All About Love: New Visions

by bell hooks

We can find the love our hearts long for, but not until we let go grief about the love we lost long ago,

Redeemed and restored, love returns us to the promise of everlasting life. When we love we can let our hearts speak.

It is possible to speak with our heart directly. Most ancient cultures know this. We can actually converse with our heart as if it were a good friend. In modern life we have become so busy with our daily affairs and thoughts that we have lost this essential art of taking time to converse with our heart. —JACK KORNFIELD

It had become hard for me to continue to believe in love’s promise when everywhere I turned the enchantment of power or the terror of fear overshadowed the will to love.

we yearn for love—that we seek it—even when we lack hope that it really can be found.

when asked about love, responded with biting sarcasm, “Love, what’s that—I have never had any love in my life.” Youth culture today is cynical about love. And that cynicism has come from their pervasive feeling that love cannot be found.

You’ve Ever Wanted Isn’t Enough, Harold Kushner writes: “I am afraid that we may be raising a generation of young people who will grow up afraid to love, afraid to give themselves completely to another person, because they will have seen how much it hurts to take the risk of loving and have it not work out.

Young people are cynical about love. Ultimately, cynicism is the great mask of the disappointed and betrayed heart.

disillusioned generation, Elizabeth Wurtzel asserts in Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women: “None of us are getting better at loving: we are getting more scared of it. We were not given good skills to begin with, and the choices we make have tended only to reinforce our sense that it is hopeless and useless.”

whenever a single woman over forty brings up the topic of love, again and again the assumption, rooted in sexist thinking, is that she is “desperate” for a man. No one thinks she is simply passionately intellectually interested in the subject matter. No one thinks she is rigorously engaged in a philosophical undertaking wherein she is endeavoring to understand the metaphysical meaning of love in everyday life. No, she is just seen as on the road to “fatal attraction.”

visionary female thinking on the subject has yet to be taken as seriously as the thoughts and writings of men.

No one takes womens love perspective as serious as guys do ?

Men theorize about love, but women are more often love’s practitioners. Most men feel that they receive love and therefore know what it feels like to be loved; women often feel we are in a constant state of yearning, wanting love but not receiving it.

along the way, in that passage from girlhood to womanhood, I learned females really had nothing serious to teach the world about love.

I began to think more about the meaning of love as I witnessed the deaths of many friends, comrades, and acquaintances, many of them dying young and unexpectedly.

particularly movies and magazines, tell us about love. Mostly they tell us that everyone wants love but that we remain totally confused about the practice of love in everyday life. In popular culture love is always the stuff of fantasy. Maybe this is why men have done most of the theorizing about love.

few writers, male or female, talk about the impact of patriarchy, the way in which male domination of women and children stands in the way of love. John Bradshaw’s Creating Love: The Next Great Stage of Growth is one of my favorite books on the topic. He valiantly attempts to establish the link between male domination (the institutionalization of patriarchy) and the lack of love of families.

Men writing about love always testify that they have received love. They speak from this position; it gives what they say authority. Women, more often than not, speak from a position of lack, of not having received the love we long for.

We know now that Rilke did not write as he lived, that so many words of love offered us by great men fail us when we come face to face with reality.

Given gender stereotypes that assign to women the role of feelings and being emotional and to men the role of reason and non-emotion, “real men” would shy away from any talk of love.

Realshit

It is far easier to talk about loss than it is to talk about love. It is easier to articulate the pain of love’s absence than to describe its presence and meaning in our lives.

Taught to believe that the mind, not the heart, is the seat of learning, many of us believe that to speak of love with any emotional intensity means we will be perceived as weak and irrational.

Facts

Only love can heal the wounds of the past. However, the intensity of our woundedness often leads to a closing of the heart, making it impossible for us to give or receive the love that is given to us. To open our hearts more fully to love’s power and grace we must dare to acknowledge how little we know of love in both theory and practice.

As a society we are embarrassed by love. We treat it as if it were an obscenity. We reluctantly admit to it. Even saying the word makes us stumble and blush . . . Love is the most important thing in our lives, a passion for which we would fight or die, and yet we’re reluctant to linger over its names. Without a supple vocabulary, we can’t even talk or think about it directly. —DIANE ACKERMAN