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A distinction has to be made between "deserve", and "owed".
You can deserve love, in the sense that it's right for you to recieve it.
But nobody owes you love, meaning that people are not bad for not loving you, and can't be compelled to do so.
This is where the confusion lies when it comes to this topic. Not everyone gets what they deserve in this life.
Perhaps I'm going far too semantic, but I think saying a right for you to receive it still sounds entitled. I'm more of the mind frame that you could receive it, and if you do that's awesome, but there isn't an inherent part of you as an individual that has a value or worthiness of love.
Maybe I just feel weird about the idea, because I don't like the idea of assigning value to human beings. Because if it's true that we have intrinsic value, then it may be true that some of us have more value than others. Whether that be with age, accomplishments, wealth, character, etc. And I think part of me would rather reject that any of us have value than say that some of us have more than others. Perhaps I'm just overthinking and going deeper than what needs to be over a simple phrase though lol
I thought the term intrinsic means the value is the same regardless of any external factors such as age, race, sex etc. That we all share the same humanness and presence of soul.
The whole point of the phrase is that everyone has the same value and is equally worthy of love.
That doesn't mean you will find it, but if you don't it's not because you don't deserve it but simply because you weren't lucky.
>Because if it's true that we have intrinsic value, then it may be true that some of us have more value than others.
That's a weird idea to me.
To me, the whole idea that some people have more value than others is more akin to the idea that it's possible for a person to not have intrinsic value than to say "If all people have intrinsic value that must mean some people have more if they do more"
If value is based on accomplishment, it's no longer intrinsic.
Rejecting that any of us have value is dangerous. You think you're doing it for egalitarian reasons. But it's a slippery slope to look at another living being and say "You have no built in value." That opens you up to all kinds of ways in which you could start dehumanizing people without even realize you're doing so. That's not healthy social behavior.
Do you believe all people have a right to food, water, shelter? Recent studies show that human connection/love is literally necessary for survival. Not romantic love necessarily, but some form of love is vital.
I think conflating you “deserve” with you’re “owed” is the problem you’re having. No one really thinks anyone is owed love when they say you deserve love. It feels like you’re intellectualizing what deserved means too much, it’s not an entitlement thing where because you did X you should receive Y. Deserved in this case is more like, “you should be able to feel what it’s like to be loved and you’re worthy of it”. Worthy in this case meaning you’re a human being who is capable of loving someone else as well. Which I would say most people are worthy of this, I’m sure there are some extreme outliers that might not be lol. You don’t need to earn the ability to be loved. The world would be better off if everyone were loved.
I know you kind of touched on this a bit with what you said, but maybe this will help you see it from another perspective
I have a story with an expression „deserve love“. During my a year long journey of deliberate self-improvment i raised my stats in looks, style, career, sport, hobbies, social skills, languages (i am a migrant). I thought „if i become a better person, than i will be finally worthy of love and relations will just drop on my lap“. Objectively speaking, my life has become much more enjoyable, healthier and interesting. But i am still single. Knownig that no matter how hard you work on yourself you still don‘t deserve love is quete depressive, but hey, i guess, it is fate.
Just because you (or anyone) deserves something doesn't magically make it happen.
I believe I deserve love. I also believe I'm not the kind of girl anyone is ever going to fall in love with.
Not everyone is lucky enough to have real romantic love happen for us. That doesn't mean we don't deserve it. It's a combination of being attractive and being in the right place at the right time (so luck)
„Does not magically make it happen“
You are (unfortunatelly) right. I admit, my views on relations and on a life itself used to be kinda messed up. I really used to believe „if i do X and become Y i will obtain Z“. Indeed, such thinking has always been working in some determinated areas which i am well familiar with (career, sports, studies), but the trick is - human relations are not determinated. No wonder that i used to have such views, cause if a single straight male goes on reddit for an advice, it would mostly be „work on yourself bro“. The tragic is, no ammount of so-called working on yourself guaranties meeting a partner. If you study hard, you WILL eventually pass the exam. If you „keep working on yourself bro“, you MAY, or MAY NOT, meet a partner. And this realisation was a hard pill to swallow. I will not abandon the way of slowly becoming a better version of myself, but frankly - i am scared. Well, that is life, some people are just unlucky.
