To love is to want to be loved

“To love is to want to be loved” names a central paradox in Sartre’s analysis of love: each lover seeks recognition from the Other’s freedom, but that very demand makes the lover dependent on the freedom they hope to secure. Love aims to preserve the Other as a subject while making oneself the indispensable object of that subject’s attention, an aim that turns intimacy into an unstable circuit of demands.

From fascination to love

Fascination alone does not produce love. An orator, actor, or tightrope-walker may hold someone’s attention, but remains a fascinating object within the world. The beloved becomes a lover only when the beloved projects being loved: what they seek to overcome is not merely a body, but the Other’s subjectivity. Seduction that presents someone as a precious object to possess may prompt efforts to conquer that object, but Sartre distinguishes such appropriation from love.

On this account, becoming a lover means seeking to make oneself be loved. The lover does not simply want the Other as an object; the lover wants the Other’s subjectivity to recognize and choose them. Love therefore begins from a movement of alienation and flight toward the Other, as the lover places their being in the hands of another freedom.

The demand and its contradiction

The lover’s freedom becomes dependent on the Other. In trying to be loved as an object, the lover accepts a bodily existence for others and refuses to stand as pure selfhood, since doing so would collapse the Other’s position as a look and leave only an object. The Other’s subjectivity consequently appears as an unsurpassable limit and supreme end: it seems to hold the key to the lover’s being. Yet it is the person who wants to be loved who alienates their freedom by making that demand.

The demand is contradictory because the lover wants more than a reciprocal wish to be loved. Each lover also asks the Other to love without first seeking love in return—to regard the beloved as the objective limit of freedom, the chosen foundation of transcendence, and the supreme value. Such love would be an engagement without reciprocity, but it can appear only as a demand made by the lover. The lover thus asks for a gift that the act of demanding already compromises.

A circuit without resolution

The lovers’ wishes double back on one another. Each wants the Other to love them, yet, by asking for this, each asks the Other to want to be loved in turn. Their relation becomes an indefinite reference, likened to reflection and reflected consciousness: each seeks a fusion in which both remain distinct enough to establish the other. Sartre locates the obstacle in the nothingness separating consciousnesses, both as an internal negation between them and as a factual gap. Love tries to overcome that gap without abolishing the separateness that makes the Other’s recognition matter.

The project can therefore defeat itself at the moment it appears to succeed. The lover wants the Other to found their being as a privileged object while remaining pure subjectivity; but when the Other loves them, the Other experiences them as a subject, and in turn becomes an object in relation to that subjectivity. The recognition sought does not deliver the fixed object-status the lover had demanded. The problem of being-for-others remains unresolved: neither lover is relieved of the responsibility to exist for themselves, or of their contingency and facticity.

Significance of the expression

The expression is not a simple definition of affection but a compact account of love’s unstable structure. The wish to be loved asks another freedom to provide a foundation, while the lover’s own freedom cannot be secured by turning that Other into an object. Each lover escapes the danger of being fixed by the Other in a different way than expected: the Other experiences them as subjectivity and wishes to experience them only as such. But the apparent gain remains vulnerable, because either consciousness can still break the spell and regard the other as an object. Love thus names an effort to make recognition permanent where freedom and separateness prevent it from being guaranteed.