Philosophy of Right § 158

"The family, as the immediate substantiality of mind, is specifically

characterised by love, which is mind's feeling of its own unity. Hence

in a family, one's frame of mind is to have self-consciousness of

one's individuality within this unity as the absolute essence of

oneself, with the result that one is in it not as an independent

person but as a member."

"Addition: Love means in general terms the consciousness of my unity

with another, so that I am not in selfish isolation but win my

self-consciousness only as the renunciation of my independence and

through knowing myself as the unity of myself with another and of the

other with me. Love, however, is feeling, i.e. ethical life in the

form of something natural. In the state, feeling disappears; there we

are conscious of unity as law; there the content must be rational and

known to us. The first moment in love is that I do not wish to be a

self-subsistent and independent person and that, if I were, then I

would feel defective and incomplete. The second moment is that I find

myself in another person, that I count for something in the other,

while the other in turn comes to count for something in me. Love,

therefore, is the most tremendous contradiction; the Understanding

cannot resolve it since there is nothing more stubborn than this point

(Punktualität) of self-consciousness which is negated and which

nevertheless I ought to possess as affirmative. Love is at once the

propounding and the resolving of this contradiction. As the resolving

of it, love is unity of an ethical type."

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/pr/prfamily.htm