Kierkegaard and the Love Paradox

Kierkegaard mentions the paradoxes of love somewhat tangentially, but I thought that they were extremely interesting. The first paradox is that of self-love and erotic love. On one hand, self-love is a precondition for erotic love. (Note: in this case erotic love is the same as romantic love) After all, how can you expect someone else to love you if you don't believe there is anything to love about yourself. If you need more proof, read any self-help article in a woman's magazine it will surely tell you that you must first love yourself before you should embark on loving anyone else.

However, egoism (which would really be the extreme version of self-love) is hardly conducive to a healthy erotic love. Egoism leads you to be selfish, and take the affection and care the other person needs from you and directs it towards yourself. Still, most people would say that the answer to this is self-love in moderation. However, in a healthy relationship, self-love is annihilated by erotic love. After all, you cannot say you love yourself if you would willingly die, but people in long-term relationships speak all the time of how they would die for their significant other. Therefore, there is a paradox: while erotic love requires self-love, it also destroys it.

The other paradox lies in the fact that passion wills its own downfall. Even writing that seems weird and nonsensical, but if you think about it, it's true. To illustrate this, we will speak of the passion of erotic love. The passion of erotic love comes in the beginning, when there is still a chase. Think of a man attempting to woo a woman. The passionate love revolves around the hope of possessing its object (the other person), the man might go out of his way to be romantic so that the woman might consent to 'belong' to him in some way or another. However, if the object were 'caught' the passion would fade, and there would be no more chase. This often happens in relationships, especially after the initial stages, once you realize that you are simply comfortable, knowing that the other person is yours and there to stay. In this way, passion revolves around possession, but also must fears that it will succeed and thus annihilate itself. Quite simply, it wills its own downfall.