Sex and Romantic Love
Quotes from Objectivist Authors
Romantic Love, Values, and Sense of Life
“A man falls in love with and sexually desires the person who reflects his own deepest values.”
-Nathaniel Branden in The Psychology of Romantic Love
“Love is a response to values. It is with a person’s sense of life that one falls in love—with that essential sum, that fundamental stand or way of facing existence, which is the essence of personality. One falls in love with the embodiment of the values that formed a person’s character, which are reflected in his widest goals or smallest gestures, which create the style of his soul…It’s in one’s own sense of life that acts as the selector, and responds to what it recognizes as one’s own basic values in the person of another. It is not a matter of professed convictions (though these are not irrelevant); it is a matter of much more profound, conscious and subconscious harmony.”
-Ayn Rand in “Philosophy and Sense of Life” in The Romantic Manifesto
“Love is, in the most general sense, our emotional response to that which we value highly. As such, it is the experience of joy in the existence of the loved object, joy in proximity, and joy in interaction or involvement. To love is to delight in the being whom one loves, to experience pleasure in that being’s presence, to find gratification or fulfillment in contact with that being.”
-Nathaniel Branden in The Psychology of Romantic Love
“There is one concept that is essential to an understanding of romantic love and the selection process: sense of life. Romantic love entails, at its core, a profound and shared sense of life. A sense of life is the emotional form in which we experience our deepest view of existence and our relationship to existence…reflecting the subconsciously held sum of our broadest and deepest attitudes and conclusions concerning the world, life, and ourselves.”
-Nathaniel Branden in The Psychology of Romantic Love
“Never marry a person who is not a friend of your excitement…And if we do not feel that our partner is the friend of our excitement, then no matter how much he or she may profess to love us, we cannot feel fully visible, we cannot feel fully loved, we cannot feel fully accepted—and we cannot even feel that our love for our partner is fully accepted.”
-Nathaniel Branden in The Psychology of Romantic Love
“For a woman qua woman, the essence of femininity is hero-worship—the desire to look up to man. “To look up” does not mean dependence, obedience or anything implying inferiority. It means an intense kind of admiration…. Hero-worship is a demanding virtue: a woman has to be worthy of it and of the hero she worships. Intellectually and morally…she has to be his equal; then the object of her worship is specifically his masculinity...Her worship is an abstract emotion for the metaphysical concept of masculinity as such—which she experiences fully and concretely only for the man she loves…”
-Ayn Rand in “Answers to Readers (About a Woman President)”
Selfish Love
“It is for your own happiness that you need the person you love, and that is the greatest compliment, the greatest tribute you can pay to that person.”
-Ayn Rand in “The Objectivist Ethics” in The Virtue of Selfishness
“Of all the nonsense written about love, none is more absurd than the notion that ideal love is selfless…To love selfishly does not mean to be indifferent to the needs or interests of the partner. To say it once more: when we love, our concept of our self-interest expands to embrace the well-being of our partner. That is the greatest compliment of love: to declare to another human being that his or her happiness is of selfish importance to ourselves.”
-Nathaniel Branden in The Psychology of Romantic Love
“To love selflessly is a contradiction in terms.”
-Nathaniel Branden in The Psychology of Romantic Love
Self-Esteem in Romantic Love and Sex
“To say ‘I love you’ one must know first know how to say the ‘I.’”
-Ayn Rand in The Fountainhead
“The first love affair we must consummate successfully is the love affair with ourselves. Only then are we ready for other love relationships.”
-Nathaniel Branden in The Psychology of Romantic Love
“To love is to value. Only a rationally selfish man, a man of self-esteem, is capable of love—because he is the only man capable of holding firm, consistent, uncompromising, unbetrayed values. The man who does not value himself, cannot value anything or anyone.”
-Ayn Rand in “The Objectivist Ethics” in The Virtue of Selfishness
“To a rational man, sex is an expression of self-esteem—a celebration of himself and of existence. To the man who lacks self-esteem, sex is an attempt to fake it, to acquire its momentary illusion.”
-Ayn Rand in “Of Living Death” in The Voice of Reason
“The man who despises himself tries to gain self-esteem from sexual adventures—which can’t be done, because sex is not the cause, but an effect and expression of a man’s sense of his own value…”
-Ayn Rand in “The Meaning of Sex” in For the New Intellectual
“Tell me what a man finds sexually attractive and I will tell you his entire philosophy of life. Show me the woman he sleeps with and I will tell you his valuation of himself.”
-Ayn Rand in “The Meaning of Sex” in For the New Intellectual
“A man of self-esteem, a man in love with himself and with life, feels an intense need to find human beings he can admire—to find a spiritual equal whom he can love. …To such a man, sex is an act of celebration, its meaning is a tribute to himself and to the woman he has chosen, the ultimate form of experiencing concretely and in his own person the value and joy of being alive.”
-Nathaniel Branden in “The Psychology of Pleasure” in The Virtue of Selfishness
Sex as Celebration
“The intimacy and intensity of the pleasure and joy that sex potentially affords are the reason for its power in our lives. Sex is unique among pleasures in its integration of body and mind. It integrates perceptions, emotions, values, and thoughts. It offers us the most intense form of experience in our own total being, of experiencing our deepest and most intimate sense of self.” -Nathaniel Branden in The Psychology of Romantic Love
“…in sex, perhaps more than in any other realm, the total of our personality tends to find expression.”
-Nathaniel Branden in The Psychology of Romantic Love
“Sex affords us the most intensely pleasurable form of self-awareness. In romantic love, when a man and a woman project that they desire to achieve this experience by means of each other’s person, that is the highest and most intimate tribute a human being can offer or receive, that is the ultimate form of acknowledging the value of the person we desire and of having our own value acknowledged.”
-Nathaniel Branden in The Psychology of Romantic Love
“Sex at its highest potential is the ultimate celebration of love.”
-Nathaniel Branden in The Psychology of Romantic Love
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Very nice work here, James, thank you.