all about love

Summary

This book is an interesting dive into what the word love means and how it has mostly lost all meaning because people use the word love for all kinds of things. And in doing so they abuse the word quite a lot to mask things that are not loving at all, to hide behind this term behaviors that are abusive and terrible.

The author is trying to come to a different understanding of what love means, an understanding that would not allow for further abuse to happen "in the name of love", one where the nurturing and caring, and personal growth aspects of true love prevail and where the continuous flourishing of the people we love is put to the foreground. Love is an expression of caring for another person, it is thus inherently self-less and doesn't have to be reciprocated. We can't ask for love, only give it. We can give love to ourselves as well though.

Her definition is inspired by the book "The Road Less Traveled" by Scott M. Peck and goes like this:

The will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth.

In this, love is inherently decoupled from Eros or other things that we normally would call "love" these days and this is a good thing, it is removed from control, from "ownership of a partner" and other such toxic concepts, removed from expectation and the possibility of hurt.

For bell hooks, love is something spiritual, something transcendent, a care for somebody else's flourishing that transcends normal life and as such it is quite rare, unfortunately. I really like this definition and all that comes from it, but to me it seems that there are other aspects of love that are also important, that feel somewhat neglected. And I think that these too, should be covered in a book called "all about love".

But while acknowledging that these other psychological ideas and motives exist, bell hooks denies that they have anything to do with "love" because the way that she uses the term is so different from how it is used in the day to day life that these things seem almost like categorical errors.

Something about this makes me a bit sad because I had hoped that these ideas would have been bound together, but then this didn't quite happen throughout the book, instead it is infused with attacks on men for their incapability of "love" in the bell hooks sense, and how this can be only shown to them through service and from women who are naturally good at it, and political commentary on the patriarchy and how the patriarchy is the culprit of why love has to be redefined as a term in the first place.

The most beautiful thing about the book was the fluidity of the language, the descriptions of love, the prose, the taste of the words. Something lingered in my brain after reading almost every other page and that makes this book still worthwhile to read, even if it didn't quite hit the nerve I was expecting. It also has an extensive list of other books that are mentioned, a lot of books that it leads to and as such is an amazing jumping off point for learning more about this topic that is so close and important to all of us.

A few quotes and ideas I wanted to highlight:

Keeping people in a constant state of lack, in perpetual desire, strengthens the marketplace economy. Lovelessness is a boon to consumerism.

The choice to love is a choice to connect—to find ourselves in the other.

Brainwashed to believe that they can only be secure if they have more than the next person, they accumulate and still feel insecure because there is always someone who has accumulated more.

In the Mars-and-Venus-gendered universe, men want power and women want emotional attachment and connection. On this planet nobody really has the opportunity to know love since it is power and not live that is the order of the day.

Girls and boys, women and men who have been taught to think this way almost always believe love is not important, or if it is, it is never as important as being powerful, dominant, in control, on top—being right. Women who give seemingly selfless adoration and care to the men in their lives appear to be obsessed with "love", but in actuality their actions are often a cover to hold power.

The expression to "fall in love" reflects a peculiar attitude toward love and life itself—a mixture of fear, awe, fascination, and confusion. It implies suspicion, doubt, hesitation in the presence of something unavoidable, yet not fully reliable.

Detailed Notes

The author lost love for the first time at some point growing up, her parents used to love her, and then at some point that stopped. When she finally got over this wound to face and find love in the real world of the present again, she couldn't. She found a world that had turned away from love.

Introduction - Grace: Touched By Love

I was often overwhelmed by grief so profound it seemed as though an immense sea of pain was washing my heart and soul away.

My grief was a heavy, despairing sadness caused by parting from a companion of many years but, more important, it was a despair rooted in the fear that love did not exist, could not be found.

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

Book Recommendation: When All You've Ever Wanted Isn't Enough - Harold Kushner

Cynicism is the great mask of the disappointed and betrayed heart.

Book Recommendation: Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women

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.

