All About Love: (not) all (my thoughts) about love

the warmth, connection, and stability of knowing someone. to be loved is to be known. when someone sees you, works to learn you, and then both realizes and actively chooses to love you for who you are is intimate & ineffable. and to know how someone sees ‘love’ so one can better love them is probably the most intimate of all.

what feels like a lifetime ago, i read half of this book and dropped it. i found it to be relatively dry. love, to me, felt too beautiful to deconstruct philosophically; i thought it could only be understood through action (which is why i found Jay Shetty’s 8 Rules of Love more digestible). the naive romantic in me (and she still exists) believes that love is more of a feeling, an emergent reaction to the world so strong it cannot be contained, rather than a pre-determined set of ideological theories. simultaneously, i always recognized love to be intentional. it’s like a carnation that grows — it is planted, and it blossoms without you telling it when or why or how, but you must water it and care for it. there is inherently trust, respect, connection, and commitment required. i thought of love to be something too tangible, too grounded in individuals whom you meet and fall in love with, for me to be “passionately intellectually interested in the subject matter… [or] rigorously engaged in a philosophical undertaking wherein [to endeavour] to understand the metaphysical meaning of love.” and so, i thought that this book leaned formulaic, algorithmic. when i think of love, i think of colours. maybe not harsh like bold, passionate complementary colours, but always intuitive and engaging, as they melt into soft pastels. when i read all about love, i saw shapes, lines, and a blank colouring book, void of the experiences like that one specific ‘i love you’ look, or the quotidian warm gestures that stack up in the fabric of time that hums… so this is love. but the monochrome outline provides structure for us to fill it in with colour. and bell hooks helps us clarify, if not redefine the lines and boundaries so we can colour the rest of the canvas in at our leisure with a more gentle & grounded awareness.

in some sense, i am always a contradicting person, containing soft opinions. i always learn to absorb more and soak in more, and then formulate judgment. to some extent, the pursuit of the definition of love can be worth examining. and i absolutely agree, that love is not simply a gut feeling. it is not merely a schachter-singer theory of feeling that physiological sensation, and naturally deriving it to be the emotion. the caveat is that love must simultaneously both be a choice and a feeling. you cannot have love without that action piece. you cannot just feel something flutter in your chest, and call that ‘love’. this is why i think that at moments you might feel as if you will love someone forever, and otherwise never have loved them at all, even if the universe conspires to break you apart. but is that love? because you stop loving them the moment you cease (or, intentionally, choose to stop) in your actions. this breaks my rosy outlook; is this a more cynical view? bell hooks says we are a cynical generation. maybe i believe in both — how there can be a paucity of love but a sustenance of a different, softer love at the same time, more out of respect for the person you once were in an act of self-love. this, is a contradiction. this is why i hit my head with some concepts reading this book.

Love being “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” Explaining further, he continues: “Love is as love does. Love is an act of will — namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.”

bell hooks asserts that we search for love despite great odds stacked against us, and that loving requires a framework of being able to openly and honestly express care, affection, responsibility, respect, commitment, and trust. i think, duh, of course. i just don’t think it’s approaching love with an algorithm. i think responsibility, respect, commitment, and trust naturally arise out of care for this other person, as a person. but yes, we also need to think about our actions, and be intentional. however, philosophically, i think love for another person is much more bottom-up, rather than top-down. it’s not approaching a potential partner with an idea, but more so getting to know this person, then arriving at these ideas, and arriving at a place but there is no way forwards but to want to embrace them.

quotes i agreed with for my own reference below.

1. “Sexist socialization teaches females that self-assertiveness is a threat to femininity. Accepting this faulty logic lays the groundwork for low self-esteem. The fear of being self-assertive usually surfaces in women who have been trained to be good girls or dutiful daughters.” yes. sometimes i think this is especially felt in a relationship. i assert myself more for trivial things, sometimes yield assertion for important decisions.
2. “But we can all enhance our capacity to live purposely by learning how to experience satisfaction in whatever work we do. We find that satisfaction by giving any job total commitment… The only way I could ease the severity of my pain was to give my absolute best.” always about the journey not the destination.
3. “My belief that God is love — that love is everything, our true destiny — sustains me.” i am not religious but from going to church a few times with friends or relatives my takeaway is that faith seems to grow from the purest concept of love. love for the world and the people in it. “When angels speak of love they tell us it is only by loving that we enter an earthly paradise. They tell us paradise is our home and love our true destiny.”
4. “Concurrently, when it comes to matters of the heart we are encouraged to treat partners as though they were objects we can pick up, use, and then discard and dispose of at will, with the one criteria being whether or not individualistic desires are satisfied.” a tragic flaw.
5. “Healthy narcissim (the self-acceptance, self-worth, that is the cornerstone of self-love) is replaced by a pathological narcissism (wherein only the self matters) that justifies any action that enables the satisfying of desires. The will to sacrifice on behalf of another, always present when there is love, is annihilated by greed.” love is generous, forgiving, altruistic.
6. “And the world of domination is always a world without love.” this is a new concept brought to the foreground for me. checks out.
7. “Capitalism and patriarchy together, as structures of domination, have worked overtime to undermine and destroy this larger unit of extended kin. Replacing the family community with a more privatized small autocratic unit helped increase alienation and made abuses of power more possible. It gave absolute rule to the father, and secondary rule over children to the mother. By encouraging the segregation of nuclear families from the extended family, women were forced to become more dependent on an individual man, and children more dependent on an individual woman. It is this dependency that became, and is, the breeding ground for abuses of power. The privatized patriarchal nuclear family is still a fairly recent form of social organization in the world.” deconstructing a bit beyond the immediate interactions within ever-so-different individual families, but logically sound.
8. “Often, sexist thinking obscures the fact that these women make a choice to serve, that they give from the space of free will and not because of biological destiny. There are plenty of folks who are not interested in serving, who disparage service. When anyone thinks a woman who serves “gives ’cause that’s what mothers or real women do,” they deny her full humanity and thus fail to see the generosity inherent in her acts. There are lots of women who are not interested in service, who even look down on it.” thinking about the women in my life.
9. “The practice of love offers no place of safety. We risk loss, hurt, pain. We risk being acted upon by forces outside our control.” yes. all is fair. and many things are beyond our control.
10. “A generous heart is always open, always ready to receive our going and coming. In the midst of such love we need never fear abandonment. This is the most precious gift true love offers — the experience of knowing we always belong.” trusting the process.
11. “One reason women have traditionally gossiped more than men is because gossip has been a social interaction wherein women have felt comfortable stating what they really think and feel. Often, rather than asserting what they think at the appropriate moment, women say what they think will please the listener. Later, they gossip, stating at that moment their true thoughts.” but this one here is amusing to me. it is interesting to be educated on patriarchal concepts as a woman — i don’t disagree, and i suppose it comes from deep conditioning.
12. “social liberals and fiscal conservatives.” my thoughts go to the political compass. but i also just like how these 12 syllables sound together.