[Objectivist]

Quote by: SoylentGreen Does this also extend to the love you have for your wife or husband or your parents and by default to your partners parents.

I'm going to recommend reading this article completely: Love and Selfishness

Here is some quotations from the article:

It [Love] is the most selfish experience possible, in the true sense of the term: it benefits your life in a way that involves no sacrifice of others to yourself or of yourself to others. To love a person is selfish because it means that you value that particular person, that he or she makes your life better, that he or she is an intense source of joy--to you. A "disinterested" love is a contradiction in terms. One cannot be neutral to that which one values. The time, effort and money you spend on behalf of someone you love are not sacrifices, but actions taken because his or her happiness is crucially important to your own. Such actions would constitute sacrifices only if they were done for a stranger--or for an enemy. Those who argue that love demands self-denial must hold the bizarre belief that it makes no personal difference whether your loved one is healthy or sick, feels pleasure or pain, is alive or dead.

You love someone because he or she is a value--a selfish value to you, as determined by your standards--just as you are a value to him or her.

The nature of love places certain demands on those who wish to enjoy it. You must regard yourself as worthy of being loved. Those who expect to be loved, not because they offer some positive value, but because they don't--i.e., those who demand love as altruistic duty--are parasites. Someone who says "Love me just because I need it" seeks an unearned spiritual value--in the same way that a thief seeks unearned wealth. To quote a famous line from The Fountainhead: "To say 'I love you,' one must know first how to say the 'I.'"