Thought: I don't like this generalization because I have talked to too many men who struggle with love and not feeling loved just as much as other people do. Sure there are differences in what people want and expect from love etc. but a sweeping generalization like this in a book about love hurts. It's saying, hey look, men don't love enough but women are not part of the problem. It's setting up a victims mindsetand puts all the blame on only half the population.

Book Recommendation: A Little Book About Love - Jacob Needleman

Contemplating death has always been a subject that leads me back to love.

Male fantasy is seen as something that can create reality, whereas female fantasy is regarded as pure escape.

Thought: J.K. Rowling, Astrid Lindgren, Jane Austen, Cornelia Funke? Just to name a few really contradict this idea. There are a lot of women who's imagination created and shaped reality, not as many as men, admittedly, because patriarchy was a real thing but still. This is not true in it's entirety.

Book Recommendation: Creating Love: The Next Great Stage of Growth - John Bradshaw

Book Recommendation: Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus - John Gray

Book Recommendation: Love and Awakening - John Welwood

People search for love, they long for it, want to know about it. But it's difficult to find positive examples, most of the talking is about the lack of love. It's absence. It's easier to speak about that.

Everywhere we learn that love is important, yet we are bombarded by its failure.

Love eludes us and we patch back together our hearts over and over again from these wounds of neglect. In the end this leaves us scarred. Sad and traumatized, yet still searching but unable to find love. The big problem of all of this is that we don't know how to love. There's no instructions for it anymore, they were lost somehow.

Chapter One - Clarity: Give Love Words

Our confusion about what we mean when we use the word "love" is the source of our difficulty of loving.

Book Recommendation: A Natural History of Love - Diane Ackerman

Love should be a verb. It's an act.

Book Recommendation: The Road Less Traveled - M. Scott Peck

A definition of love:

The will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth.

Love is as love does.

Love is both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.

Love is a mix: care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, trust, honest and open communication.

Love as a feeling.

Cathect - to invest feeling or emotion into somebody.

That process of investment wherein loved one becomes important to us is called "cathexis".

People confuse the two => cathexis is not love. It's just a part of it.

Love and abuse cannot coexist.

Because love needs care and nurture which is the opposite of neglect and abuse.

Care is not enough. Love is more than that. Care is but one dimension.

We can have romantic relationships without love. Where there is care and affection but not love. Where there is also neglect and abuse.

Many of us choose relationships of affection and care that will never become loving because they feel safer. The demands are not as intense as loving required. The risk is not as great.

Even though we are obsessed with the idea of love, the truth is that most of us live relatively decent, somewhat satisfying lives even if we often feel that love is lacking.

An individual does not need to be a believer in a religion to embrace the idea that there is an animating principle in the self—a life force (some of us call it soul) that when nurtured enhances our capacity to be more fully self-actualized and able to engage in communion with the world around us.

Thought: Just because spirituality is not religious doesn't mean people have to accept it. Or embrace the idea. A life force animating our bodies or even the suggested idea of a soul being that life force is deeply unscientific without any further context and even besides that a big assumption in a philosophical sense. It's not something to be embraced lightly and that's I think why people have problems with the word spiritual in the given definition of love. Not because they aren't religious, but because they are not spiritual either. Those are different concepts.

We use the word love in ways that make no sense based on the definition given prior. This leads to a lot of the confusion, if love can mean almost anything and is connected with a lot of negative shit, then well, we don't have any avenue for understanding love, much less practicing it.

What we cannot imagine cannot come into being.

Chapter Two - Justice: Childhood Love Lessons

Book Recommendation: Raised in Captivity: Why Does America Fail It's Children? - Lucia Hodgson

Households are often deeply confusing to children. They are told that punishments are acts of love, that love is only to be thought of as the fulfillment of desires, as a positive/negative valence of a feeling. Children also have no option but to endure this, they can't "fight back" against this, there is no way to act against the authority of the parents early on.

The rights of children are abused all the time. Forceful coercion and abuse (physical and emotional) run rampant in order to make kids do what you want them to do.

Abuse and neglect negate love.

Book Recommendation: Boyhood, Growing Up Male - Bob Shelby

Book Recommendation: Finding Freedom - Jarvis Jay Masters

Kids cling to the feeling of love, even in the face of severe abuse, trying to forget and hide the abuse and focusing on the "good moments".