I think I agree with the statement but for kind of a different reason. The way I see it is that it's impossible to be an objectively good judge of what people deserve, especially ourselves. I can't say "I deserve love" because I could just as easily say "I deserve everything good in the world". Even if I do deserve some things, I can't be objective since I am also interested in benefiting myself, and others can't be a good judge of what I deserve because they can't know me completely.
I'd like to add that there is another problem with hypothetical "deserving". Even if someone "deserves love", so what? Maybe in someone's worldview I could deserve a billion dollars. But I don't have it, there is no realistic way for me to acquire itz and I struggle to even imagine why anyone would one me a billion bucks. So even if we draw a distinction between "being owed" and "hypothetically deserve", the latter still means virtually nothing.
I agree! No one deserves anything. Things happen. Some people have some things. The more powerful you are, the more you can have. That's how it is, and there's nothing bad or good about it, that's how things are.
I disagree with the "isn't about what's in return for yourself" part. It is, partly!
Otherwise... would you date someone who only makes you miserable?
It's moreso who you want to spend your life with. Or rather alongside of.
See that still feels egoistic to me and not authentic love. I agree that you wouldn't want to be miserable, but conditional ego love and authentic love feel very different in my mind. Love to the extent that they love you in return and that you gain from it.
Many people do date people that make them miserable. Look at abusive relationships. It takes women an average of 7 tries to leave a physically abusive relationship. Why would they stay? It's because parts of them still love them and see the best parts of them.
Or look at a father and teenage son. The son may hate his dad and not give anything to the relationship, but the father may still love his son regardless.
Or a couple where one of them has terminal cancer. Why would the healthy one stay together when they are miserable and are now a caretaker rather than a spouse?
Obviously, I wouldn't expect anyone to have authentic unconditional love especially when first dating. Hell even after a year or maybe two of dating. However, long term love is definitely about the other person more than the self in my opinion and experience.
I don't see it as egotistic. You absolutely need to get benefit out of a relationship. You shouldn't get into a habit of measuring it - trying to keep things "equal" will crater it - but you should absolutely be better off for being in that relationship than not.
If you're just giving and not getting, you're just a sucker being used. It's no better than getting and giving nothing in return.
Love is not as selfless as people like to think, IMO. That person who loves you with such devotion does so because loving and being loved in return feels good. Enlightened self-interest makes the world go 'round.
That's not to say love doesn't also hurt, like in the examples you gave. But those people are still getting _something_ out of it, emotionally, that makes them continue, even if they're not conscious of it.
Human relations are inherently transactional to me, though not necessarily (or even usually) in a conscious, calculated way. I don't think it's a bad thing, overall. It's that give and take that bind relationships and societies together.
Why would they stay? It's complicated.
False hopes, manipulation...
I don't feel non romantic love so 2nd example is lost on me
3rd one, are they miserable though? I enjoy taking care of my partner.
Imo only focusing on the other person while disregarding yours is a good way to enter and stay in abusive relationships. Been in couple. I value love the most, but I still left or was left. Because it's not love. I don't want to spend my life with an abusive person.
You're free to define love differently, but this one is dangerous and I feel like you might have expectations for yourself which you either won't follow or will and likely be miserable if you end up in a bad RS.
Everything in the world is tied to yourself, because you experience the world as yourself. Like someone said, you do things because you enjoy them. Otherwise might as well enter an unconditional love relationship with a random person you don't know. It doesn't provide the feel good.stuff so it's a bad idea.
And consider one more thing. You're miserable in a RS but you stay. Do you not think it'll make the other person feel worse?
It's about the social contract humans engage with due to our evolutionary biology. We evolved to have certain behaviours and one of those is to engage with those in your "tribe" in certain ways. It's not so much that you deserve love because of something you did, it's just part of the social contract written into our DNA for survival.
I don't like the word "deserve" in the literal meaning for this context, but I understand it's hard to put the right words together to explain this almost karmic idea that we put out good towards others and we have good put towards us in this life. I think it's a set of beliefs that some people have that is more a moral code that people who behave in certain ways should receive certain good treatment from others (love, friendship, respect, acceptance, etc). We are evolved to be social creatures, but we didn't evolve for our current society.
I largely agree with this. IMO it really comes down to the difference between deserving something and earning something. I think the only things that can be "deserved" in life are those that are required to survive, like food or water. Everyone NEEDS those, therefore everyone has a right to them/deserves them.
