"Love others as you love yourself" is called the Golden Rule. But there's another, equally important Golden Rule: to love yourself as you love others. — Anonymous
I'd gladly lay down my life for two brothers or eight cousins. — J. B. Haldane
I never understood people giving up their lives for a "higher purpose." My reasoning was like so. Suppose you believed that you could stop a world war by killing an out-of-control leader, but that in doing so, you'd die. I know a lot of people would choose to do this, because a lot of people are moral. I'm moral, but I don't want to die either — at least not yet.
At the same time, I've heard parents say that they wouldn't think twice before giving up their lives to save their children. This makes sense to me, because if you consider the opposite strategy, parents who would kill their children to save themselves wouldn't fare very well in the evolutionary marketplace. Most parents follow the Super Golden Rule when it comes to their children: love your children way more than you love yourself. The reason, you could argue, is that by favoring their children, their favoring their own genes. It's selfish in a way.
What's odd is that, by some crosswiring in my brain I guess, I've experienced this feeling towards a child who wasn't my own. I spent a week with my cousin's foster child and realized that I could easily see myself taking this kid across the country in my truck a la The Road and teaching her all about science, math, how flowers work, how to make stuff out of clay, sing, play guitar, whatever. When I heard they gave her back to her biological family, the thought crossed my mind to see about adopting her myself.
What you learn over time is that that feeling of love that you have toward others is identical to the feeling of love that they have towards you. That is to say, you create the physical feeling of love in both directions. They might prompt it by doing something thoughtful, but ultimately, the feeling of being loved is the same as the feeling of loving.
But if that's true, then how come it's so hard to live by the Golden Rule?
The best predictor for how someone will feel about you tomorrow is how they feel about you today. But what you think they think about you can change a lot. For overthinkers like me, and there are a lot of us, we can go through phases where we feel loved and hated, or rejected and accepted, in minutes.
The anxiety is caused by missing information. I hate surprises. The other person feels a certain way about you, but hasn't told you; or they don't know how they feel about you, and you can't accept that. Then, if you're really insecure, you start to act on those behaviors by demanding information from them, which never ends well. This happens in both romantic and professional relationships alike.
Why do I hate being surprised? I'm not sure about that.