Disciplining while loving and without punishment is difficult. Teaching responsibility is the difficult idea.

Parent and child discussion, critical reflection, and finding a way to make amends was usually the process by which misbehaviour was addressed.

When we love children we acknowledge by our every action that they are not property, that they have rights—that we respect and uphold their rights.

Chapter Three - Honesty: Be True To Love

Book Recommendation: Lying - Sissela Bok

Book Recommendation: The Dance of Deception - Harriet Lerner

When many of us are asked basic questions, like How are you today? a lie is substituted for the truth.

Telling the truth, will cause pain.

Children learn that early. Hence they start lying as a mechanism of self protection.

Dissimulation: taking on whatever appearance is needed to manipulate a situation

Children learn also early on that lying is a way of gaining power over adults.

Book Recommendation: The Mermaid and the Minotaur - Dorothy Dinnerstein

Book Recommendation: 101 Lies Men Tell Women - Dory Hollander

Patriarchy tells us daily through movies, television, and magazines that men of power can do whatever they want, that it's this freedom that makes them men.

Thought: I think this freedom is what makes us humans. We can do whatever we want, it only has consequences. The definition of power is to have some control over reality and therefore power means you can sometimes alter the consequences of your actions. Therefore all people in power can "do whatever they want" to more of a degree than people not in power. The "only" problem now is that power is unevenly distributed, more in the hands of men, than women.

Book Recommendation: The End of Manhood - John Stoltenberg

Book Recommendation: Rediscovering Masculinity - Victor Seidler

Most men use psychological terrorism as a way to subordinate women.

When people lie, they lose the capacity for loving and being loved. They lose the possibility of trust.

Trust is the foundation of intimacy. When lies erode trust, Genuine connection cannot take place.

You can still receive care and affection without trust. But not love.

We may lie to bolster a man's self-esteem. These lies may take the firm of pretending to feel emotions we do not feel to pretending levels of emotional vulnerability and neediness that are false.

The idea of somebody getting pregnant in order to bind the partner to themselves for longer, especially in an already bad relationship scares the heck out of me. In both directions. It seems so sinister and evil, yet it happens.

Widespread cultural acceptance of lying is a primary reason many of us will never know love.

Advertising is a way of lying to people. And those lies make them want things they otherwise wouldn't.

Keeping people in a constant state of lack, in perpetual desire, strengthens the marketplace economy. Lovelessness is a boon to consumerism.

Chapter Four - Commitment: Let Love Be Love in Me

Commitment to truth telling lays the groundwork for the openness and honesty that is the heartbeat of love.

Book Recommendation: Six Pillars of Self-Esteem - Nathaniel Branden

Self love means finding (despite trauma and abuse) life affirming patterns of thought and behavior. Having ways to deal with the shit life throws at us... Because we deserve this. Because we are worthy of love.

Self affirmations help with this.

Self-assertiveness: The willingness to stand up for myself, to be who I am openly, to treat myself with respect in all human encounters.

Book Recommendation: Revolution from Within - Gloria Steinem

Gossip is a way for women to speak their mind in a safe context. It's because of patriarchy that women gossip, because in the "real" world they have learned that offering their opinions is not "safe".

Thought: This goes against another idea I have heard, namely that there is differences in the amount of assertiveness between individuals and that this is hereditary and linked to gender even if controlling for education/socialization...

Shamed by the feeling that they can never let anyone know who they really are, they may choose isolation and aloneness for fear of being unmasked.

Book Recommendation: Do What You Love, the Money Will Follow - Marsha Sinetar

Whenever possible it is best to seek work we love and to avoid work we hate.

Violence in domestic life often comes from hate in the work life. This builds stress and the relief for that stress is found at home. Work interacts with our capacity of self love and well being, it can enhance or destroy both.

Book Recommendation: The Knitting Sutra - Susan Lydon

A blissful household is one where love can flourish.

What objects we put into our living places matter because they are expressions and enablers of love.

Chapter 5 - Spirituality: Divine Love

Secular individualism. Worshipping the twin gods of money and power.

