Quote from: Atlas on September 14, 2012, 02:53:21 PM

You meet a woman and after the first couple of dates, she tells you that she dates you only because you need her.

She felt bad about how infatuated you were with her and she only dated you for your own sake. You really weren't her type and she really didn't like the way you lived your life but she felt obligated out of her selfnessness to meet your needs. She sacrificed all of her selfish romantic desires and just focused on how much you depended on her. She was so selfless and altruistic in fact that she mostly admired your neediness and how sad you would be if she left you. She loved that your entire happiness depended on her presence and thus felt altruistic in her act.

Would you accept a "love" of this kind?

This sort of formulation is not very open for analysis. It's very hard to dissect when you use "love" and "selflessness" in such an opaque way.

Presumably, she is satisfying some desire by doing this. Even if she despised the act itself, the intellectual reasons for her choice still are rooted in the norms that are favored by herself at the reptilian level. There is no such thing as being selfless from the ground-up, it doesn't mean anything.

Again, since she presumably isn't interested in what I am (other than being weak and needy), I wouldn't possibly be able to return the "love". I could commit myself to such a relationship in a more political level, which is realistically the common case anyway. Would I call what she does, "love"? I wouldn't. Then again, I don't call many other things love, so it's pretty much a semantic debate. Her love isn't "unreal" to me, it can indeed be included in the definition of love.