Vanity and Love

Vanity is the need to be loved, which can take on the form of shame as the sadness of not being loved, and conceit as the anger at not being loved. We only depend on the love of others when we do not love ourselves, so that pride is actually the opposite of vanity. Our society is based on vanity because of a lack of love, which, once there, was passed on through the generations because vanity leads to seductiveness, while pride leads to genuineness: the former is more likely to lead to offspring, but often gets them raised with the same lack of self-love. In almost every dysfunctional family, at least one of the parents remained with the other not because they loved them but because they needed to be loved.