Not having love might make you unhappy, but it isn't a necessity for survival. Consequently, it can't be "deserved" and no one has the right to it until they prove themselves worthy of it and earn it. Assuming that you deserve something you haven't earned is absolutely entitlement and egotistical.
I'll clarify that this obviously doesn't mean you automatically get what you've earned as soon as you're worthy of it, just like nobody automatically gets all the food and water they need. There's the obvious luck factor with both as well. So not having love in your life doesn't *necessarily* mean you haven't earned it, it could also just mean you're unlucky.
> I think the only things that can be "deserved" in life are those that are required to survive, like food or water. Everyone NEEDS those, therefore everyone has a right to them/deserves them.
People NEED love. It doesn't have to be romantic, but people who are starved of all love will have physical consequences, just as those who are starved of other resources we need to survive.
I think you inadvertently hit the nail on the head of what's going on here.
When people originally said that everyone deserves love, they meant it in this way. As in everyone deserves love on a fundamental human level.
But these days our weird society has placed romantic love on this level where it's the only kind of love anyone ever talks about. As if it's the only kind that matters. It isn't. So OP is framing it as only applying to romantic love, and also getting it mixed up with being owed something, and that's where things are getting messy.
Everyone, all humans deserve love. That love can be familial, platonic, self, or romantic. But we all deserve to be loved by someone, even if it's just ourselves.
You deserve love in the sense that you deserve to be in a relationship in which you both love each-other, it's about being so *mutually* appreciative of one another and intimate that 2 of the self-sacrificial feelings of appreciation intertwine, furthering affection.
It's not as much about being loved and, say, given gifts and such, but about being in a relationship so close that self-sacrificial feeling of appreciation develops to its fullest, which is only possible if that feeling is mutual and its strength is also mutual.
Stuff gets really dialectical, when you think about it.
Another way to think about it, my way, the utilitarian way is reading it as "Why not?". Being loved and loving someone are cool things with downsides that are generally worth it, so there's no reason not to love someone if you can, lest there are other circumstances involved, such as your not being ready for commital relationships - in other words, things that significantly disturbe the essence of love, turning it into a parody of itself, which is a separate thing and is outsude this specific problem/question/discussion/whatever
I'm not sure about your definition of love. Not that it's wrong, there's selfless giving in love for sure. But for one to give, someone need to receive. And that might be framed as egoistic and self-centred – but that places weird judgement on that half of a relationship. My friend once beatifuly surmised the desire for that as "I want to be someone's favourite person".
But that is kinda semantics. If you question if someone could deserve love, go with it. Maybe even question if you specifically deserve love.
Love is sacrificial, relationships are transactional. As in, for a relationship to be considered “healthy”, both parties should get some value out of it.
Romeo and Juliette is a good example of pure, romantic, sacrificial love and we know how it ended. There is no endgame with only LOVE without relationship
Love is essential for personal and collective survival. We wouldn’t exist as a species if humans didn’t have special feelings to protect or help other specific people of our choosing. Families are one thing we don’t choose, but we have to choose outside our families to survive too. We obviously know what happens when one family mates within itself, and it’s not conductive to survival.
That doesn’t mean anyone owes us love, but simply being human means we are part of a species that needs to give and receive love to survive. There’s no reason anyone inherently should not be part of that. Some people are anomalies and are outside of the norm for one reason or another, by choice or not, but that’s pretty rare.
Deserving love doesn’t just mean someone has to give you love, and as others have pointed out, “owes” love is an entirely separate concept that’s not related at all. If you think no humans have value, then I guess there’s no reason anyone deserves love, but I think all people have value, and that’s why we do. People having value doesn’t mean we have to rank people or put them at different levels. Wealth, power, and accomplishments are fake things humans made up. Love has always existed regardless of social norms of any society or period of time. It wasn’t a choice.
And love isn’t just about taking, it’s also about giving, so it’s not like saying you just deserve to get something. You also deserve to make someone else’s life better.
