Many persons lose sleep because of their love for others, as the lover who sighs and tosses, dreaming, asleep or awake, of the beloved. The mother loses sleep thinking of the child with its little worries and problems, its willfulness or its frail health. There is always some cause that seems to her reasonable ground for worry. The father, too, plans for the future of his son, and lies awake to map out a life for another human being, as if that being were a puppet and his father held the strings by which it could be moved in his hands.

Dickens showed the futility of such planning in “Dombey and Son,” and we have all seen it in actual life. Yet we go on doing as our fathers did, and suffering, as we say, “because of our love.” It is really only because we do not understand what love is.

What we usually call love is largely self-love; that is why we hear so much of the pangs of love. Love, being the essence of godlikeness, ought to bring us the joy of the gods, and love would bring only joy if we could forget ourselves. We understand ourselves so little that we do not know when our love is self-love. We are always seeking some return upon our affection, as if it were an investment that must pay dividends to prove its profitableness. The price of our love is generally the right to criticise, to influence, to control; or, if we forego these seeming advantages, we expect at least consideration from those whom we have blessed with our love. No relation of life seems too sacred to escape the contamination of the selfish demands of self or narrow love.

The mother loves her child, cares for it in its helpless years, gladly risks even her life for it, and yet may be unwilling that that child shall live its own life, follow its own yearnings, think its own thoughts. The great stumbling-block of the parent is the unconscious demand for gratitude, the claim made upon the child of a return for the effort and affection so freely bestowed. It may be that the parent does not look for material returns, such as money or position, nevertheless a price is exacted every time that the parent is surprised, disappointed, or angered by the child pursuing some course contrary to his teaching. The love that cared for the helpless child becomes the tyranny that would control its thoughts and action.

We say “This is natural,” but we seldom say, even to ourselves, “This is selfishness.” We would not desire to compel another to think as we think, if we were not sure that we could not be mistaken. It is a conceit of ourselves which makes us quick to thrust upon another “ready-made” opinions because they are our opinions.

But there is a still more subtle selfishness than this that may be at the bottom of things. If we have earnestly advocated anything which the world has been slow to accept, we feel that it is a sort of attack upon us and our views when our children do not support those views. We say, “How can we expect others to heed us, if our own children don’t heed us,” and so we are hurt or angered. We think of their opposition as disloyalty, and it does not occur to us that it might be no advantage if others did heed us; that the very opposition of our children may be the best means of preventing us from doing harm to our fellows.

Besides, if we cared more that men should see the right and love it, than that they should heed us, it would not hurt or vex us whether they listened or not. If we have a message, it will find hearers and followers. “There can never be one lost good,” says Browning, and, if what we would teach is good, it will find its own. It is self-love, not love for others, which makes us sore or angry when they will not listen.

It is a narrow love that makes us fail our friends because they have not fulfilled the ideal we had of them. We never really loved them. We loved something that we thought they should be, and were unwilling to find them something different. We get pain out of our relations with our fellow-beings because our love is not big enough to exclude self.

We make in our minds a model of what our friends should be, and it takes up so much room that we cannot accommodate so much as a mental photograph of what they really are. And just there lies not only the possibility but the absolute assurance of “disappointment” in them, and consequent “pain” for ourselves.

If we knew our friends for what they really are, and were willing that they should be themselves, we could not possibly be disappointed in them. We really insist upon our friends being in “our own image and likeness.” Just so the Hebrews, in the efforts to present God to the world, made of him simply a man like themselves—big and strong, to be sure, with sentiments of love and pity and justice, but with a lust of anger and revenge which almost blotted out his tenderness. Many people still cling to this idea of God, but they are mostly those whose love is so full of self that even the Supreme Being must conform to their standard or they cease to believe in him.

The “disappointment” that so often follows marriage, even between the fondest lovers, is mainly caused by this narrow or self-love. Most married misery is due to each trying to improve the other instead of himself. “Because I love him,” says the wife, “he should do as I ask him, but he refuses. He does not love me as I love him. I am almost broken-hearted with disappointment.” “Any wife who loved her husband would find it a pleasure to be and to do what he asks. My wife does not conform to my wishes, but insists upon doing as she herself prefers. If a man is not the head of his own house, how is happiness possible? Marriage is indeed a lottery, and I have drawn a blank,” says he.

But there is one thing certain, if we find ourselves suffering through our love in any relation of life, whether as husband or wife, mother, daughter, lover, friend, we may be sure that it is because our love is not broad enough; because we believe in ownership, or desire gratitude, or are confident of our wisdom and ability to control the life of another. In short, that we love self best. “Love suffereth long and is kind; ... seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil.” The largest love embraces, understands, and forgives everything, and knows no disappointments and no end.