Book Recommendation: The Art of Loving - Erich Fromm

Organized religions have forgotten their roots of universal love. Instead they segregate, they divide, they keep people apart instead of uniting them. To each their own instead of everybody together helping one another out of love.

This mirrors culture at large, in which this idea is reflected as consumerism and trying to get wealthy for its own sake instead of sharing this wealth out of love with everybody. Instead of making everybody better of people accumulate and hoard for their personal gain. Therefore Capitalism is fundamentally at odds with love because money and the accumulation of it isn't love and for it to continue working the people have to stay unsatisfied and need to think that they can buy their way out of their spiritual problems.

Love as a spiritual force that united and binds all life.

Essays of Thomas Merton and Martin Luther King are often about the spiritual power of love. This idea of love as sacred union, as a principle of life is shared across all the major world religions.

Let us love one another, for love is God and everyone that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. – Saint John

Love as an active force that should lead us into greater communion with the world.

Book Recommendation: The Active Life - Parker Palmer

Love can be politicized as a weapon against the patriarchy, organized religions etc.

Action, like a sacrament, is the visible form of an invisible spirit, an outward manifestation of an inward power.

Spirituality is the recognition that there is something more, a mystery moving in us and around us and living in accordance with that mystery. Letting it act through us. Embracing it as an expression of love.

Book Recommendation: A Path with a Heart - Jack Kornfield

All other spiritual teachings are in vain if we cannot love. Even the most exalted states and the most exceptional spiritual accomplishments are unimportant if we cannot be happy in the most basic and ordinary ways, if, with our hearts we cannot touch one another and the life we have been given. What matters is how we live. – Jack Kornfield

My belief that God is love—that love is everything, our true destiny—sustains me.

Book Recommendation: Lovingkindness - Sharon Salzberg

Chapter 6 - Values: Living by a Love Ethic

A love Ethic should inform our choices. Instead of going for money, power or fame, we should go for love. Valuing and nurturing human life is love.

Facing radical change is scary and accepting a love Ethic and using that as a guide to our every behavior is such radical change. People like talking about change like that, but they usually don't commit to it, they never act it out in the real world.

If it is true ... that live is the only sane and satisfactory response to the problem of human existence, then any society which excludes, relatively, the development of love, must in the long run perish of its own contradiction with the basic necessities of human nature. – Erich Fromm

Faith is the antidote to fear, it enables us to move past fear and act. Fear upholds structures of domination and makes love impossible. But love also counters fear, if we choose to love we become less afraid. We connect more with those around us.

The choice to love is a choice to connect—to find ourselves in the other.

Book Recommendation: Care of the Soul - Thomas Moore

Love should be anchored in knowledge and awareness.

The current patriarchical power structures produce the media that we see and the people in power want to continue being in power by any means necessary and therefore "manipulate the masses" into accepting those images as well.

Book Recommendation: Altars in the Street - Melody Chavis

Book Recommendation: Another Turn of the Crank - Wendell Berry

Learning how to face our fears is one way we embrace love.

Chapter 7 - Greed: Simply Love

Materialism creates a world of narcissism in which the focus of life is solely on acquisition and consumption.

Intense spiritual and emotional lack in our lives is the perfect breeding ground for material greed and overconsumption. In a world without love the passion to connect can be replaced by the passion to possess.

Our nation fell into the trap of pathological narcissism in the wake of wars that brought economic bounty while undermining the vision of freedom and justice essential to sustaining democracy.

Thought: Without wars, there wouldn't be a nation to speak of in the first place. No democracy to sustain. Sometimes violence and force are necessary evils because otherwise other people would use them against you and therefore there would be a real oppressive regime without these things in place.

People lost hope in the public image of ethics and love, and when looking at their homes they also didn't find love there either. In a way to deal with this broken hollowness they turned to consumerism, to hoarding material resources, turning away from a spiritual, ethical dimension of life and toward a purely materialistic world view where the only thing that mattered was how much you owned.

Imagine a mom who accepts her children dealing drugs because that's how they can make ends meet as a family, and observe how this is as far away from love as you can get. Thinking about love might simply cause her pain. Yet in searching for love, for feelings she might become addicted to substances. In order to feel anything.