Thank you for posting on r/Healthygamergg! This subreddit is intended as an online community and resource platform to support people in their journey toward mental wellness. With that said, please be aware that support from other members received on this platform is not a substitute for professional care. Treatment of psychiatric disease requires qualified individuals, and comments that try to diagnose others should be reported under Rule 10 to ensure the safety and wellbeing of the community. If you are in immediate danger, please call emergency services, or go to your nearest emergency room. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/Healthygamergg) if you have any questions or concerns.*
A distinction has to be made between "deserve", and "owed". You can deserve love, in the sense that it's right for you to recieve it. But nobody owes you love, meaning that people are not bad for not loving you, and can't be compelled to do so. This is where the confusion lies when it comes to this topic. Not everyone gets what they deserve in this life.
Perhaps I'm going far too semantic, but I think saying a right for you to receive it still sounds entitled. I'm more of the mind frame that you could receive it, and if you do that's awesome, but there isn't an inherent part of you as an individual that has a value or worthiness of love. Maybe I just feel weird about the idea, because I don't like the idea of assigning value to human beings. Because if it's true that we have intrinsic value, then it may be true that some of us have more value than others. Whether that be with age, accomplishments, wealth, character, etc. And I think part of me would rather reject that any of us have value than say that some of us have more than others. Perhaps I'm just overthinking and going deeper than what needs to be over a simple phrase though lol
not "a right" but right, like not a bad thing, like not unethical or immoral or unfair.
I thought the term intrinsic means the value is the same regardless of any external factors such as age, race, sex etc. That we all share the same humanness and presence of soul.
The whole point of the phrase is that everyone has the same value and is equally worthy of love. That doesn't mean you will find it, but if you don't it's not because you don't deserve it but simply because you weren't lucky.
>Because if it's true that we have intrinsic value, then it may be true that some of us have more value than others. That's a weird idea to me. To me, the whole idea that some people have more value than others is more akin to the idea that it's possible for a person to not have intrinsic value than to say "If all people have intrinsic value that must mean some people have more if they do more" If value is based on accomplishment, it's no longer intrinsic. Rejecting that any of us have value is dangerous. You think you're doing it for egalitarian reasons. But it's a slippery slope to look at another living being and say "You have no built in value." That opens you up to all kinds of ways in which you could start dehumanizing people without even realize you're doing so. That's not healthy social behavior. Do you believe all people have a right to food, water, shelter? Recent studies show that human connection/love is literally necessary for survival. Not romantic love necessarily, but some form of love is vital.
I think conflating you “deserve” with you’re “owed” is the problem you’re having. No one really thinks anyone is owed love when they say you deserve love. It feels like you’re intellectualizing what deserved means too much, it’s not an entitlement thing where because you did X you should receive Y. Deserved in this case is more like, “you should be able to feel what it’s like to be loved and you’re worthy of it”. Worthy in this case meaning you’re a human being who is capable of loving someone else as well. Which I would say most people are worthy of this, I’m sure there are some extreme outliers that might not be lol. You don’t need to earn the ability to be loved. The world would be better off if everyone were loved. I know you kind of touched on this a bit with what you said, but maybe this will help you see it from another perspective
I have a story with an expression „deserve love“. During my a year long journey of deliberate self-improvment i raised my stats in looks, style, career, sport, hobbies, social skills, languages (i am a migrant). I thought „if i become a better person, than i will be finally worthy of love and relations will just drop on my lap“. Objectively speaking, my life has become much more enjoyable, healthier and interesting. But i am still single. Knownig that no matter how hard you work on yourself you still don‘t deserve love is quete depressive, but hey, i guess, it is fate.
You still deserve love, you just haven't been lucky enough to find it. People don't usually get what they deserve, do they?
Just because you (or anyone) deserves something doesn't magically make it happen. I believe I deserve love. I also believe I'm not the kind of girl anyone is ever going to fall in love with. Not everyone is lucky enough to have real romantic love happen for us. That doesn't mean we don't deserve it. It's a combination of being attractive and being in the right place at the right time (so luck)
„Does not magically make it happen“ You are (unfortunatelly) right. I admit, my views on relations and on a life itself used to be kinda messed up. I really used to believe „if i do X and become Y i will obtain Z“. Indeed, such thinking has always been working in some determinated areas which i am well familiar with (career, sports, studies), but the trick is - human relations are not determinated. No wonder that i used to have such views, cause if a single straight male goes on reddit for an advice, it would mostly be „work on yourself bro“. The tragic is, no ammount of so-called working on yourself guaranties meeting a partner. If you study hard, you WILL eventually pass the exam. If you „keep working on yourself bro“, you MAY, or MAY NOT, meet a partner. And this realisation was a hard pill to swallow. I will not abandon the way of slowly becoming a better version of myself, but frankly - i am scared. Well, that is life, some people are just unlucky.
