If you didn't like my other Articles, you really don't want to read this one....
The word love is one of the most bastardized words out there. It’s in fact, bastardized more than ‘hero’ which is saying something. Just like hero, Love is a very important and not to be spoken lightly term. In fact, I dare say that unless you’re using the most basic of definitions (sex, or chemical response) that most people have NEVER (even those that are married) experienced love. Do I say this just from my own personal experience? No, I’ve asked a lot of people about their relationships. Among these, those that last and those that fail or are in the process of failing. It’s this very reason that 50% of marriages end in divorce (BTW, that statistic is misleading because it’s actually much more, when you look at the true nature of how they calculate it.)
Anyhow, this is my definition of love. It holds a very high standard that most people probably don’t want to agree with for a myriad of reasons, however….
To start, we have to define some terms that build to the construct of love. Love is not a prime or concrete definition. It is a 4th level definition.
Admire: The act of appreciating and valuing a single action or deed accomplished by an individual.
Respect: A form of currency paid for by multiple acts accomplished by an individual that another admires. Every admirable action builds respect. Respect is not given, it is taken as currency for acting admirably. You must earn respect, just as you earn your paycheck.
Love: The overwhelming desire to possess that which you respect, whether it is human or inanimate.
Now before you freak out and say “he said possess! And he was referring to a human being!” Read on, it’s important.
Our society has a really big problem with possession. Heck we don’t even like to possess our pets any longer. This is a direct result of women’s lib. Yes, women’s lib was a very good thing, as is the freedom of every human being on earth. However, some negative things came out of it, just like the freeing of black people did the same. It tainted the language. It taught normal people to be afraid to see marriage and love as possession because to own someone is a bad thing right?
If you own someone for whom you are asserting your will over their freedom and their own free will, then yes, it’s a bad thing. But you can possess someone without asserting your will over his/hers.
How does this work? Isn’t possession the right to do whatever you wish with something? Yes it is! But Love is based on respect, which is based on multiple acts that you admired. Those acts did not happen without free will. So if you possess someone that you respect and even love, your will would be to allow them to exert their free will. Based on your repeated evidence showing that they are trustworthy and worthy of respect, you know that they’re actions will not harm you and thus you can continue to possess them, excluding all others from that possession without destroying their free will. Now on to why my definition is so important….
It is this desire to possess and pay for the person whom you have chosen to love through your own actions that is most important. Loving another is much like buying a house. You have a huge down payment (the courtship) that you have to make, culminating in a ring and a wedding. You then also have ongoing monthly payments for 20+ years. You then still in addition to those monthly payments have maintenance fees that last the entire time you own the house. And while over time your expenses go down because of what you have paid in the past, you never stop paying for the right to own that house. (Or if your in-laws really hate you, you even end up paying taxes on it just like a house 
To put it another way, respect is much like a leaky bucket that cannot be fixed sitting on a table. The only way that you can keep the bucket full is by continually feeding it more water. And to be clear, the more lovable a person is (i.e. the more respect you have for them) the more water you have to pour in every day.
What do I mean by paying for love? (Yes, I know you all got upset again… I can see it in your metaphorical eyes)
Payment for love and the right to possess another is acting in ways that the one you are possessing finds admirable. So in effect, you are paying for the right to possess that person you love with acts that cause the other person to love you in the same way and wish to possess you.
The concept of payment is very important. Everything that happens in the universe requires payment. To move a rock, you must pay for the rock to be moved. The only currency that gravity and inertia recognize is physical force. Wanting the rock to move without acting to make the rock move doesn’t make the rock move. Wishing for someone else to move the rock doesn’t make the rock move. Holding a gun to someone else’s head to make the rock move works for a while, but inevitably in the end you will fail because either the other person will die, or kill you. And when the next rock comes around, everyone else will know that you’re a thief and stay well clear of you so that they can’t also be enslaved. (Hence why we have the gray market that gets around taxes, the government is stealing and people avoid being stolen from whenever possible, even if the thief has big guns)
In the case of love, you can’t pay someone else to do the deeds for you or steal the deeds from someone else; you have to pay the piper yourself. It’s direct payment, that doesn’t recognize cold hard cash (that’s not love, because there is no respect); it only recognizes admiration and respect earned through hard work and positive action.
The hardest questions here are “What do you admire? What do you respect?” These concepts come down to your philosophical position on life. Are you a subjectivist or an objectivist? Do you value life and your freedom to live it? Or do you value friends and relationships over the truth? Do you even believe in truth?