Book Recommendation: Love and Addiction - Stanton Peele

Both men and women remain in dysfunctional, loveless relationships when it is materially opportune.

Book Recommendation: The Seven Laws of Money - Michael Phillips

Genuine love is rarely an emotional space where needs are instantly gratified. To know genuine love we have to invest time and commitment.

Maybe people want love to function like a drug, giving them an immediate and sustained high.

Thought: There is something adjacent to love, some might call it infatuation, the rose colored glasses, the butterflies in the stomach sort of feeling that does feel exactly like this: "love" as a drug, giving an immediate and sustained high. But only for a couple of weeks to months, the "honeymoon phase". This is just as much part of human lived reality and the experience of love as the part/aspects of spiritual love she is describing.

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.

Dropping and getting another relationship in case something doesn't work out instead of fixing it and repairing it has strong analogues to our consumer culture. Repairing and maintenance is work frowned upon and not engaged in, both in relationships as well as in the marketplace. We don't try to mend things, we instead search for somebody else, over and over again.

Book Recommendation: The Healing of America - Marianne Williamson

Rich Americans focus not on their privilege but instead defend it by saying that the poor haven't worked hard enough, hence they are poor. They try to justify their wealth and cling onto it. Greed is a widespread stance in America and as such making money is the thing to do. At the expense of everything else, including love.

Book Recommendation: Freedom of Simplicity - Richard Foster

Hippies once they started to get older and integrate into the existing society and systems, instead of changing those systems, adapted to them, using them to their own advantage, going against and forgetting their own, once lofty, morals. When push comes to shove, morals often go out the window first.

It did not take long for this generation to find out that they loved material comfort more than justice.

Thought: Why is that the case? They had most of the things the authors describes and asks for yet they fall into this old pattern when it comes down to it? What is missing? Would most people fall back to these easier ways if that happened? Isn't that the problem, rather than patriarchy? Namely that often violence and abuse are much easier than love and compassion and hence people, failed beings that we all are, often do the easier lazier thing instead of the moral "right" thing and then come up with systems that help them forget their moral transgression, and consumerism comes out of all of that instead of the other way around?

Brainwashed to believe that they can only be secure if they have more than the next person, they accumulate and still feel insecure because there is always someone who has accumulated more.

He said that he liked seeing what monrx could make people do. How it could make them shift and violate their values.

Thought: This reminds me of MrBeast videos and how they epitomize this thinking. People would do everything to get rich quick and worse than that people really enjoy watching other people suffer and contort their morals and selves and struggle absurdly, just to get rich quick. That's the whole appeal of his YouTube channel.

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

When we value the delaying of gratification and take responsibility for our actions, we simplify our emotional universe. Living simply, makes loving simple.

Chapter 8 - Community: Loving Communion

Book Recommendation: The Different Drum - M. Scott Peck

Book Recommendation: Never Let Me Down - Susan Miller

Learning to love in friendships empowers us in ways that enable us to bring this love to other interactions with family or with romantic bonds.

We trust that a true friend desires our good.

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.

When we see love as the will to nurtured one's own or another's spiritual growth, revealed through acts of care, respect, knowing, and assuming responsibility, the foundation of all love in our life is the same. There is no special love exclusively reserved for romantic partners.

Because people think of romantic relationships as primary they are willing to endure much more shit from those types of relationships. Behavior that would have long ago caused us to end a friendship is tolerated if we find it in an abusive partner.

To love well is the task in all meaningful relationships, not just romantic bonds.

Book Recommendation: Life is For Loving - Eric Butterworth

Forgiveness is an act of generosity. It required that we place releasing someone else from the prison of their guilt or anguish over our feelings of outrage or anger. By forging we clear a path on the way to love. It is a gesture of respect.

Book Recommendation: Forgiveness! - Robin Casarjian

Realistically, being part of a loving community does not mean we will not face conflicts, betrayals, negative outcomes from positive actions, or bad things happening to good people. Love allows us to confront these negative realities in a manner that is life-affirming and life-enhancing.

