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Loving People Who Love Only Themselves
A Personal Perspective: The love for an egoist.
Updated September 25, 2023 Reviewed by Lybi Ma
It is sometimes suggested that very selfish people cannot love anyone or anyone other than themselves. The eyes of the lover for the selfish person are said to be not so much a gateway to the other’s inner life as a mirror in which the selfish see their own reflections. They are not genuinely interested in the well-being or feelings of the other except to the extent that those support or undermine the selfish person’s view of him or herself.
George Meredith in The Egoist captures this view of the selfish person. Meredith describes a highly self-centered man named Willoughby Patterne. Willoughby has in his sights a strong woman named Clara Middleton, but Clara is not the sort of person who can satisfy his thoroughly egotistical desires. He believes another woman, Laetitia Dale, can give him the self-satisfaction he craves. Meredith writes:
The exceeding beauty of steadfastness in women clothed Laetitia in graces Clara could not match. A tried steadfast woman is the one jewel of the sex. She points to her husband like the sunflower; her love illuminates him; she lives in him, for him; she testifies to his worth; she drags the world to his feet; she leads the chorus of his praises; she justifies him in his own esteem. Surely there is not on earth such beauty! ...
His home would be a fortress, impregnable to tongues. He would have divine security in his home.
One who read and knew and worshipped him would be sitting there star-like: sitting there, awaiting him, his fixed star.
It would be marriage with a mirror, with an echo; marriage with a shining mirror, a choric echo.
For the selfish person, even the way in which third parties see one’s lover seems to matter primarily because and to the extent that the impression the lover makes on others reflects on the selfish person’s own standing in society. This is certainly true of Willoughby Patterne, who in his reverie, thinks that the world must “bow to Laetitia’s visible beauty,” but not, of course, for Laetitia’s sake. Laetitia is, in fact, not in the prime of her youth anymore, but Willoughby needs to imagine her as a divine beauty, not because he is in love, but because this is how the world would see what an achievement on his part it is to get her.
It is clear why someone such as Willoughby wants to be loved in the way described, but can anyone come to love Willoughby? Laetitia, as it happens, does have real feelings for him. How can she? How can anyone love an egoist?
When the egoist is our parent or child, we may find ourselves committed to them. Myriad ties and common history may make it impossible for us to walk away. But in the case of romantic love, there is no common history. What is the explanation then?
A person may, of course, confuse purely physical attraction for something deeper, though this particular type of illusion generally does not last very long.
There are also cases in which people subdue their own needs through a mixture of enamored selflessness and a desire to put the object of love on a pedestal beyond right and wrong, so high that the ordinary rules of ethics no longer apply. (One does not usually seek to hold accountable a deity one worships.) One person becomes wax, to be molded by the other into a shape the other desires.
In other cases, love may be based on the perception that the other needs us, a perception that can matter greatly to a decent and kind-hearted person.
Then, there are people who have the wishful belief that their love has the power to transform the other and even wash away their narcissistic tendencies.
There is, however, something else: Real-life egoists are not, in fact, incapable of love. Meredith’s Willoughby is a caricature. An actual egoist may well love but with a selfish kind of love. This is particularly evident, perhaps, in the case of parents and children where even the most extreme versions of self-centeredness tend to co-exist with love, but it is true in the romantic love case as well.
That, I think, is the chief issue. If you are with someone you have come to believe does not care about you at all and never will, it is unlikely that you will stay. And you won’t be plagued by feelings of guilt for leaving either. But that is usually not how things stand. The egoist can and does love with a flawed love.
The love for an egoist, therefore, need not be unilateral. This is the secret source of its endurance.
That is not all. We may also recognize ourselves in the egoist. “The secret of the heart is its pressing love of self,” Meredith writes. There are, of course, healthy versions of self-love. Self-love is an antidote to the kind of misguided selflessness that may lead one to disregard one’s own needs and interests and make oneself an instrument of another's happiness.
But our propensity toward self-love often goes beyond what is healthy. Writer Robert Louis Stevenson, in an essay titled “Books Which Have Influenced Me,” relates the following anecdote involving a reader of Meredith’s novel The Egoist:
A young friend of Mr. Meredith’s (as I have the story) came to him in an agony. ‘This is too bad of you,’ he cried. 'Willoughby is me!’ ‘No, my dear fellow,’ said the author, ‘he is all of us.’
Stevenson goes on, speaking in the first person:
I have read The Egoist five or six times myself, and I mean to read it again; for I am like the young friend of the anecdote—I think Willoughby … a very serviceable exposure of myself.
Upon occasion, then, we may recognize ourselves in a selfish lover. We may be loved by an egoist and love egoistically in turn.
In Meredith’s novel, things are rather more clear-cut. Willoughby is the egoist. Consistent with that, his advances are first rejected by Clara Middleton, who sees his flaws readily. He is eventually rejected by Laetitia Dale as well for despite the fact Laetitia loves him, she too sees in the end what he is about.
But things are often not quite so clear-cut in actual human affairs. This is not to suggest that we are all egoists – much less that we are all egoists like Willoughby – but it is to say that sometimes and to some extent, both lovers are. And this partly explains why each stays in a relationship with an egoist.
On the flip side, we may recognize that the love we receive, much like the love we give, is not completely selfish either, and we may appreciate the elements of genuine feeling in both. While Meredith is probably right that a heart's secret is often a propensity to self-love, we may call this the heart's dark secret. The heart has, in addition, a deeper secret. The deeper one has to do with the recognition that self-love is not enough. Even when the world fully cooperates in the satisfaction of desire, self-love tends to lead at best to self-satisfaction. A heart may, thus, yearn to be rescued from itself and its natural tendency toward egoism. Two selfish lovers may yearn for a better kind of love, the kind that gives happiness.
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