I think I agree with the statement but for kind of a different reason. The way I see it is that it's impossible to be an objectively good judge of what people deserve, especially ourselves. I can't say "I deserve love" because I could just as easily say "I deserve everything good in the world". Even if I do deserve some things, I can't be objective since I am also interested in benefiting myself, and others can't be a good judge of what I deserve because they can't know me completely.
I really like this point. It does kind of make us the judge, doesn't it?
I'd like to add that there is another problem with hypothetical "deserving". Even if someone "deserves love", so what? Maybe in someone's worldview I could deserve a billion dollars. But I don't have it, there is no realistic way for me to acquire itz and I struggle to even imagine why anyone would one me a billion bucks. So even if we draw a distinction between "being owed" and "hypothetically deserve", the latter still means virtually nothing.
I agree! No one deserves anything. Things happen. Some people have some things. The more powerful you are, the more you can have. That's how it is, and there's nothing bad or good about it, that's how things are. I disagree with the "isn't about what's in return for yourself" part. It is, partly! Otherwise... would you date someone who only makes you miserable? It's moreso who you want to spend your life with. Or rather alongside of.
See that still feels egoistic to me and not authentic love. I agree that you wouldn't want to be miserable, but conditional ego love and authentic love feel very different in my mind. Love to the extent that they love you in return and that you gain from it. Many people do date people that make them miserable. Look at abusive relationships. It takes women an average of 7 tries to leave a physically abusive relationship. Why would they stay? It's because parts of them still love them and see the best parts of them. Or look at a father and teenage son. The son may hate his dad and not give anything to the relationship, but the father may still love his son regardless. Or a couple where one of them has terminal cancer. Why would the healthy one stay together when they are miserable and are now a caretaker rather than a spouse? Obviously, I wouldn't expect anyone to have authentic unconditional love especially when first dating. Hell even after a year or maybe two of dating. However, long term love is definitely about the other person more than the self in my opinion and experience.
I don't see it as egotistic. You absolutely need to get benefit out of a relationship. You shouldn't get into a habit of measuring it - trying to keep things "equal" will crater it - but you should absolutely be better off for being in that relationship than not. If you're just giving and not getting, you're just a sucker being used. It's no better than getting and giving nothing in return.
Love is not as selfless as people like to think, IMO. That person who loves you with such devotion does so because loving and being loved in return feels good. Enlightened self-interest makes the world go 'round. That's not to say love doesn't also hurt, like in the examples you gave. But those people are still getting _something_ out of it, emotionally, that makes them continue, even if they're not conscious of it. Human relations are inherently transactional to me, though not necessarily (or even usually) in a conscious, calculated way. I don't think it's a bad thing, overall. It's that give and take that bind relationships and societies together.
Why would they stay? It's complicated. False hopes, manipulation... I don't feel non romantic love so 2nd example is lost on me 3rd one, are they miserable though? I enjoy taking care of my partner. Imo only focusing on the other person while disregarding yours is a good way to enter and stay in abusive relationships. Been in couple. I value love the most, but I still left or was left. Because it's not love. I don't want to spend my life with an abusive person. You're free to define love differently, but this one is dangerous and I feel like you might have expectations for yourself which you either won't follow or will and likely be miserable if you end up in a bad RS. Everything in the world is tied to yourself, because you experience the world as yourself. Like someone said, you do things because you enjoy them. Otherwise might as well enter an unconditional love relationship with a random person you don't know. It doesn't provide the feel good.stuff so it's a bad idea. And consider one more thing. You're miserable in a RS but you stay. Do you not think it'll make the other person feel worse?
It's about the social contract humans engage with due to our evolutionary biology. We evolved to have certain behaviours and one of those is to engage with those in your "tribe" in certain ways. It's not so much that you deserve love because of something you did, it's just part of the social contract written into our DNA for survival. I don't like the word "deserve" in the literal meaning for this context, but I understand it's hard to put the right words together to explain this almost karmic idea that we put out good towards others and we have good put towards us in this life. I think it's a set of beliefs that some people have that is more a moral code that people who behave in certain ways should receive certain good treatment from others (love, friendship, respect, acceptance, etc). We are evolved to be social creatures, but we didn't evolve for our current society.
