Of love and work as obsessions

A DESCRIPTION OF SILAS MARNER'S WORKAHOLISM:
these too belonged to the past, from which his life had shrunk away, like a rivulet that has sunk far down from the grassy fringe of it s old breadth into a little shivering thread, that cuts a groove for itself in the barren sand-

this description sounds like any obsession- even the obsession of romantic, preferential love. We seem to telescope our universe down that one person for whom we would "move mountains, blah blah..." We forget our friends, our parents- indeed we scorn them now, they are mere hindrances in our desperate and fervid attempts at consuming and being consumed by the lover. While romantic, committed love may liberate us in many other ways, such as teaching us the amazing depths to which our love and desire for another may run, it sure does seem to be a powerful limiting force in other ways. So taking into account its rigid and blind exclusionary and preferential dimensions we need to question whether such a love is moral? Is the world better off because two people decided to minimalize their shared universe and shut out the rest, the suffering, the unloved?