Is it Selfish?

Beautiful parents on their wedding day. Love my hippie mama and daddy.

Do you ever feel selfish because you want someone to appreciate you? I do. Should I? According to this article. NO. Here is the entire article, but this excerpt is what I really appreciated reading:

Here's my question: Is it selfish to want to matter to someone?

To a certain extent, it is selfish by definition: you want something for yourself. You're making a claim on someone's attention and regard (and in a particularly strong way). You don't want merely to mean something to this person—you want to be everything to him or her. You want to be the first person he or she thinks to share and celebrate the good times with, and also the first person he or she go to for comfort when the bad times hit. You want to be the focus of this person's personal life, not in the sense of dominating it, but of providing a ground, a center—a home. ("You feel like home to me" has got to be one of the greatest things one person can say to another.)

But is it important that you "earn" it? Should you have to? No, romantic attention is to be given freely, in the sense both of being voluntary as well as without expectation of receiving anything in return. Perhaps "earn" is the wrong word, then—how about "deserve"? Not much improvement: that merely switches the emphasis from the economic (to earn implies some sort of transaction) to the ethical (to deserve implies a right or claim). But both words suggest there is some sort of merit involved, that you have to be "good enough" in some measurable way to earn or deserve regard from another person.

But attention, care, and love are not things that should have to be earned—as we said above, they have the greatest value when they are freely given (in both senses). By the same token, they are not to be deserved in the sense of a reward—but they can be deserved because the other person deems you worthy of them. (This, of course, is exactly what the self-loathing have trouble believing.) Put another way, your beloved does not give you attention because you deserve it—rather, you know you deserve it from the fact that it is given (and given freely).

In the end, it's not selfish to want another person to appreciate, value, or desire you (no matter how you might feel about yourself). In a certain sense, desires themselves are never selfish—but how we act on them can be. As long as you're honest and kind—and be yourself—than you "deserve" all the attention people are willing to offer you.

And if someone does offer it to you, don't question it. Embrace it--for it is too valuable a gift to let go to waste.