How can I devise an analogy to discuss the matter at hand?

Let us say that there is a unicorn and a boy and they love each other very much. The boy enjoys spending time with the unicorn, walking and talking long into the night. The boy has only met this one unicorn and is pretty certain that she is the only one. The unicorn has special understanding as only unicorns have and the boy has come to treasure this.

One day the unicorn says, “I love you as a unicorn loves a boy and I cannot love you any other way, for that is the nature of unicorns. But you love me as a boy loves a girl, something I will never be.”

The boy is happy loving the unicorn. He does not know how one *ought* to love a unicorn, he just knows that he does love one. He knows that he is happiest when loving the unicorn and loving girls has never made him very happy.

The unicorn says, “You should look within yourself and find the reason why you love me when you know I can never love you as a girl would. Do not stop looking until you learn something unflattering about yourself.”

What is the flaw in the unicorn’s request? I think it is that last part, the part that assumes there must be something flawed at the center of the love. The unicorn later clarified that perhaps there are good things underneath the flaw, layers of good and bad. But it was the unicorn’s first inclination to suspect something wrong at the core of the boy’s feelings and indeed suggesting the introspection seemed motivated by this suspicion.

There is the immediate temptation to latch on to some undesirable quality within myself merely to satisfy this condition. As if I could return with some lump of personal ugliness in my hands and say “Yes, you were right. Now can we move forward?” So far, everything I have turned up seems false, something that might look ugly enough to satisfy the unicorn, but isn’t truly a factor.

And maybe that points towards the issue: The fact that I even considered digging up ugliness in myself simply because she asked me to, regardless of how untrue to myself that act would be. I’m not saying that I do not take stock of myself, that I do not examine my motivations. But it was the quality of the request and my willingness to undertake it that compromised my integrity. So this is the current, truest bit of ugliness: I am willing to betray my own heart and look for flaws that aren’t there in the hopes that someone might love me. I will compromise my integrity, call it a kind of martyrdom, a sacrifice for love, when I should instead stick to my convictions.

What is obsession the shadow of? Is it devotion? Dedication? Where is the line drawn? I would say that devotion is selfless, it comes from within and goes out to the recipient of the devotion. Obsession is selfish and seeks satisfaction, taking something from the object of obsession. These traits have inverse properties: Devotion defines what is being devoted. The devotee, in a sense, vanishes. But obsession defines the one obsessing, the object losing meaning. That is to say, you can learn about the obsessed person by how the obsession makes them behave, but when you take the object of obsession on its own terms, you gain different information.

To illustrate: Say I am obsessed with chocolate. This may tell you that I prefer dark, sweet things. I am ruthless in my pursuit of such things. I may spend money foolishly to get chocolate. Perhaps you learn I am unfaithful because you witness me abandon other candies if chocolate is made available. But if you removed me from the context and examined a bit of chocolate for yourself, it wouldn’t suggest any of these things about me. Obsession attempts to imprint a context that may not actually exist.

Does this analogy work for devotion? I’m not sure it does or maybe the distinction is too subtle and slippery. Let me try: I am devoted to chocolate. I extoll the virtues of its sweet goodness. I add it to certain recipes and they are much improved. I remark on how its color and shape are pleasing. Some of these behaviors are similar to obsession, but what seems different is that attention is drawn away from me and towards the chocolate. Though my feelings about the chocolate are subjective, I am not tampering with the context very much: it is accurate to describe chocolate as sweet and generally pleasant.

Another thought: Can someone tell if they are obsessed or devoted? Is another party, an impartial observer, required to judge this? Hmmm.