A fulfilled demand for love destroys the very condition the demand required.
Evidence
Love is a contradictory effort to surmount the factual negation while preserving the internal negation. I demand that the Other love me and I do everything possible to realize my project; but if the Other loves me, he radically deceives me by his very love. I demanded of him that he should found my being as a privileged object by maintaining himself as pure subjectivity confronting me; and as soon as he loves me he experiences me as subject and is swallowed up in his objectivity confronting my subjectivity. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 958
Categorization
- XREF: This paradox of wanting to be loved while needing the Other to remain free — its impossibility — is the seed of Beauvoir’s account of inauthentic love. — connects to: Love destroys itself when trust is broken by greed for more — , A Year of World Stories, 15726; The desperate pursuit of meaning systematically destroys the meaning sought.; Attempting to appropriate the Other destroys the incarnational freedom desire sought — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 989 (+4 more)
- DEEPTHINKING: The engine of the whole Sartrean account of love: the very satisfaction of the demand for love subverts its precondition, so desire structurally cannot reach its object.
Broader Connections
- Possessing the loved one wholly destroys the transcendence that made him lovable
#corroborates(0.92) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1875 - Love destroys itself when trust is broken by greed for more
#expands(0.90) — , A Year of World Stories, 15726 - Attempting to appropriate the Other destroys the incarnational freedom desire sought
#corroborates(0.85) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 989 - A woman’s total self-giving in love turns into total demand on her beloved
#exemplifies(0.82) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1869 - Physical intimacy destroys the idealized masculine prestige that distance sustains.
#exemplifies(0.80) - The desperate pursuit of meaning systematically destroys the meaning sought.
#exemplifies(0.78)