Relationships

I am quite tired, but I have been in the mood to get things done this evening. I had a conversation with an old friend tonight after a movie; the norm for our conversations is that they're relatively long, and this was no exception.

I summarize, for both our sakes. I think we arrived at the conclusion that the old adage "Love your neighbor as yourself" requires a certain extrinsic outlook. There are two interesting things to note about the phrase: the first is that it requires self love, and the second, that unless you love others, you don't love yourself.

The genesis of our discussion was that my friend's cousin said that he would never die for his wife; he loved himself too much for that. It is not particularly surprising to find that my friend's cousin has a reputation for putting others down to exalt himself—his relationships suffer through respecting his own life overmuch.

Because his outlook is narcissitic and introverted, he is unable to love others or himself; his self-love isolates him and leaves him unhappy, which is precisely the result he would avoid if his pride didn't get in the way. (You may, of course, substitute me in this paragraph; I am surely guilty.)


The connection of pride and misguided self-love is not accidental. Lewis talks of appropriate pride, which is the natural reward of the task. It is not wrong to take pride in compliments, as a child does when his father congratulates him on a job well done. It is the "natural reward" of doing the job well.

But there is a pride which motivates self-sufficiency and suppresses the need for the natural reward of pleasing another person. In self-obsession, it isolates man from his peers and destroys his ability to relate to others; it is an inability to admit a need for friendship and companionship, to be interdependent. It is a negative pride that eliminates the positive (and Good) pride.

It is precisely the answer of the cynic to those who are in love or who love at all, because love expects the natural rewards of a relationship, as a man pursues marriage rather than sex or a child the approval of his parents rather than their scorn.