As a person, can a sith feel the need to love, or to be loved??

Love and passion are not the same thing. True love is not an attachment -- true love is loving the person enough to be willing to let them go.

 

You wouldn't be willing to have them taken from you though.

 

It depends on what you mean by that. I think being a well-adjusted person -- an enlightened person, if you want to be mystical about it -- means you *are* willing to let your loved ones be taken from you; that you'll try to prevent it, sure, but that you'll understand that sometimes things happen that are outside your control, that there are things in the world that are bigger and matter more than your love, and being willing to take that in stride if it happens. Not that you're a robot who fails to feel sad or aggrieved or even devastated by loss -- but that you *accept* these emotions, you *allow* yourself to feel sad, but you don't let them knock you off your center and blind you to what you think of as right and wrong.

It's an extremely difficult goal to strive for. I don't know that many people could, say, feel objective enlightened lovingkindness toward some desperate mugger who stabbed their spouse, or toward some enemy soldier following orders who shot their son, or whatever. But it's a goal we *should* shoot for. The ideal loving relationship is one that makes it *easier* to love everyone else in the world, not harder; the ideal of love is loving someone to the point where if someone took her away from me I would try to love him too because I had come to understand that mixing my love with hatred or resentment -- of anyone, for any reason -- cheapened and contaminated my love.

If Anakin had really understood that then he wouldn't have polluted his mother's memory and desecrated the site of her death by making her death an occasion for violence and murder in vengeance.