If you don’t believe in truth (i.e. you’re a subjectivist) then the concept of respect becomes very difficult. In fact, the concept of socialism is borne from the difficulty in defining respect for the subjectivist. If nothing is right or wrong, how can you define what is of value and what isn’t? And if you have no way have valuing something, then you can’t admire it and you can’t build respect either. Hence to a subjectivist the only measure of value comes from self-sacrifice. It is the relationships with others that are most important. If others are happy, then you are good no matter the cost to you personally. If others aren’t happy, you’re bad no matter the benefit to yourself personally. People become happy when they have food in their mouths and don’t have to work for it because it was given to them. You can see this all have the time with freebies on Oprah, reality TV, and lotteries. Most people will do anything to get something for nothing. Socialism prays on this concept by luring people into thinking that they’ll get something if they’re more pathetic than someone else (Extreme Makeover: Home Edition anyone?). As a result, someone that lives in poverty and gives away everything that they produce and earn to someone else is valued more than someone that builds and creates and in the process trades with others that builds and creates allowing fair commerce to take place.
Based on this principle, the subjectivist admires the most abject pathetic person the most, because the more pathetic the more in need, and the greater the opportunity to give away what you have for that other person that allowing yourself to become good. (Or at least not bad)
So, for the subjectivist, pathetic is admirable, and respectable and thus lovable. It is this evil concept of self-sacrifice, of responsibility to take care of others because you were unfortunately born with greater ability than others, which is also destroying the concept of love. If you’re told your entire life that you’re evil because you have more than others and you aren’t giving it away enough, but you like your car and your house and the TV and want to keep it, you have a contradiction. The result is guilt. You're taught to give away everything to others more needy, but at the same time, you want to reap the fruits of your own labors. If you constantly fee guilty, you can’t ever admire your accomplishments because they are the source of your guilt, and thus you can never respect yourself and thus can never love yourself. And if you can’t love yourself, and believe that you are lovable, then the only love that you’re going to find is no love at all, because it will not be based on respect, but a competition of based on guilt, or pathetic character.
Conversely, if you believe in truth and believe in life as the highest value, you therefore believe in freedom to live your own life in your own interest. You also believe that everyone else is also entitled to the same thing. Once you believe that it is OK to be selfish and act to better your own existence, then there is no guilt for your accomplishments and thus you can respect yourself and possess yourself without guilt, and fully earned.
Only when you love yourself can you truly be loved by someone else, and love another. This is an important phrase, so let’s look at it carefully:
Why would someone else not be able to love you if you don’t love yourself? The reason is, because to love someone else you have to respect him or her. One of the most important acts that result in admiration is self-respect. You have to believe that you can do something, to ever try it. It is the pre-requisite for all other actions. Before you can try to accomplish something, you have to believe that you can accomplish it. (Yoda, you rock!)
Why wouldn’t you be able to love someone else if you don’t love yourself first? Because to love someone else, you have to have a frame of reference from which to base your value position that results in admiration. If you have never accomplished anything, because you don’t believe that you can accomplish anything, the most you can say is that you love everyone else that has accomplished anything at all, good or bad. It’s only through acting in ways that make you admire your actions, take pride in your actions that you can form a position to judge other’s actions so that they can gain your respect.
End result? Love is earned through achievements that garner admiration. Those achievements culminate in respect, which you have to continually act in a way that the person that loves you admires to maintain that respect. It is this payment that constitutes love that can last a lifetime. The down payment is simply the hard work that gets you noticed and causes the person to START loving you, just as it is harder to start pushing the rock than it is to keep pushing the rock (unless it’s on Teflon).
If you’ve read this far, you probably actually agree with my definition of Love, or at least were so pissed off by what I had to say that you had to find more to nit pick over so that you could justify why I’m wrong. In either case, the next logical question comes down to sex. What is sex for in this definition of love, if you wish to make the act of sex an act of love?
Sex is the ultimate selfish act of possession. It is the desire to physically own that which you love. The act of sex is the expression of this desire to own the person you are with. It is a trade between two people of their highest values. They trade on their respect for the other and take from that earned respect nature’s highest reward for hard work. It is the taking of pleasure in the one you love’s body that is earned by right as a result of all of the hard work you did to gain admiration for your actions and respect for the culmination of those actions.
But this sounds a lot like an act of an animal! Yes, well that’s because we ARE animals. In fact the definition of human is “rational animal”. The key here is rational. To the irrational human, the one that doesn’t respect themselves or their partner, the act is simply a physical gratification for the sake of gratification. To put it another way, it is the purpose of the act. To the rational human, the purpose is to act in such a way that the person can respect himself or herself. The result is another loving them, which culminates in the shared act of sex. It is this differentiation of selfish purpose that is the key. The animal act is purely an animal act when pleasure is the purpose and not the outcome.
Does this mean that someone has to always do something admirable for you to want to have sex with him or her even if you're married? No, of course not. It isn’t a 1-1 relationship. You’re entitled to as much pleasure as you want and as the other person is willing to trade as payment for your admirable actions. But just like everything else in life, sex is an act of fair trade. You must pay a fair sum of currency for the gratification that you receive as a result, just as you pay a “fair” sum of currency for the gratification of watching a movie at a theatre.
