I have similar questions, Dan.
Many people say that real love is both selfless and uneffected by any personal emotion or good feeling. But I don’t understand this. Maybe there is such a thing as this selfless non-feeling love, but I don’t see how a human being, or any animal, can feel that or be motivated to act according to that. They say that any kind of love that motivates you to act because it makes you feel good is really a selfish kind of love because you’re only doing it for the good feeling you get from it. It’s as if “real” love is supposed to be emotionless or feelingless, like you’d be completely indifferent or apathetic about it, like Spock, yet at the same time you’d still act on it out of some untainted, stoic awareness that it’s the right thing to do, or that it’s purely for the sake of another’s well-being. But this sounds to me more like a feeling of obligation or guilt, which I don’t think is the same as love at all. Other than that, I’m not sure how a human being, or any animal, can be motivated to act unless some good feeling to one’s self comes out of it.
Good feeling to one’s self is the driver for any kind of action, whether it come from love, lust, entertainment, ambition, laziness, or whatever. If this is selfish, then selflessness is impossible. Obviously, I don’t think that can be the case, so the question for me is not whether it makes one feel good, but can the other person rely on us. For example, I know that my children can rely on me to always be there for them, to protect them, to care for them, to make them feel safe and loved, because it brings me pleasure to know these things are secured. Compare this to my desire to help someone for purposes other than themselves–for example, if I were in sales and I convince a customer that her satisfaction with the items I’m trying to sell are my top concern. Well, it may be a concern–if she’s happy with the items I’m trying to sell her, that means I’m more likely to make the sale, or that she will be a return customer. But in this case, her happiness is contingent on making the sale, and what’s really driving me is the money I will make on the sale, not her happiness. But with my children, their happiness and well-being is the goal. And people will often confuse this (the goal) with the motivation (personal good feeling). The goal is what I aim for (and it stops there) while the good feeling which I get (knowing my kids are happy and taken care of) is what comes out of it such as to motivate me, something to make me want to satisfy my goal.
But this selfless, feelingless kind of love, I don’t understand. Not that this makes it false or bad in any way, I’ve just always found it to be an obscure and hard-to-comprehend sort of thing, and I question whether a person who brings it up even knows what their talking about.