Love is about you: on love as selflessness

Love of a parent is often without any reward. “Say thank you,” parents teach their kids from an early stage. But parents know that to teach their kids to be grateful is quite different from what kids normally do: they would complain, ask and plead, but they remain careless in returning love or showing how they love their parents.

But though it is important te be grateful, love is not shown to receive gratitude. One does not love in order to benefit from it. One simply loves. One does not stop loving a child who seldom say thank you. This is true as well of the relationship between two married people, but it is also true of loving relationships on many levels.

One simply loves someone else for that person’s sake. Love can, therefore, not become a matter of demands or claims. Where I challenge the one I love to give, I degrade her or him to being a servant of me and my feelings. Then the one I love has no freedom, no will. The other person becomes a slave.

That is why the cross with the completely abandoned Christ is the highest symbol of love. And that is why Paul wrote In 1 Corinthians 13:5: “love is not self-seeking.”