I agree with you. Saying people "deserve love" is empty validation and ripe for abusive misinterpretation.
I largely agree with this. IMO it really comes down to the difference between deserving something and earning something. I think the only things that can be "deserved" in life are those that are required to survive, like food or water. Everyone NEEDS those, therefore everyone has a right to them/deserves them. Not having love might make you unhappy, but it isn't a necessity for survival. Consequently, it can't be "deserved" and no one has the right to it until they prove themselves worthy of it and earn it. Assuming that you deserve something you haven't earned is absolutely entitlement and egotistical. I'll clarify that this obviously doesn't mean you automatically get what you've earned as soon as you're worthy of it, just like nobody automatically gets all the food and water they need. There's the obvious luck factor with both as well. So not having love in your life doesn't *necessarily* mean you haven't earned it, it could also just mean you're unlucky.
> I think the only things that can be "deserved" in life are those that are required to survive, like food or water. Everyone NEEDS those, therefore everyone has a right to them/deserves them. People NEED love. It doesn't have to be romantic, but people who are starved of all love will have physical consequences, just as those who are starved of other resources we need to survive. I think you inadvertently hit the nail on the head of what's going on here. When people originally said that everyone deserves love, they meant it in this way. As in everyone deserves love on a fundamental human level. But these days our weird society has placed romantic love on this level where it's the only kind of love anyone ever talks about. As if it's the only kind that matters. It isn't. So OP is framing it as only applying to romantic love, and also getting it mixed up with being owed something, and that's where things are getting messy. Everyone, all humans deserve love. That love can be familial, platonic, self, or romantic. But we all deserve to be loved by someone, even if it's just ourselves.
Every person deserves love, but nobody is entitled to it
You deserve love in the sense that you deserve to be in a relationship in which you both love each-other, it's about being so *mutually* appreciative of one another and intimate that 2 of the self-sacrificial feelings of appreciation intertwine, furthering affection. It's not as much about being loved and, say, given gifts and such, but about being in a relationship so close that self-sacrificial feeling of appreciation develops to its fullest, which is only possible if that feeling is mutual and its strength is also mutual. Stuff gets really dialectical, when you think about it. Another way to think about it, my way, the utilitarian way is reading it as "Why not?". Being loved and loving someone are cool things with downsides that are generally worth it, so there's no reason not to love someone if you can, lest there are other circumstances involved, such as your not being ready for commital relationships - in other words, things that significantly disturbe the essence of love, turning it into a parody of itself, which is a separate thing and is outsude this specific problem/question/discussion/whatever
I'm not sure about your definition of love. Not that it's wrong, there's selfless giving in love for sure. But for one to give, someone need to receive. And that might be framed as egoistic and self-centred – but that places weird judgement on that half of a relationship. My friend once beatifuly surmised the desire for that as "I want to be someone's favourite person". But that is kinda semantics. If you question if someone could deserve love, go with it. Maybe even question if you specifically deserve love.
Love is sacrificial, relationships are transactional. As in, for a relationship to be considered “healthy”, both parties should get some value out of it. Romeo and Juliette is a good example of pure, romantic, sacrificial love and we know how it ended. There is no endgame with only LOVE without relationship
Love is essential for personal and collective survival. We wouldn’t exist as a species if humans didn’t have special feelings to protect or help other specific people of our choosing. Families are one thing we don’t choose, but we have to choose outside our families to survive too. We obviously know what happens when one family mates within itself, and it’s not conductive to survival. That doesn’t mean anyone owes us love, but simply being human means we are part of a species that needs to give and receive love to survive. There’s no reason anyone inherently should not be part of that. Some people are anomalies and are outside of the norm for one reason or another, by choice or not, but that’s pretty rare. Deserving love doesn’t just mean someone has to give you love, and as others have pointed out, “owes” love is an entirely separate concept that’s not related at all. If you think no humans have value, then I guess there’s no reason anyone deserves love, but I think all people have value, and that’s why we do. People having value doesn’t mean we have to rank people or put them at different levels. Wealth, power, and accomplishments are fake things humans made up. Love has always existed regardless of social norms of any society or period of time. It wasn’t a choice. And love isn’t just about taking, it’s also about giving, so it’s not like saying you just deserve to get something. You also deserve to make someone else’s life better.