Selfish? ‘I love you’ often says ‘I’m desperate for you to love me’

By David McElroy · January 8, 2016

Why do so many people murder those they claim to love? Why do we call these murders “crimes of passion”?

Could it be that much of what we call romantic love is really the need to control someone else? And could it be that when most people profess love, they’re really saying, “I’m desperate for someone to love me. Will you be the one to love and accept me?”

Here’s the real question that’s been bothering me lately. Is love always ultimately selfish?

At heart, I’m a romantic, in both the narrow sense and the broad sense. I identify with the line in the Postal Service song called “Clark Gable” which says, “I want so badly to believe that there is truth, that love is real.” I’ve believed in love — and continued to believe in love — at times in my life when it didn’t make sense. I need love to be real. I need for someone who says “I love you” to mean that she loves and accepts me — as a person, the way I am, for better or worse — rather than it simply meaning, “I like the attention you’re giving me.”

I’ve always ignored evidence to the contrary and made the conscious decision to believe in people who’ve said they love me, even when the evidence suggested otherwise. Am I idealistic in the good sense and just waiting for real love to triumph? Or am I in denial and setting myself up to be disappointed in people who are merely serving their own selfish purposes — for however long I meet their needs?

I don’t know, but the question has been haunting me.

I’ve realized that I feel most strongly eager to tell a woman I love her when I need to hear that she loves me. As I realized that about myself, it led me to this terrifying thought that maybe the love I want to express is more about my own need than it is the other person. Could I have this element of narcissism in me? Or could the fact that I can even ask the question suggest otherwise?

I desperately need love and I feel the strong need to express love. But what happens if someone supplies all of my needs for love — when someone loves and adores me, when someone is willing to do anything for me? What happens when I’m not having to pursue someone’s love?

When I think about those situations from the past, I’m uncomfortable. Have I been selfish enough to be complacent when someone desperately needed me? Have I been selfish enough to lose the need to express love when I had the power or control in a relationship?

I honestly don’t want to think about this, because it forces me to look at dark and selfish parts of myself. But when I’m honest, it also forces me to question whether all love is ultimately selfish in some way. And I don’t want that to be true.

I’ve seen how narcissists “love.” What they do isn’t real love, because it’s always about control and about getting their own needs met. They say “I love you” because they’re desperate to hear it in return, even though their actions prove themselves to be controlling and self-centered. They almost never really know the people they claim to love, because their own fear of being unlovable distracts them from noticing anything else. The other person is merely a source of “narcissistic supply.”

But what about those who don’t suffer from narcissistic personality disorder? Is all love selfish? Even for those who are emotionally healthy in other ways?

If I fall in love with you but you don’t love me in return, I eventually lose my love for you — so was it real? Or was it real only to the extent that bait is real when it attempts to hook a fish?

Most couples I see are miserable, partly because all they’re interested in — whether they admit it or not — is what they can get from a relationship. Over and over, I see people fool themselves into thinking they’re self-sacrificing and loving, when their actions show they’re mostly interested in shaping that person into what they want him or her to be.

Are we all engaged in elaborate Pygmalion projects? I’ve done that before and it terrifies me, because I didn’t know it at the time. The more I look at other relationships, the more I wonder whether we’re all doing that — at least until two people simply learn to tolerate each other and settle into a routine. Is that really love? It doesn’t feel like it, but how can I know?

Have I ever seen real love? Can I be certain I’ve experienced real love?

It’s hard to know about love I might have seen in other couples, at least in the long term. Almost everybody has experienced the heated, exciting passion in a loving relationship that can last for months or even a few years. But what about when people get past that? How many couples who stay together for the long term really experience true love for the other — as opposed to simply settling into the feeling that they’re trapped at worst or “this is good enough” at best?

I say I’ve seen real love in long-term couples. I think I have. But when I start asking myself to name those people — and why I’m sure it’s really love instead of just acceptance — I start doubting.

Then there are my own feelings. When I experience love, is it just because I’m desperate for someone to love me, to understand me, to accept me? Or have I really loved those to whom I’ve said, “I love you”?

My own feelings are the only reason I can still feel hope. When I think about every woman to whom I’ve ever said — or would say today — “I love you,” I can honestly say that I feel some degree of warm love for every single one of them, to one degree or another. Even for a few who have betrayed me and hurt me very deeply — sometimes for reasons I’ll never understand — I wish them only the best. I want them happy even if I can’t be happy.

I’m depressed about much of what I think about the reality of love and much of what I see in others about love. But my own feelings give me hope.

I love some people who don’t love me anymore (or maybe who never did). I want good things for them. Even though I might be angry about specific things those people have done, I can look at each case and know in my heart that I would do whatever I had to do to help that person be happy — even at great cost to myself. Even if she never knew what I had done for her.

I question the honesty and integrity of my own heart at times. I question my motives. I question whether I’m selfish (or if I can love unselfishly). I really do — and I don’t want to give myself too much credit.

But when I feel the burning love still in my heart that I know will almost certainly never be returned, that gives me hope that there’s truth inside there and that love is real.

That’s not a satisfying answer as I sit here alone and in desperate need of love and understanding, but that flicker of hope that love is real is all I have to hold onto.

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Is it an attempt to blur the gender line between men and women? Or is it some weird tribute to the traditional Scottish kilt? It’s hard to say, but fashion designers keep pushing for men to wear skirts in the last few years. Both men and women in modern fashion seem oddly androgynous, as though it would be offensive for a man to look manly or for a woman to look feminine. A CNN article about the latest fashions from Paris caught my attention Monday and left me wondering about the ugly clothes the designers are hawking. If a man wants to wear a skirt — or a kilt — that’s OK with me, but I’ll stick with a traditional dark suit with a white shirt and tie. (Well, when I’m not wearing t-shirts and sweats, of course.) I always wonder who actually buys the outlandish garb from fashion designers anyway. I would be humiliated to be seen in any of this stuff, but I obviously have no sense of high fashion.

If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

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