Indeed many of the tears we shed are cried not for others but for ourselves. We may think we're crying about someone else's pain, but, more often than not, what is revealed in our tears is more our own possessiveness than our compassion, more our own brokenness than the wounds over which we think we are weeping. In our tears, just as in love, we are often unconsciously seeking ourselves.
We replicate this too, more than we think, in our good deeds and generosity towards others. We can be generous, big-hearted, self- sacrificing, and helpful, as long as we are assured that we are needed, that we are important, that nobody else can quite provide what we are giving. But, should we one day find out that someone else has arrived who is wanted more than we are, we can very quickly become cool and distant, resentful even, because someone else is providing a help and a happiness instead of us, perhaps healthier and deeper than ours. The resentment we feel betrays that, to a large measure, what we were seeking in our generosity was ourselves, not someone else's happiness.
All of this, of course, can be even more painfully true when we fall in love and experience the heartaches and heartbreaks that go with that.
And so is a doctor's warning, a health warning, a fair warning: "Be careful not to seek yourself in love, you can end up with a broken heart that way."