It is difficult to truly love when still attached to the ego. Because the ego is motivated by itself. The highest love from the ego is what Rand describes: an acknowledgment of value in the beloved, based on the lover’s value system. But you see how this is necessarily self-motivated.

In other words, “I” have this need for love, and it is specific to my own philosophical values, so that the highest love of which “I,” in the sense of my own ego, am capable, is to seek out the “you” which most perfectly satisfies my philosophical value system.

This, is really only an intellectual graduation from its physical antecedent in that we are sexually attracted to the mate that is best suited for our evolutionary value system, i.e., most likely to produce offspring that survive and excel in the physical world.

However, when one comes unattached from the ego, and finds oneself rooted as part of the whole One, it becomes unnecessary to concentrate and channel love through this one particular, justified, and logical Randian framework—albeit, this framework seems to be the highest love on the mental plane, and therefore of the Western world, in the sense that it is at least not random, and the greatest thing one can achieve mentally is to be right, and insofar as we say that what is “right” in regards to human decisions is what is rational, i.e., what is “best” in the sense that it produces the max utility for said human, and utility is relative to the desires and the intellectual value system of said human, then we can call this the highest love in the same way that we would say economically that a perfect buyer and seller have met in the marketplace and found a sort of synergy to produce the most value and therefore are motivated and self-interested in a very logical way to “stay together” and not buy from or sell to anyone else in the market. Still, this is a lower love than one unattached from the ego.

When we detach from the ego, we gain access to a much higher and “bigger” love, whereby we are no longer the same “I” attached just to our one body, mind, and soul with a particular set of interests and values all within our one self. We have now graduated to what seems to be our truest self as part of the One—all of creation as one interconnected living organism—whereby we tap into a much larger need and ability when it comes to love in that we are part of the motivation system that rules everything, which is motivated to love everything, and therefore unlocks us from the pigeon-holed Randian mental love and gives us both the power and desire to express a much “larger” love unconditionally to everyone and everything.

Rand was on the right track when she wrote in The Fountainhead, “To say ‘I love you’ one must first know how to say the ‘I.'” She understood the necessity of knowing ourselves in order to love anyone else. But the Randian “self” is solipsistic, and unaccommodating of a metaphysical reality with connections between us all that make us all part of the same entity, and thus makes possible this “larger” love.