Why is guilt so often associated with love and relations? Should we banish guilt from our relations or is guilt a form of "ethical anxiety" towards an other, and thus desireable?

Guilt, like pride, shame, and embarrassment, is an emotion of self-assessment; all these emotions, too, are social emotions, in that they involve reference to (real or imagined) relations to other people and our place in the social order. Given that guilt involves--one might even go so far as to say that it is at least in part constituted by--relations between the guilty party and some other party or parties, it is natural that it might arise in the context of love, understood as a loving relationship. Insofar as love is indeed a relationship--this, I think is a controversial claim: you might consider other entries on this site on love for other perspectives on love--then it would be natural that guilt, shame, and other social emotions would arise in the context of that relationship. What's distinctive of guilt, however, is a feeling of responsibility for an action that one regrets, an action, moreover, that violates authority or breaks rules--including, in this context, the rules constitutive of a...