We don't focus on their emotional strengths or weaknesses. We don't focus on the biological wisdom of our own bodies, which are all too happy to tell us with whom we should be canoodling. We focus on the wrong selfish needs...what kind of material resources someone has, or how closely they might adhere to some "idea" we carry of our life's story, or how people will judge us with this person on our arm.
And too, all too often, we simply take what we can get. But who can resist when love, any love, is offered? What fool even should resist?
There are times when two people's loving, selfish desires align. These times are among the most sacred of our lives. Caught up in hormonal rushes with someone who approximates what we think we "deserve", is a roller coaster ride we never want to get off. Hormones being what they are, more often than not we're rudely tossed from the car. But no matter how painful the fall, we get up and stand by those tracks, waiting for the ride to come barreling by again.
JUMP! JUMP!, our primal needs shout.
Yet no matter how excited we are by the lover strapped in beside us, inevitably (and often sooner rather than later) we realize that profound intimacy can be profoundly annoying. We start making mental checklists of the things we put up with, compared to the benefits we enjoy. On the other side, our beloved has their own ledger.
No loving relationship should ever be forced to endure that kind of scrutiny...but that's the inescapable result of living in an "all your eggs in one basket" world (or all your ovaries...or seeds). And perhaps it was NEVER all peaches and coconut milk. Perhaps going in, you knew that this fool was far from your dreamy ideal. That's where the acceptance of selfishness, yours and others', comes in. How far are you willing to let someone you love be something other than your ideal?
How do you find love in a fear-driven world? By trying to find people (in romance and elsewhere) with whom your selfish desires mutually balance. It ain't romantic, it ain't sexy. A more pragmatic, scientific understanding of human sexuality (and how Disney got basically everything wrong) can also save you from immeasurable worlds of misery.
The ultimate test of love comes on that day when your beloved wishes to change the nature of your loving contract, reducing or even removing certain components of which you may be quite fond. Or simply changing. Can you love someone enough to let them be something you don't approve? Can you love them enough to share their resources or touches? Can you love them enough to let them go?
Most love quickly dies under such strain. And love that dies that kind of death, was probably never really love to begin with.