Many of us seek community solely to escape the fear of being alone.

Book Recommendation: Reaching Out - Henri Nouwen

Loneliness is painful; solitude is peaceful. – Henri Nouwen

Book Recommendation: The Wheel of Life - Elisabeth Kübler Ross

Women have been and are the world's great teachers about the meaning of service.

Women are known for their acts of service, but this is a choice, not a biological reality. Denying this choice is robbing them of something important. It's not something sexually determined, it is something noble women can choose to do. Many don't.

Thought: Men also serve, just as much as women do, thinking of military service as one example where men literally die to protect their country, their families etc. also robs men of this idea of service. Both men and women serve, in often different ways, but it's not a pre-dominantly male or female thing, and should always be revered as the sacred act it is.

The willingness to sacrifice is a necessary dimension of loving practice and living in community.

All men [and women] are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. – Martin Luther King Jr.

Chapter 9 - Mutuality: The Heart of Love

Love allows us to enter paradise. Still, many of us wait outside the gates, unable to cross the threshold, unable to leave behind all the stuff we have accumulated that gets in the way of love. If we have not been guided on love's path for most of our lives, we usually do not know how to begin loving, or what we should do and how we should act. Much of the despair young people feel about love comes from their beliefs that they are doing everything "right" or that they have done everything right and love is still not happening. Their efforts to love and be loved just produce stress, strife and perpetual discontent.

Thought: Ouch. I can relate to this a bit too much.

The story of her and her partner in a "private gender war" hits close to home too. However, I think that while I'd like to engage this battle in the thought space i.e. what does reality look like, I don't care about it in reality, i.e. from biological reality doesn't stem any necessity for how things should be.

Like many men, he wanted a woman to be "just like his mama" so that he did not have to do the work of growing up.

Thought: Thinking of what she wrote a page earlier it seemed to be the same for her, that she also wanted to have a man "just like her father" so that she didn't need to do the work of growing up.

Book Recommendation: The Peter Pan Syndrome - Dan Kiley

Though they have reached adult age, they are unable to face adult feelings with responsibilities. Our of touch with their true emotions, afraid to depend on even those closest to them, self-centered and narcissistic, they hide behind masks of normalcy while feeling empty and lonely inside. – Dan Kiley

Thought: Uff, as somebody who has been struggling with Peter Pan Syndrome stuff and heavy self criticism from this idea this hits very close to home, but then at the same time also completely misses the mark. It's odd this cognitive dissonance I feel when reading this. It also heavily reminds me of "A Review of Dating Men in the Bay Area". The category described is the Man Who Is Not.

The only alternative to not turning into a conventional macho man was to not become a man at all, to remain a boy.

Thought: Her descriptions of her relationships to men hurt so much to read. If somebody is stuck in the old gender roles, that's not ok, if somebody struggles to find a way out of this but doesn't find it, that's not ok either. But both are signs that these men didn't love, which I find a strange accusation. Did the men agree with this? I.e. did they think they were loving? Also what's their whole story of the same events?

Observing his struggle I saw how little support men received when they chose to be disloyal to patriarchy. Although these two liberal men were more than two generations apart, neither had given the question of love much thought. Despite their support of gender equality in the public sphere, privately, deep down, they still saw love as a woman's issue. To them, a relationship was about finding someone to take care of all their needs.

Thought: How does she know this? To me this feels so unfair to these individuals. Especially the second one. Also, would these men think that she did think of the relationship in the same light?

In the Mars-and-Venus-gendered universe, men want power and women want emotional attachment and connection. On this planet nobody really has the opportunity to know love since it is power and not live that is the order of the day.

Girls and boys, women and men who have been taught to think this way almost always believe love is not important, or if it is, it is never as important as being powerful, dominant, in control, on top—being right. Women who give seemingly selfless adoration and care to the men in their lives appear to be obsessed with "love", but in actuality their actions are often a cover to hold power.

Thought: This seems like a contradiction, why is it men and women now that seek power? Shouldn't it be just men if this was a patriarchy that trained women to be subservient in their roles? Why is there this power struggle going on from both sides? If literally two sentences ago it was men seeking power and women seeking love?

