To love is always to want to be loved in return, generating indefinite regress.

Evidence

Each one is alienated only to the exact extent to which he demands the alienation of the other. Each one wants the other to love him but does not take into account the fact that to love is to want to be loved and that thus by wanting the other to love him, he only wants the other to want to be loved in turn. Thus love relations are a system of indefinite reference—analogous to the pure “reflection-reflected” of consciousness—under the ideal standard of the value “love;” that is, in a fusion of consciousnesses in which each of them would preserve his otherness in order to found the other. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 958

Categorization

• XREF: Directly sets up the famous ‘lover wants to be loved’ circle that Beauvoir and later Sartrean critics (and psychologists like Lacan on desire) take up — core backdrop for Beauvoir’s account of love in The Second Sex. — connects to: To love is essentially to project being loved by the Other. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 956; Willing to be loved alienates the lover’s freedom into the body-for-others.; Being loved means becoming the ground on which the world appears for the Other (+3 more)
• DEFINE: Defines love as a system of indefinite reference under the ideal of ‘fusion of consciousnesses.‘

Broader Connections

• To love is essentially to project being loved by the Other. #expands (0.90) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 956
• Willing to be loved alienates the lover’s freedom into the body-for-others. #expands (0.85)
• Love is the enterprise of pursuing an unrealizable unity with the Other #corroborates (0.85)
• Being loved means becoming the ground on which the world appears for the Other #expands (0.80)
• The abandonment-neurotic withholds love preemptively to avoid the risk of being abandoned. #exemplifies (0.80)
• Reciprocal modern love presupposes each ego having secured a definite boundary #qualifies (0.75) — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 583