Seek Love

Lesson 7: Seek Pleasure (3 of 3)

If you want to grasp the gulf between the conventional view of selfishness and the view I’ve outlined in this book, there is no better illustration than the fact that, on my view, the greatest reward life has to offer the selfish individual is love.

Love is inherently selfish, Ayn Rand once told Playboy magazine. So-called 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. I don’t have to point out to you that no one would be flattered by, nor would accept, a concept of that kind. Love is not self-sacrifice, but the most profound assertion of your own needs and values. It is for your own happiness that you need the person you love, and that is the greatest compliment, the greatest tribute you can pay to that person.

To love someone is to care about them, to want the best for them, to take joy in their happiness, and to suffer when they suffer. You love someone, not for what they can do for you in some instrumental sense—not for the promotion they can help you get or the status they can help you acquire. You take pleasure in their sheer existence, and in sharing your life with them. Depending on the nature of their relationship—whether they are friends, or lovers, or children—their interests become co-mingled to a greater or lesser degree with your own.

To the extent altruism has any plausibility, this is the reason: other human beings are enormous values. If you love your life, you want to see others flourish, and want to help them flourish. And if you love another person, you will often do things that superficially seem like sacrifices: you skip that ballgame to tend to your sick spouse, you spend a long day helping your friend move, you forego a new car to help your kids pay for college. But these only seem like sacrifices if you drop the context—the context that what you are doing is nurturing a relationship that means the world to you.

Altruism, though, encourages people to engage in genuine sacrifices. Far from expressing love and nurturing relationships, these sacrifices poison relationships. When a friend or family member takes advantage of me, demands more of my time than I truly want to give, demands more of my money than I can truly afford, and I accede to these demands, that doesn’t strengthen the relationship. It only stokes hidden resentments that reveal themselves in avoidance, in angry outbursts, in passive-aggressive remarks.

Sacrifice has no place in human relationships. Relationships should be mutually fulfilling, rooted in a deep spiritual affinity, where neither side exploits the other nor allows themselves to be exploited. I’ve got your back and you’ve got mine. We aren’t mutual servants but independent equals, coming together to share values and share lives.

The rest of this lesson is about human relationships—about why they are so supremely crucial to our happiness and how to nurture them so they are truly mutually fulfilling.

Friendship

You’re born into a community—a group of people you interact and spend time with. In forming friendships, you build a chosen community. You select the people with whom you’ll share your life. People vary in how much selectivity they exercise in this regard. Some form friendships in childhood, mostly by happenstance, and those childhood friends remain their only friends. What remains true is that friendship offers you the ability to create your ideal community—to surround yourself with people you enjoy, respect, and admire.

Friendships exist on a spectrum. All of them involve some degree of mutual caring, intimacy, and shared activity—but they can vary wildly in all three respects.

Some friendships are narrow—a bond over a shared activity. The friend you watch baseball with, the friend you play video games with, colleagues at work, and workout buddies at the gym. These friendships may involve little in the way of self-disclosure. Conversations may rarely travel beyond the shared interest. Such friendships represent real bonds, but the values that constitute those bonds are thin. If you move to a new town or give up an old hobby, the relationship moves from present tense to past.

Other friendships have depth. They are friendships of the soul that can have nearly the strength and intimacy of romantic love. Though they may start out with or involve a bond over a shared activity, the connection stretches far beyond that. Your interests may change. Your friend may move away. You may not see each other for months or even years. But the bond remains because it is rooted in love for who your friend is. Your friend is, as Aristotle put it, “another self.” They embody your values in a profound way.

To say this is not to say that your friend is just like you. On the contrary, your closest friends often embody those traits that you value and yet are underdeveloped in your own character. I think of the friendship between Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. Jefferson was bold to the point of recklessness and took comfort in the solidity and cautiousness of his best friend Madison. I think of my tendency toward introversion—and my love of friends who electrify a room and energize me with their outward enthusiasm. Such friendships spring from a shared universe of values but are heightened by complementary differences that help round you out and bring out latent facets of your personality.

Why are friendships so valuable? What need are they meeting? It should be abundantly clear that friendship isn’t utilitarian. A friendship I cultivate in order to help my career or enhance my social standing is not a friendship at all. To be sure, friends do help friends. Reciprocity is one way that human beings nurture emotional bonds. I help you move. You pay for dinner. But such reciprocity isn’t the purpose of the friendship. The reason you are my friend is not because you buy me dinner—you buy me dinner because you are my friend.