Like their male counterparts, they enter relationships speaking the words of love even as their actions indicate that maintaining power and control is their primary agenda.

The fact that this sadomasochistic power dynamic can and usually does coexist with affection, care, tenderness, and loyalty makes it easy for power-driven individuals to deny their agendas, even to themselves. Their positive actions give hope that love will prevail. Sadly, love will not prevail in any situation where one party, either female or male, wants to maintain control.

Thought: This little injunction, even to themselves, is extremely powerful here. It makes every reader wonder whether these dynamics exist in their own minds too. Everybody could be guilty, even if you think you aren't doing this... You might be. This is a powerful way to turn somebody onto their own blindspots. How to find out if you are truly not stuck in power dynamics though? Any attempt of "real love" could still be construed as an act of control, no matter how much you try that this isn't the case. This makes this idea also very dangerous. It is a seed of doubt that can break, basically any relationship because things can always be re-interpreted as manipulation and taking up control, even if they genuinely aren't. This can become a form of gaslighting very easily.

At least when you hold to the dynamics of power you never have to fear the unknown; you know the rules of the power game.

The practice of love offers no place of safety. We risk loss, hurt, pain. We risk being acted upon by forces outside our control.

Afraid of love, many of us focus more on finding a partner.

Men aren't worse at loving than women. Both are equally bad at it. Viewing it as a power struggle to be engaged in, helped by their respective self help books. Men are portrayed as emotionally un-intelligent, even if this is a learnable skill, it is put up there as a biological fact to hide behind but also to be exploited.

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—admir to ourselves that we want to know love and be loving even if we do not know what means.

Thought: That means there was no love in couples for all the time the patriarchy ran rampant? Never? I doubt that this is the case because there were too many people who found love within their shitty pre-defined gender roles and practiced this mutual giving and respect. I can't imagine that in literally thousands of years of human culture, where nobody was talking about the rampant sexism, yet the people were still talking about love, that they all missed what love truly was. Not too mention that much of the traditions she is based on are much much older than that and steeped in sexist thinking so often, yet inspire her about love. Sure the two are linked, and sexist thinking creates problems but those can be solved and overcome and love is possible in a flawed world, even in one with gender conflict.

Book Recommendation: The Path to Love - Deepak Chopra

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.

Thought: The wording of this is deeply sexist in and off itself. It's literally saying that men have to be guided by women on the path of love while also claiming that men should be able to develop their own capacity to love. Why can't a man learn how to love by himself? Without a woman to teach him? Also, shouldn't men teach women and women teach men and men teach men and women women? This to me is sad that there are these glaring contradictions of wanting non sexist thinking, while also advocating for it when it's beneficial to women.

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

Thought: One could be mean here and say that this is because the power struggle is won in the case of a maternal relation whereas in the other case it isn't.

Continual lying ... is often deemed acceptable and excusable male behavior.

Thought: again... Why is it only male behavior here?

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 helplessness or vulnerable.

Thought: Again... Why men? Why not people? Why the sexism?

Setting a time where both people agree to listen can help with this. It creates connection and trust.

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

Constancy is important for love. And constancy is commitment. They are one and the same.

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

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.

Suffering and pain do not end when we begin to love.

Thought: Because suffering and pain in the Buddhist sense are the opposite side of the same coin as love. If we truly care, we fear the loss, we become vulnerable to be hurt. Because love creates attachment and attachment creates the fear of losing that person.

Book Recommendation: Lessons in Love - Guy Corneau

Book Recommendation: Love the Way You Want Its - Robert Sternberg

Generous sharing of all resources is one concrete way to express love. These resources can be time, attention, material objects, skills, money etc.

Thought: In this case patriarchal households could be loving. You have two different people expressing love in different ways. It is just one way out of many, but it is one way. It is by no means the best or even a better way than other ways, it is just one that could work. And it doesn't need to be patriarchal, the roles could equally well be flipped or it's a different mix of exchanging resources all together. Mutual attentiveness and synergy of what makes the most sense given the circumstances is important. I.e. if one person is really skilled at one thing, and this is easy for them to do and provides value, then by all means they should share that predominantly without regards to "equality".

