Love Is Selfish

Love is often portrayed as the most altruistic feeling. When we love someone we are willing to sacrifice ourselves for the other person.

We constantly think and care about our partner, sometimes even putting their needs ahead of ours.

But why are we so selfless? Are we trying to fulfill our own needs by behaving so altruistically?

To answer these questions we may need to answer other questions first: If love is such an altruistic feeling, can we fall in love with anyone? Why do we fall in love in the first place?

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Why we fall in love

Falling in love is driven by attraction.

We are attracted to those we think can fulfill all our needs. The people we are attracted to are usually those looking good, making us feel good, and making good things happen to us.

Good is a very subjective concept. We are all different in terms of what we consider good-looking, the emotions we need to feel, and the experiences we want to have. However, if someone doesn’t bring any good to us, then we won’t feel any sort of attraction and we won’t be able to love that person.

Consequently, love is selfish, as we only feel attracted to those who can fulfill our needs.

Through love, we try to address multiple layers of needs.

In the first stages of dating, when we don’t know much about our partner yet, we focus more on superficial aspects like physical appearance, status, and charisma. By doing so we try to fulfill our most selfish needs, as all we care about is what we need to feel good, and not what we can give back to our partner.

Only when love unfolds we start addressing our deeper needs. We start caring about the feelings of our partner and we look for emotional connection rather than pure attraction. Our actions are still selfish, as their goal is to make us feel loved, worthy, and understood, however, the needs we are trying to address are altruistic ones, as by addressing them we also improve the life of our partner.

So, attraction is driven by selfish needs, while we can fulfill our most altruistic ones only through love.

How we should fall in love according to society

In our society falling in love is everything.

Communities are slowly disappearing and we need to rely on social media and dating apps to get to know potential partners. There we are pushed to prioritize our selfish needs, focusing on superficial standards like looks and status.

With social media, we are constantly exposed to extremely beautiful and successful people and this distorts our view of reality and inflates our standards.

Dating apps then give us the illusion that we can find someone meeting these unattainable standards, as we have now everyone, including the most successful people, just a few swipes away.

Dating apps have to create this illusion as their business can only thrive if we care only about falling in love, continuously jumping to new relationships, instead of developing love, by sticking to one single partner.

Sadly, they are being successful at it, as they are managing to completely exploit the selfish needs of men and women.

Men are biologically driven by quantity, meaning they tend to be attracted to many women to maximize their chances of spreading their genes. This explains why, on dating apps, men often swipe right on many women.

Women, on the other hand, are biologically driven by quality. Since they carry the pregnancy and bear a higher reproductive burden, they tend to be much pickier on dating apps, selecting only high-value men to ensure the healthiest and strongest offspring.

So, we have high-value men playing with multiple women and losing the ability to commit to a monogamous relationship. Meanwhile, women develop inflated standards due to having too many options, leading to broken hearts as they only date high-value men who don’t want to commit. Normal men, on the other hand, are chronically lonely and forced to pay for all the premium features of dating apps to increase their chances of finding a woman who won’t reject them.

In this situation, nobody is happy, because dating is considered a transaction. We are treated like products that can be rejected and substituted if not considered good enough.

Even worse, we end up developing an insecure attachment style and get addicted to the rollercoaster of online dating, finding people who behave distant and avoidant more attractive, while we get bored by those who are not afraid to show their affection from the beginning.

So, modern society is pushing us to maximize the fulfillment of our selfish needs and completely ignore our altruistic ones.

Nowadays it’s only about falling in love, feeling the attraction, and then jumping to the next relationship as soon as we are expected to give something back.

In our society, everybody wants to fall in love, but nobody is ready to love.

How we should fall in love to find love

If we want to fall in love to find love we should stop seeing dating as a transaction. Falling in love is not about trying to find the best possible partner ticking all the boxes in our checklist, and is not about seducing as many people as possible to boost our ego.

If we want to fall in love to find love we need to set reasonable standards, accepting that we can only receive from our partner what we can give back. Nobody owes us anything and we are not entitled to the best looking and successful people just because we exist.

We also need to accept that falling in love is just the first step, but not the final goal of a relationship. The attraction we feel first will soon disappear once we get to know our partner and there will be no more mystery in the relationship.

We can only find love if we deprioritize our selfish needs for adventure, fun, and lust, to focus more on our altruistic needs. Only by doing so, we can be able to substitute attraction with respect, love, and support when the time arrives.

When we fall in love we need to be intentional, thinking from the beginning if the person we are dating can do more than just fulfill our selfish needs. Is our partner someone we want to commit to, someone we want to grow with, and someone deserving of our unconditional love?

To answer these questions we need to give ourselves enough time to get to know the other person. We may feel attraction from the first moments if someone is good-looking, confident, and charismatic, but we need time to see if behind the surface there is also kindness, honesty, and responsibility.

We shouldn’t focus on finding superficial flaws to reject potential partners. Our goal shouldn’t be to maximize attraction, but to find someone good enough to fulfill our superficial needs, so that we can invest our time looking for the qualities necessary for long-lasting love.

We shouldn’t date to be impressed, but just to get to know someone and do our best to give that someone a chance.

We should let time allow us to develop deeper feelings for a person, as love comes through familiarity. Attraction can be instant but is based on our idealized version of the person we are falling in love with.

When we fall in love we should be aware of the gap between our fantasies and reality, and give us the time to embrace all the imperfections, so that we can love someone real, and not someone we expect our partner to become.

Only by doing so, we can truly love someone and consequently fulfill our deeper needs of feeling loved, worthy, and understood.

To fall in love to find love we should see the falling in love part just as a precondition for a mutual growth journey, not as the final goal.

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Fulfilling our superficial selfish needs is important, as they are a prerequisite for love. We need financial security, emotional, and physical attraction. However, they shouldn’t be our sole reason to judge someone. We shouldn’t try to maximize attraction, we should just make sure we find someone good enough.

Only by doing so we can then fulfill our deeper altruistic needs, start focusing on one person only, and see, with time and patience, if the partner we chose is a good candidate for a long-term romantic relationship.

For sure there will always be someone better than our partner, but at least we’ll be able to say we have one, instead of continuously rejecting for the search of perfection until we have no one more to reject, or the perfect person we chose turns out to be selfish and not suitable for a long term relationship.

Because to be honest, if someone is that perfect, why would that person choose us and solely commit to us, over all the available options?

Are we really that perfect, or maybe just a little bit too selfish?

For those with reasonable standards looking for true love who have to deal with constant rejection, I know how painful it is. But we should stay strong, keep searching, and focus on improving ourselves. By doing so we’ll raise our value, attract more people, and eventually we’ll find love. Even if we don’t, at least we’ll be in a good place able to enjoy all the other beautiful things life has to offer.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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From The Good Men Project on Medium

What Does Being in Love and Loving Someone Really Mean?

My 9-Year-Old Accidentally Explained Why His Mom Divorced Me

The One Thing Men Want More Than Sex

The Internal Struggle Men Battle in Silence

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