love is always egoistic and usually aggressive as a force. it's egoistic because for people - at very least for me - love is about fascination and adoration, so finding someone in their being, their beliefs, their behaviours etc - so enciting for me, so enriching for my life and so capable of provoking in me positive feelings and tendencies that i develop a deep and honest appreciation and want them in my life, for that reason. i want them because they make my life less boring and empty, because they inspire me, because they comfort me, because they motivate me, and I don't mean active effort on their part, i mean being motivated by conversing with them or knowing they exist and that i will benefit everyone by trying harder for them, because i have fun in heir company, because they entertain me, in other words i want and appreciate them because if i have them I have more out of life. i have more in general or i have something specific i want and wouldn't get so easily with someone else. i will nurture them because it is in my interest to still have them in my life and have them be in a good state, and because i have an appreciation, so i attach value, the same way i attach value to a painting i consider beautiful so i don't want it to burn in a housefire, or to knowledge in the library of Alexandria that i mourn is lost. thus i love them, my love is the value they have for me
(although if i only said the last sentence with no context one would think it has to be a material value - some kind of benefit that ties to my material state or career. sure, if i'm happier i do better at work and if i'm motivated i aim higher with career and goals, so it's tied, but only as much as everything is connected, because "value" can be immaterial, and in fact, in nature, considered so egoistic, it often is. value in form of getting more meat than another animal is material, but value in form of being picked by an attractive female or surviving winter - not necessarily. nature is full of immaterial values. why is the first and often only association with "Value" material? why has money made such a monopoly for value that humans, to talk about feelings in "decent" company, have to escape into terms of religion, of spirituality, terms that alienate them?)
love is usually an aggressive force - by usually i mean always when one hopes for a reciprocation; of course, you can love from a distance and then it'll lack the element of aggression arguably, but retain the element of egoism even moreso, making it your private pleasure, your escapism no one knows about. then it's entirely yours, isn't it? you either want them to remain your own secret guilty pleasure, or you want influence over them and their life. you don't want their happines to exist in isolation, you want to be the cause of it, and you want it for yourself. you want to occupy their thoughts. you want a place in their life. you want influence on their mood, on their interests... and you want back from them what you give them - the ability to impact you and your life, the power over you. the "power" here does not represent violence or obligation - the power here is more subtle - it's wanting a continuous impact, and had the continuity broken off, most would hate to know their beloved wasn't also impacted. it's wanting credit for their happiness, for the changes in their life. "influence" does not mean conscious manipulation - influence means causing things in them and in their experience of life. tell me, do you really not want that? don't you want to make them happy, to introduce them to things and people, to give them gifts and see them use them? don't you want to leave your mark on their life? don't you want a bit of power over them?
don't you want them to think about you and feel back for you, you want to be dear for them as they are for you, and don't they have power over you if you love them? aren't they capable of hurting you with one word, one sentence? aren't they capable of breaking your whole life easily, if only they tell you a few hurtful things you wouldn't care about if you heard them from a stranger? aren't they also capable of fixing your day with only a few words? in case of romantic love, aren't they capable of elevating you to the heights of happiness with passing touch, even? aren't they capable, so easily, of destroying you? and you want to be the same for them! more often than not!
for to love is to give someone power over you out of your own egoism.
worrying? oh, it's not at all worrying, it's true to love as an instinct of life. in few things does the instinct, the will to live express as strongly as it does in love. wherever life is concerned for itself and its survival, it will use love. the attraction to potential partners, the love for your child, the carrier of your genes; the love for these who helped you and may do it again, the love within a community of social animals, the love for a friend without whom life would have less of a point and you would have less of a desire to continue it. love is inherent to life, at least animal life, and life is based on principles of egoism and aggression; real selflessness, had it existed, would represent a pointless (from the point of view of the individual committing it) self-destruction. passiveness is a trait of lifeless obejects and carrion. that what stopped moving and trying to consume other living beings - is dead.
this is so wonderful about love - where love is present, death isn't. love is alive, it's for life to get what it wants - as such, it is an aggressive force, an egoistic force. to love selflessly would be to love an ideal - one that doesn't exist and maybe then, even then, it would be the most egoistic love of all - a love for something invented by yourself, a love invented to soothe and satisfy yourself. masturbatory, one-sided, self-contained. love is a force of nature and that makes it so destructive, and what makes it destructive, makes it beautiful.