“To love is to find one's own happiness in the happiness of another.”Nicolas Chamfort · Maxime și cugetări · 1795 · Maxima 12
Whoever loves can no longer be happy apart from the beloved's happiness.
Chamfort defines love by redrawing the borders of the self: the other's joy is not merely a pleasant fact but a direct source of your own happiness. The mechanism is affective identification: whoever loves lives with two sets of feelings, their own and the beloved's. The definition excludes disguised egoism, in which the beloved is merely an instrument of one's own pleasure. An example: a parent who feels happy at a child's success, even though it brings them no personal benefit.
Why it matters The definition is a simple test: if the other's happiness does not touch you, the relationship is not yet love, only convenience.