There are relationships you form for practical, “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours,” reasons, but these aren’t friendships—they are alliances. There is nothing wrong when people network to find potential business partners. We need such alliances, and they can sometimes even evolve into friendships. But in a friendship, it is not something external to the friendship we are seeking. The value is in the relationship itself.

A crucial part of what you seek from a friendship is visibility. Just as art makes your most abstract values perceptually real, so, too, does friendship—but in a crucially different way. A friend embodies the values you care about and the virtues you admire. You see in their flourishing the kind of life and world you want to live in and create.

But this isn’t all. Your friend is not simply acting in the world, the way a character acts in a novel. Your friend is interacting with you. Listening to you. Responding to you. Showing understanding, care, and affection. With your friend, you don’t just see—you are seen. When they celebrate your successes, those successes feel more real. When they share your sorrows, you feel understood. When they praise your virtues, you feel appreciated. When they laugh at your jokes, they heighten your joy.

Whereas art allows us to experience our values as perceptual objects, other people, in Nathaniel Branden’s words, allow us “to experience ourselves perceptually, as concrete objects ‘out there.’” He goes on:

Our psychology is expressed through behavior, through the things we say and do, and through the ways we say and do them. It is in this sense that our self is an object of perception to others. When others react to us, to their view of us and our behavior, their perception is in turn expressed through their behavior, by the way they look at us, by the way they speak to us, by the way they respond, and so forth. If their view of us is consonant with our deepest vision of who we are (which may be different from whom we profess to be), and if their view is transmitted by their behavior, we feel perceived, we feel psychologically visible. We experience a sense of the objectivity of our self and our psychological state of being. We perceive the reflection of our self in their behavior. It is in this sense that others can be a psychological mirror.

And like an actual mirror, one of the benefits of this visibility is not simply in helping you experience yourself, but in helping you discover yourself. It is through friendship that you come to learn about your blind spots—hidden strengths and hidden weaknesses, virtues you didn’t know you had and flaws you didn’t know you needed to correct. It was my friends who helped me see that I could be conflict avoidant and childish in the face of disappointment. And it was my friends who helped me see that I am unusually loyal, generous, and funny.

Friendships, finally, help you create yourself. It is through friendship that you can be inspired to grow and improve in new ways—when you see virtues in your friends that you want to emulate. My friend Lisa VanDamme has an unusual talent for making people feel appreciated and understood. My friend Yaron Brook has a magic ability to combine deep moral seriousness with a friendly approachability. My friend Doug Peltz is infectiously curious and enthusiastic about the world. These people make me want to be better and have helped me discover new ways to grow.

But all of this presupposes a solid foundation: that you select friends for their virtues. This doesn’t necessarily mean perfect people. But it does mean that you deal with people on the basis of their virtues, and that you acknowledge forthrightly any vices. That may mean delimiting the relationship, it may mean encouraging them to do better, but what it certainly means is that you don’t surround yourself with people who help you rationalize and evade your own shortcomings. If I find comfort in being around liars because they tolerate my dishonesty, if I find reassurance in being around losers because they won’t judge my lack of ambition, if I seek approval from people with low standards because I’m unwilling to hold myself to high standards, I will not achieve the benefits of friendship. I’ll simply build for myself a human casket.

Romantic Love

Religion is theft. It takes our highest concepts and emotions—the sacred, reverence, exaltation, worship—and binds them to a supernatural fantasy world beyond our reach. They are products of the next world—not this profane world; they are what we feel for God—not human beings. What garbage. At root, these concepts and emotions refer to our attitude toward a moral ideal, to an earthly ideal, to man at his highest potential, to a potential we have the power to actualize. These emotions belong on earth—and we experience them most powerfully on earth in the form of romantic love. We worship in the bedroom.

Romantic love—sexual love—is a response to your highest values embodied in another person. This includes morality—the universal values and virtues that should guide human life—but it includes much more than that. You fall in love with someone’s core values—not as empty abstractions, but as expressed and embodied in every detail of a person. You fall in love, writes Rand,

with that essential sum, that fundamental stand or way of facing existence, which is the essence of a personality. One falls in love with the embodiment of the values that formed a person’s character, which are reflected in his widest goals or smallest gestures, which create the style of his soul—the individual style of a unique, unrepeatable, irreplaceable consciousness.

To say that you fall in love with a person’s soul is to say that you fall in love with their self-made soul. Romantic love is a testament to free will. If you truly viewed someone as a deterministic robot, a puppet of forces outside their control, you could not love them. What you love in a person is their chosen values—their soul as they have made it, their character as they have crafted it. Even their physical appearance, though shaped by genetics, is an expression of their choices: how they dress, how they move, how well they maintain their body, how they outwardly express their inner self. Absent free will, your lover would be little more than an animated sex doll.

