All About Love

by bell hooks

  Much popular self-help literature normalizes sexism. Rather than linking habits of being, usually considered innate, to learned behavior that helps maintain and support male domination, they act as though these differences are not value laden or political but are rather inherent and mystical. In these books male inability and/or refusal to honestly express feelings is often talked about as a positive masculine virtue women should learn to accept rather than a learned habit of behavior that creates emotional isolaition and alienation. John Gray refers to this as “men entering their cave,” and posits it as a given that a woman who disturbs her man when he wants isolation will be punished. Gray believes that it is female behavior that needs to change. Self-help books that are anti–gender equality often present women’s overinvestment in nurturance as a “natural,” inherent quality rather than a learned approach to caregiving. Much fancy footwork takes place to make it seem that New Age mystical evocations of yin and yang, masculine and feminine androgyny, and so on, are not just the same old sexist stereotypes wrapped in more alluring and seductive packaging.

  To know love we must surrender our attachment to sexist thinking in whatever form it takes in our lives. That attachment will always return us to gender conflict, a way of thinking about sex roles that diminishes females and males. 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. The deeply cynical, who have lost all belief in love’s power, have to step blindly out on faith. In The Path to Love, Deepak Chopra urges us to remember that everything love is meant to do is possible: “The aching need created by lack of love can only be filled by learning anew to love and be loved. We all must discover for ourselves that love is a force as real as gravity, and that being upheld in love every day, every hour, every minute is not a fantasy—it is intended as our natural state.” Most males are not told that they need to be upheld by love every day. Sexist thinking usually prevents them from acknowledging their longing for love or their acceptance of a female as their guide on love’s path.

  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. Usually we are not socialized in these practices so that we can be loving or share knowledge of love with men, but rather so that we can be maternal in relation to children. Indeed, most adult females readily abandon their basic understanding of the ways one shows care and respect (important ingredients of love) to resocialize themselves so that they can unite with patriarchal partners (male or female) who know nothing about love or the basic rudiments of caregiving. A woman who would never submit to a child calling her abusive names and humiliating her allows such behavior from a man. 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.

  Few parental caregivers teach their children to lie. Yet continual lying, either through overt deception or withholding, is often deemed acceptable and excusable adult male behavior. 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. Writing about the importance of listening in The Healing of America, Marianne Williamson calls attention to philosopher Paul Tillich’s insistence that the first responsibility of love is to listen: “We cannot learn to communicate deeply until we learn to listen, to each other but also to ourselves and to God. Devotional silence is a powerful tool, for the healing of a heart or the healing of a nation. . . . From there we move up to the next rung on the ladder of healing: our capacity to so communicate our authentic truth as to heal and be healed by its power.” Listening does not simply mean we hear other voices when they speak but that we also learn to listen to the voice of our own hearts as well as inner voices.

  Getting in touch with the lovelessness within and letting that lovelessness speak its pain is one way to begin again on love’s journey. In relationships, whether heterosexual or homosexual, the partner who is hurting often finds that their mate is unwilling to “hear” the pain. Women often tell me that they feel emotionally beaten down when their partners refuse to listen or talk. When women communicate from a place of pain, it is often characterized as “nagging.” Sometimes women hear repeatedly that their partners are “sick of listening to this shit.” Both cases undermine self-esteem. Those of us who were wounded in childhood often were shamed and humiliated when we expressed hurt. It is emotionally devastating when the partners we have chosen will not listen. Usually, partners who are unable to respond compassionately when hearing us speak our pain, whether they understand it or not, are unable to listen because that expressed hurt triggers their own feelings of powerlessness and helplessness. Many men never want to feel helpless or vulnerable. They will, at times, choose to silence a partner with violence rather than witness emotional vulnerability. When a couple can identify this dynamic, they can work on the issue of caring, listening to each other’s pain by engaging in short conversations at appropriate times (i.e., it’s useless to try and speak your pain to someone who is bone weary, irritable, preoccupied, etc.). Setting a time when both individuals come together to engage in compassionate listening enhances communication and connection. When we are committed to doing the work of love we listen even when it hurts.

  M. Scott Peck’s popular treatise The Road Less Traveled highlighted and affirmed the importance of commitment. Discipline and devotion are necessary to the practice of love, all the more so when relationships are just beginning. Peck writes: “Whether it be shallow or not, commitment is the foundation, the bedrock of any genuinely loving relationship. 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 a nation of individuals who are easily devastated by emotional pain, however relative. When we face pain in relationships, our first response is often to sever bonds rather than to maintain commitment.

