Love and Happiness

I'm admittedly no student of the history of love, but I will venture this guess: It'd didn't come from Paul. A lot of things that christianity claims as it's own inventions are evident in the religions that preceded it. Scratch the "a lot," I have yet to find one thing that it didn't crib from something else, but back to the question at hand.
This transposition of love and self sacrifice has always struck me as somewhat odd. Christianity seems to be wanting to broaden the meaning of love until it is synonymous with any positive emotion, which is...kind of dumb. Love, when the word is used in a conversation, means the amount you would care about a family member or romantic attraction. To seek to spread it to friendship or the civic mindedness or any of the other points that a lot of Paul's theology did was pretty pointless.
From the stance of self sacrifice, look up Jainism sometime, it's an ancient Indian religion revolving around the ideas of wisdom, non-violence and self control. It has all the aspects of the best parts of christian teaching without trying to redefine our relationships as love.
When we were talking the other day I stated flat out that humans are incapable of loving others, especially strangers, as they love themselves, and I meant it. That isn't some sort of nihilistic idea, it's a simple statement of fact. When was the last time you decided that you could use a day off to just relax? When was the last time you stopped by a random office building and informed someone inside that they needed a day off so they could relax and then worked for them? No one behaves this way, and the pretense that you do is simply a lie.
We care for those who we have a relationship with, and there is nothing wrong with that. It's what lets us build up society into something worth being a part of. Personal sacrifice is part of every relationship, but that doesn't mean it's separate from personal happiness.
We find happiness in many things...actually on this, scroll down and watch the video from my last post back before we restarted the conversation, that is exactly the sort of thing that I'm talking about when I say we do not need to base our idea of love on a concept of God. If you start out assuming you have the answer at the outset, for instance "God is where love comes from," you will be wrong more often than not and unhappy because of it more often than that.

Now to answer the two questions you brought up:
Yes, personal happiness is the goal in love, just as it is in life. Or as it should be. That isn't selfish that is realistic, and that is where ethics come from. Not from the idea of pleasing a judgmental parent figure in the sky, but from HUMAN happiness.
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Side note: I hate the fact that the formatting here doesn't let me tab in paragraphs. It annoys my sense of style.