Quote Originally Posted by wufwugy View Post
I have a theory that the difference between parental love and other forms of love is that parental is a projection of the self (called vicariousness, but rarely viewed as the foundation of the love)

I believe this explains the apparent paradox of how parents find children generally burdensome and tend to be less happy than the equivalent non-parent adult, yet also can't imagine life without their kids and have inexorably intertwined emotions. They say that you never know love until you have a child, and maybe they're right. But my theory suggests that if you put the same effort into loving yourself as you could for a child, you wouldn't need to project the love onto another in order to experience it

Or maybe it's just not possible to love yourself the way children bring what I'm calling proxy self-love. I'm not convinced of that, though, and since I plan on never having children, I'd like it to not be true

Thoughts?
god damn you overthink everything.