  When conflict arises within us or between us and other individuals when we walk on love’s path, it is disheartening, especially when we cannot easily right our difficulties. In the case of romantic relationships, many people fear getting trapped in a bond that is not working, so they flee at the onset of conflict. Or they self-indulgently create unnecessary conflict as a way to avoid commitment. They flee from love before they feel its grace. Pain may be the threshold they must cross to partake of love’s bliss. Running from the pain, they never know the fullness of love’s pleasure.

  False notions of love teach us that it is the place where we will feel no pain, where we will be in a state of constant bliss. We have to expose the falseness of these beliefs to see and accept the reality that suffering and pain do not end when we begin to love. In some cases when we are making the slow journey back from lovelessness to love, our suffering may become more intense. As the lyrics of old-time spirituals testify, “Weeping may endure for a night but joy will come in the morning.” Acceptance of pain is part of loving practice. It enables us to distinguish constructive suffering from self-indulgent hurt. When love’s promise has never been fulfilled in our lives it is perhaps the most difficult practice of love to trust that the passage through the painful abyss leads to paradise. Guy Corneau suggests in Lessons in Love that many men are so fearful of feeling the emotional pain that has been locked away inside them for so long that they willingly choose a life of lovelessness: “A good number of men simply decide not to commit themselves because they cannot face dealing with the emotional pain of
love and the conflict it engenders.” Women are often belittled for trying to resurrect these men and bring them back to life and to love. They are, in fact, the real sleeping beauties. We might be living in a world that would be even more alienated and violent if caring women did not do the work of teaching men who have lost touch with themselves how to live again. This labor of love is futile only when the men in question refuse to awaken, refuse growth. At this point it is a gesture of self-love for women to break their commitment and move on.

  Women have endeavored to guide men to love because patriarchal thinking has sanctioned this work even as it has undermined it by teaching men to refuse guidance. It sets up a gendered arrangement in which men are more likely to get their emotional needs met while women will be deprived. Getting your emotional needs met helps create greater psychological well-being. As a consequence, men are given an advantage that neatly coincides with the patriarchal insistence that they are superior and therefore better suited to rule others. Were women’s emotional needs met, were mutuality the norm, male domination might lose its allure. Sadly, the men’s movement that emerged in response to the feminist critique of sexist masculinity often encouraged men to get in touch with their feeling but to share them only in a “safe” context, usually only with other men. Robert Bly, a major leader of this movement, had little to say about men and love. Men in the movement did not urge one another to look to enlightened women for guidance in the way of love.

  Those who choose to walk on love’s path are well served if they have a guide. That guide can enable us to overcome fear if we trust that they will not lead us astray or abandon us along the way. I am always amazed by how much courageous trust we offer strangers. We get sick and enter hospitals where we put our trust in a collective body of people we don’t know, who we hope will make us well. Yet we often fear placing our emotional trust in caring individuals who may have been faithful friends all our lives. This is simply misguided thinking. And it must be overcome if we are to be transformed by love.

  The practice of love takes time. Without a doubt, the way we work in this society leaves individuals with little time when they are not physically and emotionally tired to work on the art of loving. How many times do we hear anyone say that they were working so hard and had no time for love, so they had to cut back or even leave a job to make a space to be loving? While movies like Regarding Henry and The Fisher King spin sentimental narratives about ruling-class men suffering life-threatening illnesses that lead them to reevaluate how they spend their time, in real life we have yet to see abundant examples of powerful men or women pausing to create a place to do the work of love in their lives. Certainly, individuals who love someone who is more preoccupied by work feel immense frustration when they endeavor to guide their partner in the way of love. Truly, there would no unemployment problem in our nation if our taxes subsidized schools where everyone could learn to love. Job sharing could become the norm. With love at the center of our lives, work could have a different meaning and focus.

  When we practice love, we want to give more. Selfishness, a refusal to give acceptance to another, is a central reason romantic relationships fail. In Love the Way You Want It, Robert Sternberg confirms: “If I were asked the single most frequent cause of the destruction of relationships . . . I would say it is selfishness. We live in an age of narcissism and many people have never learned or have forgotten how to listen to the needs of others. The truth is, if you want to make just one change in yourself that will improve your relationship—literally, overnight—it would be to put your partner’s interest on an equal footing with your own.” Giving generously in romantic relationships, and in all other bonds, means recognizing when the other person needs our attention. Attention is an important resource.