You cannot fully know a person’s soul at first glance, but it is amazing how much you can know. Precisely because a person’s style of soul is contained in their smallest gestures, you can become enraptured with a person the moment you set eyes on them. This is not love, but it’s not mere physical attraction. Most of us have had the experience of finding someone physically attractive and losing interest once they open their mouths. No, you’re responding to a much richer source of information. Just as an artist can capture their subject’s personality in a single, unmoving frame, so you can see a glimpse of a person in your first encounter.

But whether it’s in that first encounter or something that evolves over time, the first hints of love emerge in a unique awareness of the other person. They seize your attention, your curiosity, your fascination. When they’re in the room, you have trouble looking away. When they’re gone, they dominate your thoughts. You find yourself trying to weave their name into every conversation. You look for opportunities to spend time with them. You want to know about them—anything, everything about them. The most trivial details captivate you. Your life becomes heightened, electrified, buoyant—you feel alive.

If the interest is reciprocal, things progress. Often, what’s happening remains underneath the surface. The growing attraction is unspoken and takes place in between the lines. A gaze held. Shoulders or legs brushing and neither person pulling away. At one level, what’s happening is all too clear. And yet, doubt remains. The doubt is excruciating—and thrilling. Does he? Doesn’t he? Does she? Doesn’t she?

And then the switch is flipped. You put the cards on the table. The relationship has been happening, but now, for the first time, you talk about the relationship. What are we to each other? Where is this going? How do you feel about me? You make a commitment—a more or less clearly articulated agreement to put energy into the relationship, to put time into the relationship, to treat it as a value to be cultivated and not too easily abandoned.

Intimacy increases. Physical intimacy—you share a kiss, then more than a kiss, then the unrivaled intimacy of love-making. But emotional intimacy as well. You begin to reveal hidden parts of yourself. Your private thoughts, secret desires, fragile vulnerabilities.

As the days and weeks and months pass, you let more of yourself be seen and you see more of your partner. You start collecting a shared history—a life lived together. And more: you envision a shared future. A life you’ll build together. Not your dreams and my dreams but our dreams. You don’t just share your life with them, you integrate your lives. You remain independent, and yet in a profound sense you are dependent on them—they become an irreplaceable component of your personal happiness. Their joy is your joy. Their suffering is yours. You inhabit a shared, private universe that others can glimpse, but never truly see.

You then make a full commitment: you intend to build and maintain your shared universe for the whole of your life. That as the easy passion of an early romance fades, you’ll do the work of keeping that passion alive, maintaining your commitment through life’s ups and downs, that you’ll be fully honest about who you are and what you want, that you’ll aim to grow together, to make each other better. Your lover has become irreplaceable to you. If you should lose them, yes, you could love again—but there would always be a hole, a part of your happiness that could not be replaced because it would be love, but not their love.

At any point, the process can break down. I don’t feel the way you feel. I don’t want what you want. You are not who I thought you were. I’ve changed. You’ve changed. Few things are as painful. But the pain is only an insignia of the far greater rewards love offers. It offers you the ability to see your values made real in another person’s character—and the unique experience of someone seeing your character and treasuring it. Romantic love is visibility par excellence. It is the one area of life where you can be fully vulnerable, fully open, and, therefore, fully seen.

But like all values, romantic love has to be earned. And the price of entry is the achievement of self-esteem and the cultivation of a moral character that makes self-esteem possible.

Absent self-esteem, you cannot truly experience love. For the person of low self-esteem, love involves an irreconcilable conflict: the joy of love is rooted in visibility—a person who lacks self-esteem finds this kind of visibility intolerable. Love offers them a mirror—and they can’t stand their reflection. Such a person will still usually seek out a relationship, only now that relationship will be aimed, not at reflection, but evasion. They’ll seek a partner who doesn’t see them, but the phony image they want to project. They’ll seek a partner who will tolerate their vices because their partner lacks virtue. They’ll seek a partner they can exploit in some way—someone who will cater to their neediness, or bow to their domineeringness, or play the role of mommy or daddy, or increase their social standing, or provide them with financial stability. They will form relationships—they have no clue how to love or be loved.

This doesn’t mean that love must wait for the day when you achieve a spotless moral character and untainted self-esteem. It does mean that any flaws in you or your partner will be an impediment. If you both are honest about those flaws, if you both work to grow and improve, and if you have a bedrock of virtue, a core of self-esteem, then that is a solid foundation for romantic love.

