How bad is this kind of reductionist thinking? It’s so bad that even Jonah Goldberg knows better. When you get schooled by the author of Liberal Fascism, well…
Seriously, by that logic, I suppose your toddler doesn’t love you either, since they would adjust to a new family if they were given to one. Is that the standard for love, then? How long you would pine away for your absent loved one?
It seems like the idiotic base assumption is that humans, by contrast, are capable (in theory, if not practice) of a true Platonic, altruistic love, independent of anything as lowly as pleasure or quid pro quo behavior. News flash: there is no such thing as “unconditional” love, and devaluing the kinds of love we do have because they aren’t eternal and unchanging is thunderfuckingly stupid. I think we have a word for someone who devotes a large amount of time and energy to meeting the needs of someone who couldn’t care less about them or their needs: a slave. If that’s not you, well, then, as Max Stirner pointed out a long time ago, your love is based to a large degree on how the object of your affection makes you feel and what they do for you, and most likely, you would eventually get over it if you lost them. That doesn’t diminish it at all or mean that your feelings are misguided because they don’t measure up to some ridiculous abstract standard set by one of the most useless philosophers that ever put quill to parchment.