What is it to you if I love you?
- Nietzsche
Love as its own reward
The fact that love has many good effects does not mean that it is motivated by those effects or that people fall in love in order to achieve them. The love that is found in healthy people is much better described in terms of spontaneous admiration and of the kind of receptive and undemanding awe and enjoyment that we experience when struck by a fine painting. There is too much talk in the psychological literature of rewards and purposes, of reinforcements and gratifications, and not nearly enough of what we may call the end experience (as contrasted with the means experience) or awe before the beautiful that is its own reward.
Admiration and love in my subjects are most of the time per se, undemanding of rewards and conducive to no purposes, experienced concretely and richly, for their own sake.
Admiration asks for nothing and gets nothing. It is purposeless and useless. It is more passive than active and comes close to simple receiving in the Taoist sense. Awed perceivers do little or nothing to the experience; rather, it does something to them. They watch and stare with the innocent eye, like a child who neither agrees nor disagrees, approves nor disapproves, but who, fascinated by the intrinsic attention-attracting quality of the experience, simply lets it come in and achieve its effects. The experience may be likened to the eager passivity with which we allow ourselves to be tumbled by waves just for the fun that is in it; or perhaps better, to the impersonal interest and awed, unprojecting appreciation of the slowly changing sunset. There is little we can inject into a sunset. In this sense we do not project ourselves into the experience or attempt to shape it as we do with the Rorschach. Nor is it a signal or symbol for anything; we have not been rewarded or associated into admiring it. It has nothing to do with milk, or food, or other body needs. We can enjoy a painting without wanting to own it, a rosebush without wanting to pluck from it, a pretty baby without wanting to kidnap it, a bird without wanting to cage it, and so also can one person admire and enjoy another in a nondoing or nongetting way. Of course awe and admiration lie side by side with other tendencies that do involve individuals with each other; it is not the only tendency in the picture, but it is definitely part of it.
Perhaps the most important implication of this observation is that we thereby contradict most theories of love, for most theorists assume that people are driven into loving another rather than attracted into it. Freud speaks of aim-inhibited sexuality, Reik speaks of aim-inhibited power, and many speak of dissatisfaction with the self forcing us to create a projected hallucination, an unreal (because overestimated) partner.
But it seems clear that healthy people fall in love the way one appreciates great music - one is awed by it, overwhelmed by it and loves it. This is so even though there was no prior need to be overwhelmed by great music. Homey in a lecture has defined unneurotic love in terms of regarding others as per se, as ends in themselves rather than as means to ends. The consequent reaction is to enjoy, to admire, to be delighted, to contemplate and appreciate, rather than to use. St. Bernard said it very aptly: "Love seeks no cause beyond itself and no limit; it is its own fruit, its own enjoyment. I love because I love; I love in order that I may love".
- Abraham Maslow, Motivation and Personality