And this, then, is the most important piece of advice for anyone who desires romance and hasn’t found it. Make yourself worthy of love. Build up your own soul. Perfect your character. Fill your life with values and ambition. I say this, not to deny or trivialize the pain of loneliness. I’ve been there. I remember walking through the streets of Laguna Beach in my mid-twenties, watching the couples wander past, and I can still feel that aching longing that seems like it will never go away. You cannot fully control when you’ll meet someone. What you can control is who you’ll be when you do meet them. Will you be virtuous, open, optimistic? Will you have built a world they’ll want to enter, a life they’ll want to share? Or will you have become a stew of resentment and entitlement that will send good people running for the exits? That’s your choice.

Searching for love can sometimes feel hopeless, like it will stretch into infinity. But it’s not and it won’t. Philosopher Harry Binswanger is fond of saying that your emotions are bad predictors of your future emotions. Loneliness carries with it a sense of eternity. Set that out of your mind. Know that it’s only temporary. And when you finally meet someone who becomes your whole world, you’ll look back and think how small a sliver of your life you spent waiting to meet them.

Children

With friends, we build a chosen community. With a lover, we build a chosen family. When that family includes children, we choose to bring into the world pieces of ourselves and our partner—who are at the same time unique, distinct, autonomous individuals.

It is hard to write about children without resorting to clichés, because the clichés are all true—and because having children is an experience so unique that you cannot compare it to anything else. There is nothing like looking down at a person you helped create, feeling the inconceivable weight of being responsible for that person’s life, and watching them look back at you, smile, and begin a new, unrepeatable life.

And this is what I see as the central value parenthood offers: the opportunity to get to know someone through the whole of their life, to help shape that life, to help them realize their full potential. So much of the reward (and suffering) of parenthood is rooted in the fact that a child is largely unactualized potential. You see in them what they might become. It thrills you—and, at times, it terrifies you.

But you also see what they are right now. Unself-conscious joy, innocence, curiosity, wonder, amazement. You get to marvel in their uniqueness. My daughter: bold, creative, anxious, drawn to art and fashion. My son: intelligent, headstrong, affectionate, drawn to puzzles and technology. Parenting is not molding clay. It is mentoring and discovering—it is helping a child on their way to self-creation, and finding joy in discovering the kind of soul your child is creating.

Traditionally, parents have seen their role in different ways, but a common theme has been that their job is to rein in a child’s selfishness. Nothing could be more wrong. Your actual job is to cultivate the child’s budding rationality. To help them become thinkers whose lives are rich with values and who can start to think about their interests in more expansive, long-range ways.

I don’t have much to offer in the way of parenting advice, but one thing I’m confident in saying is: treat children with respect. To impose your religion or your philosophy, to try to make them develop interests because they’re your interests, to try to nudge them to pursue the dreams you want them to pursue (or wish you had pursued), is to treat children, not as individuals, but as objects. Children have free will, their lives belong to them, and while it’s your job to help them grow, to trespass on their sovereignty is to cripple their ability to grow.

Should you have children? This is such a hard question to answer. In many respects, there is no joy more profound. But there is also no job more demanding. My general view is that you should not have children unless you’re certain you want children. And yet I also believe that you cannot really know what’s it’s like to have children until you do. So I will say this: don’t allow yourself to be pressured by outside forces either way. Know that there is a profound, unique, unrivaled adventure to be found in parenthood—but know that it’s not an adventure to be taken up lightly. The stakes—for you and for them—are too high.

Sex

This has been a book about morality and happiness, and so it’s appropriate that we end with the most intense form of happiness: the act of sex.

Traditional morality saddles sex with prohibitions. Sex is what tempts us away from morality’s demands. It is what drags the religionist down to earth. It’s what the saint renounces. We elevate virginity and treat its loss as a loss.

If anything, those who defend sex today are worse than those who condemn it. They treat sex as an amoral physical act. They reduce it to an animal urge and tell us to indulge without thought or standards. Men should rack up numbers. Women should rid themselves of their “hang ups,” which include not only a sense of guilt for sexual enjoyment, but sexual standards.

Both sides are profoundly wrong, and they are wrong in the same way. What they fail to grasp is that sex is the reward for and expression of our most profound, selfish values. Great, passionate, guiltless, meaningful sex is morality’s greatest reward. Not the sanitized, neutered sex Christians talk about—the kind aimed primarily at making babies or strengthening a marriage. No. Sex. Real, raw sex aimed at intense physical and emotional pleasure, undertaken solely for the sake of that pleasure.

