In addition to all that love is, it’s also an expansion of the motivation behind use of rights from self-benefit to the benefit of others. Thomas Jefferson’s masterstroke for rights theory was the discovery that the pursuit of happiness belonged as one of the categories of rights. When individuals are not in a position to act to promote their survival (i.e., survival’s assumed for the foreseeable future), they can feel free to act to pursue happiness. This can be seen as entirely selfish, but is it?
Happiness comes from the pursuit and successful completion of an individual’s goals. Love is the empathetic connection from one person to another wherein the loved one’s happiness makes the loving individual happy. Similarly, other emotions are shared, including sadness, anger, disgust, and fear (the other two major emotional categories, surprise and interest are more individually experienced). Love ties a person to the emotional state of the other and so the pursuit of happiness becomes not just a pursuit of self-interest, but also a pursuit of the interests of loved ones.
A loving relationship between two people can take two forms: reciprocal love and unrequited love. In reciprocal love, two people love one another. This is the ideal situation as the happiness of one builds on the happiness of the other, which in turn makes the one’s happiness increase. This is an open-feedback loop (like when a microphone picks up on the sound from speakers and thus the sound gets louder and louder) where happiness continuously compounds on itself. The same doesn’t generally happen with the other emotions as one or both people rely on the other to help make the situation better and thus gratitude and newfound optimism can temper those open feedback loops.
Unrequited love is guaranteed with someone who has a toxic personality because toxic people have deficits in love in proportion to their dysfunctional traits. Sympathy for victims of toxic relationships is natural, but the toxic person is also deserving of sympathy. Even if they are using those in relationship with them, their misery is lifelong whereas the victim can escape from the unrequited love of a toxic person and find reciprocal love with another. We have two battles to face when it comes to toxicity. We need to avoid relationships with toxic people, but we also need to avoid becoming a toxic person, which can happen when in an unrequited-love relationship.
Love and happiness can walk hand-in-hand if we make our choices wisely. You might get great joy from raising children and helping them achieve happy lives. You might find a lifelong romantic partner and revel in the wonder of reciprocal love. You might get a job that includes service to others and gain happiness when seeing them thrive due to your help. The pursuit of happiness is not just unfairly cast as bad due to a focus of self-interest at the exclusion of others, but happiness is much harder to achieve when focused exclusively on self-interest. Love can be a multiplier to the pursuit of happiness when in the context of relationships with reciprocal love. Seek out these relationships and reject toxic, unrequited love and watch happiness grow at an otherwise unimaginable rate.
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