All About Love: New Visions

by Bell Hooks

His pleasure in being wealthy was grounded in the desire to not only have more than others but to use that power to degrade and humiliate them.

To maintain and satisfy greed, one must support domination. And the world of domination is always a world without love.

Greed subsumes love and compassion; living simply makes room for them.

Living simply is the primary way everyone can resist greed every day. All over the world people are becoming more aware of the importance of living simply and sharing resources.

We can work to change public policy, electing leaders who are honest and progressive. We can turn off the television set. We can show respect for love. To save our planet we can stop thoughtless waste. We can recycle and support ecologically advanced survival strategies.

We can celebrate and honor communalism and interdependency by sharing resources.

All these gestures show a respect and a gratitude for life. When we value the delaying of gratification and take responsibility for our actio...

Living simply makes lovi...

The choice to live simply necessarily enhances our ...

It is the way we learn to practice compassion, daily affirming our connectio...

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.

By encouraging the segregation of nuclear families from the extended family, women were forced to become more dependent on an individual man, and child...

Love was not what made you feel bad, hate yourself. It was what comforted you, freed you up inside, made you laugh.

Most of us are raised to believe we will either find love in our first family (our family of origin) or, if not there, in the second family we are expected to form through committed romantic couplings, particularly those that lead to marriage and/or lifelong bondings.

However, friendship is the place in which a great majority of us have our first glimpse of redemptive love and caring community.

In friendship we are able to hear honest, critical feedback. We trust that a true friend desires our good. My friend wants me to relish the presence of my mother.

Often we take friendships for granted even when they are the interactions where we experience mutual pleasure. We place them in a secondary position, especially in relation to romantic bonds.

Committed love relationships are far more likely to become codependent when we cut off all our ties with friends to give these bonds we consider primary our exclusive attention.

The more genuine our romantic loves the more we do not feel called upon to weaken or sever ties with friends in order to strengthen ties with romantic partners.

Trust is the heartbeat of genuine love. And we trust that the attention our partners give friends, or vice versa, does not take anything away from us—we are not diminished.

Genuine love is the foundation of our engagement with ourselves, with family, with friends, with partners, with everyone we choose to love.

While we will necessarily behave differently depending on the nature of a relationship, or have varying degrees of commitment, the values that inform our behavior, when rooted in a love ethic, are always the same for any interaction.

One of the longest romantic relationships of my life was one in which I behaved in the more traditional manner of placing it above all other interactions. When it became destructive, I found it difficult to leave. I found myself accepting behavior (verbal ...

Most women and men born in the fifties or earlier were socialized to believe that marriages and/or committed romantic bonds of any kind should take precedence over all other relationships.

abuse irreparably undermines bonds.

Women who would no more tolerate a friendship in which they were emotionally and physically abused stay in romantic relationships where these violations occur regularly.

Had they brought to these bonds the same standards they bring to friendship they would not accept victimization.

To love well is the task in all meaningful relationships, not just romantic bonds. I know individuals who accept dishonesty in their primary relationships, or who are themselves dishonest, when they would never accept it in friendships.

“We cannot endure without love and there is no other way to the return of healing, comforting, harmonizing love than through total and complete forgiveness: If we want freedom and peace and the experience of love and being loved, we must let go and forgive.” Forgiveness is an act of generosity.

It requires that we place releasing someone else from the prison of their guilt or anguish over our feelings of outrage or anger.

By forgiving we clear a path on the way to love. It is a ...

True forgiveness requires that we understand the negative ...

“Forgiveness is a way of life that gradually transforms us from being helpless victims of our circumstances to being powerful and loving ‘co-creators’ of our reality. . . . It is the fading away of the perceptions that cloud our ability to love.”

When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.

Henri Nouwen emphasized the value of solitude. In many of his books and essays he discouraged us from seeing solitude as being about the need for privacy, sharing his sense that in solitude we find the place where we can truly look at ourselves and shed the false self.

Loneliness is painful; solitude is peaceful. Loneliness makes us cling to others in desperation; solitude allows us to respect others in their uniqueness and create community.”

The Peter Pan Syndrome: Men Who Have Never Grown Up. Published

Sadly, love will not prevail in any situation where one party, either female or male, wants to maintain control.

All the ingredients for love were present but my partners were not committed to making love the order of the day.

When someone has not known love it is difficult for him to trust that mutual satisfaction and growth can be the primary fou...

To practice the art of loving we have first to choose love—admit to ourselves that we want to know love and be loving even if we do not know what that means.

More often than not females are taught in childhood, either by parental caregivers or the mass media, how to give the basic care that is part of the practice of love. We are shown how to be empathic, how to nurture, and, most important, how to listen.

The respect woman demand and uphold in the maternal-child bond is deemed not important in adult bondings if demanding respect from a man interferes with their desire to get and keep a partner.

Choosing to be honest is the first step in the process of love. There is no practitioner of love who deceives. Once the choice has been made to be honest, then the next step on love’s path is communication.

Discipline and devotion are necessary to the practice of love, all the more so when relationships are just beginning.

Deep commitment does not guarantee the success of the relationship but does help more than any other factor to ensure it. . . . Anyone who is truly concerned for the spiritual growth of another knows, consciously or instinctively, that he or she can significantly foster that growth only through a relationship of constancy.” Living in a culture where we are encouraged to seek a quick release from any pain or discomfort has fostered

When we face pain in relationships, our first response is often to sever bonds rather than to maintain commitment.