Just like Love the currency of righteous sex is very specific. It is a trade in pleasure between two people that have earned that pleasure. To take pleasure, you must give it in fair trade.
What a second! You said give! Yes, that’s right, I said give. Give in the sense of giving someone something that they have purchased. It is in your own enlightened self-interest to give in fair trade during sex, just as it is in your interest to pay a fair amount for your food, because if you don’t, just like the grocery store, your partner isn’t going to be interested in trading with you if you don’t.
What about love that isn’t sexual in nature? Of course Freud would say that there’s no such thing, but of course the rational animal has the capacity to love without it being about sex. This love is most commonly associated with family members but can be with others, a mentor, a close friend or a public figure that does incredible feats such as a basketball player or a hockey player when they decide to act in enlightened self interest. I’m going to break these two concepts (family versus everything else) into two separate concepts however, because there is a very important distinction that needs to be made.
We start with the mentor, the friend, the superstar, because they’re easiest. They act in such a way that causes admiration, which builds into respect for their actions. In the case of the superstar this is often a very limited view of their existence. This is why we hunger for more information about their private lives and ultimately are very disappointed because it is a very rare case where the person is as worthy of respect in their entire life, as their actions on a court, or in front of a screen. In the case of these relationships (groupies withstanding) sex is not the payment. It is the other things that result from the person that are payment for your respect. It is the exultation of the winning shot (MJ), the secrets revealed by the mentor, the ear that listens and helps you solve your problems of the best friend. In the case of opposite sex (or same sex as the case may be) friends, the separation of sex and love is very difficult and why friendships of this nature rarely work without it becoming a sexual one, because it is in our animal nature to want to possess the opposing sex that you love.
In the case of family the same thing happens. People don’t think about the trade that occurs, but it does occur. If it doesn’t occur, then it isn’t love. Family members are no more entitled to love (something for nothing, the rock moving simply because it wants to) than anyone else. The payment between child and mother/father is clear. The mother/father create the child and then protect it, nurture it, pay for it’s XBOX, and most importantly teach it. (When I say teach it, I mean, teach the child positive values, teach the child how to learn and how to view the universe. Not 1+1 = 2.) In return, the child has admiration for the parent’s actions, and later respect. (Well until their teenagers and then they realize all of the lies that they’re parents told them, and then they’re just pissed off, and rightfully so, we tell our children so many lies for no reason (Santa))
In the case of the parent to the child, it works the very same way. The parent chooses (hopefully!) to produce the child. They invest in the child, just as the child invests in the parents their trust, by providing for it, protecting it and teaching it. They are in effect putting payment in the bank ahead of time (sort of a reverse mortgage). By doing so, they are expressing confidence in themselves, both their genetics and their ability to bring up the child, that they will be repaid. The child repays the parents by acting in positive ways that result in admiration, and learning the values that will serve them their entire lives and allow them to earn respect. (This explains hockey moms flashing the opposing team, even if it isn’t justified) It’s this pre-payment that also serves genetics and the propagation of the species because the parents push their children to repay them, to accomplish the hopes and dreams of the parents, and achieve that which the parents never were able to in their own lives.
So just like the friend, the mentor and the superstar, there is respect earned by both parties. The next time someone says “But they are family” respond, that love is earned, it doesn’t matter if you're family or your physics professor. It is the sense of entitlement of love from family members that causes the arguments and acrimony in families. It is also what causes parents to lie to their children, and it is what causes teenagers to hate their parents, because of those lies. A parent must continually earn the respect of their child, just as the child must do the same for the parent. By lying to the child you are not only acting in a way that takes away respect, that is a negative, and thus not admirable and is actually deplorable, but you are creating a contradiction and being a hypocrite. How is the child to learn or even value someone that says one thing, and then does another? It’s not possible.
So the next time you ask yourself. “Am I in Love?” Ask yourself the following questions in this order:
1. Am I at this moment capable of respecting and loving myself?
2. If yes, do I respect the person that I think I’m in love with?
3. If yes, am I willing to give the same back in trade for that which I wish to possess?
4. If yes, am I willing to do so on a continual basis?
5. If yes, is there anything in the world that you would rather possess in this fashion (animate or otherwise)?
6. If no, has the other person built up enough trust for you're to believe that they have answered yes to the previous 4 questions and no to #5?
If you answer negatively to any one of these questions, then you’re not in love.
If you answer yes to all of these questions, then congratulations, you have found the real deal, and I’m very happy for you! (And I hope the sex, fully earned, and as a result of your actions, not as a purpose is fantastic! (Just don’t tell me about it!))