Rand on Why Love is Selfish

Love is often platitudinously expressed as being selfless, the notion that one surrenders the essence of themselves to another portrayed as the ultimate act of romance.

But love requires mutual values. In order to love, a person must recognize something of value in an entity other than himself. And in order to recognize value in others, a person must first have a sense of his own value.

Love isn’t selfless; it is perhaps the ultimate act of selfishness. Ayn Rand’s most famous quote on the subject comes from The Fountainhead.

“To say ‘I love you’ one must first know how to say the ‘I.’” protagonist Howard Roark says to Dominique Francon. Unlike Roark, whose developed sense of self guides his actions, Dominique is less assured. She knows what she values, but she is affected by the cruelty of the world and its attempts to stifle individuals. Despite their mutual attraction, Roark will not accept Dominique as a romantic partner until she learns to value herself and be indifferent to the rest of the world. Until she does, she cannot truly appreciate Roark. 

Elsewhere in her writing, Rand describes romantic love as something possible only for the individual of “unbreached self-esteem.” Love, she continues, is a response to the “highest values in the person of another” and integrates both the body and the mind through desire.

Roark’s love for Dominique is ultimately self-interested, not only because being around the things one values brings happiness to the individual, but because he is invested in Dominique’s welfare. He needs her to thrive so that he can thrive.

There are really two layers to Rand’s idea of selfish love. In the first, there is the sense of comfort one receives from knowing that the things one values not only exist elsewhere in the world but live through the reason of another person. In the second, the individual has a vested interest in propagating those values in the life of the person he loves. An increase in their happiness reflects in his own. 

To be disinterested in the happiness of the person you love, Rand wrote in an essay entitled “The Ethics of Emergencies, would mean one is indifferent to one’s own values. 

Ultimately, when Roark pushes Dominique away in The Fountainhead, it is a selfish act. He needs Dominique to reflect value in its highest form. It is the only way to secure her happiness, and by extension his.

Roark is not Dominique’s only love interest in the novel. Peter Keating, another architect and the moral antithesis of Roark, also loves Dominique. But Keating’s love is ultimately selfless because Keating as a person doesn’t really exist. He is so obsessed with success and popularity that he adopts whatever attitudes, whatever values he is told. As a person, he is null. He is a sum of other people’s ideas and opinions.

He has an innate sense of desire for Dominique based on her physical beauty, but he otherwise is incapable of valuing or understanding her. She is the daughter of his boss, so it is advantageous for him to be attracted to her. Others in society find her desirable, so it is a coup against his competitors for him to possess her. 

But he does not understand her, as he admits repeatedly. He cannot, for he has no sense of self. He has the capacity to want to love her but he does not understand how to form values independent of other people’s opinions. Nor does he really care for her welfare. He knows their marriage is not a happy one, but as Dominique fulfills her social roles as a wife, he doesn’t do anything to procure his happiness or hers.

He is the epitome of selfless love. Rand in a 1963 interview with Playboy stated selfless love “would have to mean that you derive no personal pleasure or happiness from the company and the existence of the person you love, and that you are motivated only by self-sacrificial pity for that person’s need of you.” And that’s exactly what Keating feels–pity that Dominique ultimately does not love him.

In the end, Dominique is stolen by another man as a stipulation for a contract Keating desperately wants to fulfill. That he allows it to happen demonstrates that he does not value her or in any way care about her happiness. While Roark released Dominique with the expectation that she would return when the time was right, increasing the happiness of both, Keating lets Dominique go out of spite, caring neither for her happiness nor his.

Ultimately, to love is to value. It’s a reward for seeking and promoting value and a way of promoting joy between two people who benefit from shared virtue in their interactions together.