Loyalty to one's "promise" or loyalty to one's "self"

Loyalty to your "promise" or loyalty to your "self"... or is there something beyond loyalty and love? These questions/conflicts/issues come up a lot in counseling practice... each person chooses differently, and for different reasons.
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(http://packerbacker.blogster.com/loyalty.html)
Is it more important to be loyal to the person you made a vow for better or worse, or to oneself?
When does it become less about the relationship between two people and more about the individual person?
We all make sacrifices for the relationships we get involved in, but eventually as time passes...and one day you realize your only purpose in life is to fulfill others needs, is it all right to think about oneself?
To be loyal to your mate forever...or to find loyalty for yourself...?

What is the proper choice in life?

1. A vow is a vow, and unless infidelity is involved, one needs to stay committed to their mate for better or worse. Period.
2. After years of "going through the motions," one day you realize that being in love doesn’t mean what it used to. You forget "how" to love or even be loved. Then you come to face the "reality" that the person you once were in love with is simply the person you are merely sharing a bed with. So you find love elsewhere when you don’t expect it...do you "go for it"?

If your mate confesses to love you but in turn, you are not "feeling" the love, are the "words" enough to hold onto a life together?

Loyalty to one's vows or loyalty to oneself? (end quote).
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(http://evesenioressay.blogspot.com/)
Romantic love, when it is primarily defined by the current emotional state of the lover, is always ultimately about the self, the lover, and rights he earns by the intensity of his feelings. The lover does not care for the beloved so much as he draws inspiration from her; one might almost say he consumes the beloved, although always to the highest purpose, or at least the highest purpose that the self, trapped in itself, can ever know.

Loyalty is what makes the difference between taking one's beloved as the standard of value and the crown of the world, and taking her as a means to the end of one's own gratification (or, at best, one's own improvement). In promising ourselves (to another), we wish to assuage our beloveds' fears; we are stating that we do not desire to consume them, and we will not abandon them once they have outlived their usefulness {ouch, what a concept to enter love from!}. Further, a mutual promise moves part of the way toward the "ecstatic union" toward which eros impels us. It hooks two lovers together. Eros pushes us to create the closest bonds possible, which do not dissolve or disguise the "otherness" of the beloved; thus not only physical unions but also the uniting of two individuals' futures in vows of loyalty are part of the demands of eros. This is one of the ways in which eros is more extreme in its demands than friendship; another is its emphasis on submission rather than equality. The model of the dual promise--the couple saying "I do"--is a model of mutual submission.

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What, if some day or night a "demon" were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: "This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it,... *

Here, recurrence* is a thought-experiment: What would we do, if this happened? How would we respond? And, of course, what can we learn about our "values" from that response? The issue at hand is affirmation of oneself, of one's own actions, and of life. One must relive every moment and, therefore, take every action again; thus we are challenged to find out what would make reliving our actions unbearable. What would make an action so terrible that extinction is preferable to reenacting it? One answer is, that the action damaged something we value more highly than we value our own lives. It was written how eros leads inescapably to regret; the lover values the beloved more than he values his own life, and he fails her.

The man who reacts to the "recurrence"* with despair or terror may have many different motivations. He may be an ascetic, in horror of himself and in love with the void. He may be an adherent of some code of morality against which he has offended, and which he values more than his own life. Or he may be in love. The man who responds to the thought of "recurrence"* with joy is beyond good and evil, for he has cleansed himself of any regret; by the same act, he has gone beyond love. (end quote).
mental health

selah