Sex, in Rand’s formulation, is “a celebration of yourself and of existence.” Recall our discussion of core beliefs in Lesson 2. At the root of your emotional mechanism is a view of yourself and the world. To achieve happiness you must cultivate self-esteem and a benevolent view of the universe—the view that you’re able to achieve happiness, worthy of the happiness you achieve, in a universe open to achievement. Sex’s special power is bringing these beliefs into full awareness—to allow you to experience them here, now, as fully realized and fully satisfied. If morality is aimed at pursuing happiness, sex is the pinnacle of that pursuit.

Sex, then, isn’t just a physical pleasure. All pleasure, for a human being, has a spiritual dimension. It’s why you’re not content to wolf down food in the back of a taxicab but seek out beautiful restaurants that create a mood. Sex is the ultimate union of the physical and the spiritual. Each heightens the other, each is indispensable to the other. It’s part of what distinguishes art and sex. Art is the pleasure of contemplation—it is something external to you. You are looking out at a world and forgetting yourself. Sex is a form of self-awareness—your awareness of yourself as a total being, mind and body, able to achieve joy in this world.

The spiritual dimension of sex is best revealed by the crucial importance of your partner. You’re not content with a sex doll, even if such a doll had the power to recreate or even surpass the physical sensations of a human being. You desire another consciousness. And more than that, a certain kind of consciousness. If you were to sleep with someone and discovered mid-sex that they were an imposter, the physical sensations wouldn’t change, but what you would experience wouldn’t be pleasure. No, the physical pleasure would intensify your emotional revulsion.

In order for you to experience sex as self-celebration, you need to be with a partner who shares your values, who embodies your values. This is why the best sex, the most fulfilling sex, is possible only in the context of romantic love.

But that doesn’t mean that anything less than the best is bad. The fact that sex is best in the context of a serious romantic relationship doesn’t mean that you should spurn the realm of sex until you fall in love—let alone until you get married. You build a sex life over time, and it may take years before you’re able to fully realize what’s possible in the bedroom.

Our first inkling of sexual pleasure comes with the discovery of masturbation. Historically, masturbation—maybe more than any other form of sexual pleasure—has been infused with guilt and shame. Why? Precisely because it is so selfish. Its only justification is your own pleasure and happiness. Religionists have condemned it as immoral. Kant secularized this religious hatred, arguing that it amounted to treating yourself, not as a moral being, but as an amusement park. Self-help gurus have commanded us to forego masturbation and “sublimate” our sexual desires so we can be better at making money. Jordan Peterson has said that masturbation weakens us. May they all rot in hell. Masturbation is a vital part of sexual discovery and sexual happiness.

But masturbation is only the first step toward sexual discovery. As you move into adolescence, you have the opportunity to interact with partners. To tell young people to forego sexual experimentation until they are ready for an adult romance is insane and self-defeating. What young people need to be taught is to treat sex with respect, which means: to approach it on the basis of values. Do I know and trust the person I’m with? Am I comfortable with what we’re doing or am I being pressured into something I’m not ready for? Am I aiming at enjoyment? Or proving something about myself (that I’m desirable, that I’m manly)? Or achieving some external result (make this guy like me, impress my friends)? As with all pleasure, the question is not: “Is this okay?” The question is: “Do I think there are real values to be gained here—and why?”

All of this applies to adults as well. As an adult, you know more about what you want from a partner and from sex. But you may not be able to find your ideal partner. Again, this does not mean you should forego sex. But you should look for a partner you know, trust, respect, and admire. Not because God said so. Not because some authority figure will disapprove. The reason to reject casual sex is causality. The issue is not that you’ll be a bad person if you sleep around—it’s that you won’t actually get the value sex has to offer. In order to experience sex as a value, it has to be based on values.

But within a context of trust and respect, sex should be treated as a guiltless adventure. For consenting adults who do know, trust, and admire each other—anything goes. Whether it’s fun sex, rough sex, loving sex, loud sex, imaginative sex, oral sex, anal sex, straight sex, gay sex—whatever brings you and your partner pleasure represents a virtue.

It is, in fact, your reward for virtue.

A Final Lesson

I don’t often think about death, but recently it occurred to me that the conventional wisdom, which says that no one knows what happens after we die, is 100 percent wrong. We have all experienced death. We spent an eternity not existing before we were born. It wasn’t painful, it wasn’t tragic. There is nothing to fear.

But how many of us have truly experienced life?

That’s what frightens me. Not death, but the failure to live. The failure to enjoy my brief time here on earth. That would be the tragedy.

But whether or not I enjoy my life is under my control. And whether or not you enjoy your life is under your control.

You have free will. You have the power to think, to learn, to grow. You have the power to chart your own course. And, armed with a morality of happiness, you have the power to create a self and a life that you love.

Will you do it?

The choice is yours.