What do you think of this description of love?

Question:What do you think of this description of love from the quote below? Any good points? Agree? Disagree?

I disagree, but I want to see how common this belief is:

"It's really very simple. If you tell a beautiful woman that she is beautiful, what have you given her? It's no more than a fact and it has cost you nothing. But if you tell an ugly woman that she is beautiful, you offer her the great homage of corrupting the concept of beauty. To love a woman for her virtues is meaningless. She's earned it, it's a payment, not a gift. But to lover her for her vices is a real gift, unearned and undeserved. To love her for her vices is to defile all virtue for her sake-and that is a real tribute of love, because you sacrifice your conscience, your reason, your integrity and your invaluable self-esteem."

Quote from Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand.

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: What do you think of this description of love from the quote below? Any good points? Agree? Disagree?

I disagree, but I want to see how common this belief is:

"It's really very simple. If you tell a beautiful woman that she is beautiful, what have you given her? It's no more than a fact and it has cost you nothing. But if you tell an ugly woman that she is beautiful, you offer her the great homage of corrupting the concept of beauty. To love a woman for her virtues is meaningless. She's earned it, it's a payment, not a gift. But to lover her for her vices is a real gift, unearned and undeserved. To love her for her vices is to defile all virtue for her sake-and that is a real tribute of love, because you sacrifice your conscience, your reason, your integrity and your invaluable self-esteem."

Quote from Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand.

...Pretty shallow, just like her. Love is the desire to be one. Without separation.

There are two aspects of man's existence which are the special province and expression of his sense of life: love and art.

I am referring here to romantic love, in the serious meaning of that term—as distinguished from the superficial infatuations of those whose sense of life is devoid of any consistent values, i.e., of any lasting emotions other than fear. 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 a 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—the individual style of a unique, unrepeatable, irreplaceable consciousness. It is 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.

Many errors and tragic disillusionments are possible in this process of emotional recognition, since a sense of life, by itself, is not a reliable cognitive guide. And if there are degrees of evil, then one of the most evil consequences of mysticism—in terms of human suffering—is the belief that love is a matter of "the heart," not the mind, that love is an emotion independent of reason, that love is blind and impervious to the power of philosophy. Love is the expression of philosophy—of a subconscious philosophical sum—and, perhaps, no other aspect of human existence needs the conscious power of philosophy quite so desperately. When that power is called upon to verify and support an emotional appraisal, when love is a conscious integration of reason and emotion, of mind and values, then—and only then—it is the greatest reward of man's life.

"Philosophy and Sense of Life," The Romantic Manifesto, ~ Ayn Rand

I am not a beauty worshipper. I think love is honest and goes much deeper than looks. Beauty is not lasting. If you don't like to look at an ugly woman, don't bother with her. How should us women deal with ugly men? Many beautiful women are married to ugly me. I wonder what they see.

god i hate Ayn Rand ive only like one book...thats so dumb

That's pretty neat. But it doesn't describe love at all! It says that if you love someone for their strifes or virtues or whatever, but it doesn't say anything about love as an emotion. It's a nice idea, and fun to read, but it does not describe love. In fact, the only thing I've found that aptly describes love is in the Bible.

it is hard because beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Great answer, "Why?". The philosopher Alan Watts said in response to the double bind irrationality of the supposed command of Jesus, "love thy enemies", that it is a double bind because love is always an involuntary response and not caused by conscious will. If one is commanded to do so, the command can only be carried out with the will. He also, pointed out that in order to love someone or something it is first a prerequitsite to like the same. We would not call our enemies our enemies if we did not like them. They make it impossible to like them.

It could be possible to have a high drive toward loving someone without quite being there, because there are some faults which conflict with the rest of what you like about the person. In that case it would be a desire to love that person once they become perfected which keeps you cultivating the eventual possibility for love to happen. Meanwhile you might mistake that cultivating for love itself. You like enough about the person to keep cultivating.

Rand semi-plays the devil's advocate here to prove the point that Love should be based on rewarding virtue for virtue, not vice for vice. Read the last few sentences with this in mind, and see if the tone of the message changes:

"To love a woman for her virtues is meaningless. She's earned it, it's a payment, not a gift. But to lover her for her vices is a real gift, unearned and undeserved. To love her for her vices is to defile all virtue for her sake-and that is a real tribute of love, because you sacrifice your conscience, your reason, your integrity and your invaluable self-esteem."

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It's an intellectually-creative way to prove her point, even though still controversial to this day: that love should be earned not given.

Me personally don't think you can throw out 'Gracious Love" or unearned-love with the Randian-Baby of Earned-love. Weren't we all babies once, a baby can't earn your love by any virtuous action or capacity besides being cuddly and cute, etc. The babies very survival is dependent on us, it's caregivers to meet its needs, this is an act of gracious love, love that is unearned based on any merited-action the baby deserves.

It could be argued that we are responsible to the baby by reason of previous-passions with a lover, but Randian thought taken to absurd-extreme in this context would have to argue that the baby must go out and sell it's tears and cuteness to provide for its very diapers, food, shelter, and very survival.

Rand's context obviously applies to adults and not children per-se, but my point is that without acts of grace from our parents or caregivers none of us would be here typing away on some Y! Answers forum, as we are doing right now...

Innately, I believe Rand would agree with me, but she had to choose an opposite-extreme for 'Christian-Conservative' thought to swing back to Reality, for her point was to say that a proper-productive person's virtues should be rewarded with love, due to his/her effectiveness to solving life's problems with Reality as the ultimate score-keeper(Reality always asserts itself...) She had to keep this part of herself hidden though in order to let the social-change that may only be coming to it's zenith today, based on her writings some decades ago..

In the context of Rand's with Adults and rewarding virtue over vice in relationships....to that spirit I agree!

Taken out of it's context, and applied, in different situations, without any lee-way either way(Adult or Non) I would have to disagree with the letter of the law that Rand may be branded to be pushing....

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Yet if you need a definite commitment, for the sake of argument and to continue to get the pendulum to swing towards independent-loving relationship rather then one that is built on Co-Dependencies...I would have to say:

I whole-heatedly Agree!!