  Generous sharing of all resources is one concrete way to express love. These resources can be time, attention, material objects, skills, money etc . . . Once we embark on love’s path we see how easy it is to give. A useful gift all love’s practitioners can give is the offering of forgiveness. It not only allows us to move away from blame, from seeing others as the cause of our sustained lovelessness, but it enables us to experience agency, to know we can be responsible for giving and finding love. We need not blame others for feelings of lack, for we know how to attend to them. We know how to give ourselves love and to recognize the love that is all around us. Much of the anger and rage we feel about emotional lack is released when we forgive ourselves and others. Forgiveness opens us up and prepares us to receive love. It prepares the way for us to give wholeheartedly.

  Giving brings us into communion with everyone. It is one way for us to understand that there is truly enough of everything for everybody. In the Christian tradition we are told that giving “opens the windows of heaven” so that we can be offered “a blessing that there will not be room enough to receive.” In patriarchal society men who want to break with domination can best begin the practice of love by being giving, by being generous. This is why feminist thinkers extolled the virtues of male parenting. Working as caregivers to young children, many men are able to experience for the first time the joy that comes from service.

  Through giving to each other we learn how to experience mutuality. To heal the gender war rooted in struggles for power, women and men choose to make mutuality the basis of their bond, ensuring that each person’s growth matters and is nurtured. It enhances our power to know joy. In A Heart As Wide As the World, Sharon Salzberg reminds us: “The practice of generosity frees us from the sense of isolation that arises from clinging and attachment.” Cultivating a generous heart, which is, as Salzberg writes, “the primary quality of an awakened mind,” strengthens romantic bonds. Giving is the way we also learn how to receive. The mutual practice of giving and receiving is an everyday ritual when we know true love. 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.

  Giving is healing to the spirit. We are admonished by spiritual tradition to give gifts to those who would know love. Love is an action, a participatory emotion. Whether we are engaged in a process of self-love or of loving others we must move beyond the realm of feeling to actualize love. This is why it is useful to see love as a practice. When we act, we need not feel inadequate or powerless; we can trust that there are concrete steps to take on love’s path. We learn to communicate, to be still and listen to the needs of our hearts, and we learn to listen to others. We learn compassion by being willing to hear the pain, as well as the joy, of those we love. The path to love is not arduous or hidden, but we must choose to take the first step. If we do not know the way, there is always a loving spirit with an enlightened, open mind able to show us how to take the path that leads to the heart of love, the path that lets us return to love.

  Ten

  Romance: Sweet Love

  Sweet Love say

  Where, how and when

  What do you want of me? . . .

  Yours I am, for You I was born:

  What do you want of me? . . .

  —SAINT TERESA OF AVILA

  TO RETURN TO love, to get the love we always wanted but never had, to have the love we want but are not prepared to give, we seek romantic relationships. We believe these relationships, more than any other, will rescue and redeem us. True love does have the power to redeem but only if we are ready for redemption. Love saves us only if we want to be saved. So many seekers after love are taught in childhood to feel unworthy, that nobody could love them as they really are, and they construct a false self. In adult life they meet people who fall in love with their false self. But this love does not last. At some point, glimpses of the real self emerge and disappointment comes. Rejected by their chosen love, the message received in childhood is confirmed: Nobody could love them as they really are.

  Few of us enter romantic relationships able to receive love. We fall into romanti
c attachments doomed to replay familiar family dramas. Usually we do not know this will happen precisely because we have grown up in a culture that has told us that no matter what we experienced in our childhoods, no matter the pain, sorrow, alienation, emptiness, no matter the extent of our dehumanization, romantic love will be ours. We believe we will meet the girl of our dreams. We believe “someday our prince will come.” They show up just as we imagined they would. We wanted the lover to appear but most of us were not really clear about what we wanted to do with them—what the love was that we wanted to make and how we would make it. We were not ready to open our hearts fully.

  In her first book, The Bluest Eye, novelist Toni Morrison identifies the idea of romantic love as one “of the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought.” Its destructiveness resides in the notion that we come to love with no will and no capacity to choose. This illusion, perpetuated by so much romantic lore, stands in the way of our learning how to love. To sustain our fantasy we substitute romance for love.