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.

Thought: This again denies that men already serve, but in different ways than women. It denies a whole half of reality, the lived experiences of men, today. Thinking of firefighters, soldiers, people in positions where they are willing to sacrifice their lives in order to serve others. How is that not service?

Book Recommendation: A Heart As Wide As The World - Sharon Salzberg

The mutual practice of giving and receiving is an everyday ritual when we know true love.

Chapter 10 - Romance: Sweet Love

Love saves us only if we want to be saved.

Book Recommendation: The Bluest Eye - Toni Morrison

Romantic love is a destructive and dangerous idea because our common conception of it is that we have no choice about it, that we lack agency to change it. We "fall" in love. But romance is not love.

Thought: This is true to lived experience for many though, the feeling of romance is what many people want to continue past the initial honeymoon phase. This is what people mean when talking about love, just as much as the nurturing and caring aspects of it.

The expression to "fall in love" reflects a peculiar attitude toward love and life itself—a mixture of fear, awe, fascination, and confusion. It implies suspicion, doubt, hesitation in the presence of something unavoidable, yet not fully reliable.

We are invested in this notion of falling in love because it is effortless. It takes responsibility away from us, it is comfortable. Easy.

Most people remain reluctant to embrace the idea that it is more genuine, more real, to think of choosing to love rather than falling in love.

Book Recommendation: Life Preservers - Harriet Lerner

We don't evaluate potential partners the way we evaluate buying a car, a list of requirements. We are afraid that this will lead to not finding anybody and this makes us afraid of being alone, forever. We act from this place of fear.

Most of us prefer to have a partner who is lacking than no partner at all. What becomes apparent is that we may be more interested in finding a partner than in knowing love.

Erotic desire is a part of romance but isn't necessary for love, per se. You can have erotic desire without love and love without erotic desire. Men tend to think that they should love who they desire for sex, following this they end up in relationships with people they don't connect with, except for the sex.

The pressure of men in a patriarchal society to "perform" sexually is so great that men are often so gratified to be with someone with whom they find sexual pleasure that they ignore everything else.

Thought: Maybe men are interested in sex more so than in love, even besides the patriarchy?

Women rarely choose men solely on the basis of erotic connection.

Thought: How is this not sexist thinking?

We often settle for lovelessness because we are attracted to other aspects of a partner's makeup.

Too often women, and some men, have their most intense erotic pleasure with partners who wound them in other ways.

Question: Why? This describes how many women find themselves drawn to abusive, ultra macho men, and somehow find them more attractive even though it hurts them... It reminds me severely of some Slat Star Codex articles where men express severe frustration and confusion about this and the super toxic ideas of the pickup artistry also hook in here and explain this, somehow. How can this exist, without this book talking about it, more?

Most of us would choose great love over sustained sexual passion if we had to.

Thought: Judging from the actual state of the world it seems that people often decide the very opposite of this. I.e. people go back to unloving shitty people if the sex and romantic feelings are just strong enough... All the freaking time.

If men were socialized to desire love as much as they are taught to desire sex, we would see a cultural revolution.

Thought: What if this is already the case, and yet men still desire sex much more, on average, than women? What if there is an inherent difference in perception of importance of sex vs. love between biological genders, regardless of socialization?

We can acknowledge the "click" we feel when we meet someone new as just that—a mysterious sense of connection that may or may not have anything to do with love.

Thought: It has to do with romantic attachment and preparation for pair bonding from a neuroscientific point of view. It's literally a bunch of chemicals being released to ensure we have offspring, that's what this "click" is and why it feels so powerful. The purpose is to get us close to somebody else and produce offspring with them and then have enough bond to them to care for and raise this offspring enough so that it doesn't die.

Book Recommendation: Soul Mates - Thomas Moore

Perfect passion is not perfect love. One can build up and lead into the other but they are different. One is a feeling and a mental state, the other is a continuous mutual action.

We can only move from perfect passion to perfect love when the illusions pass and we are able to use the energy and intensity generated by intense, overwhelming, erotic bonding to heighten self-discovery.

Love doesn't even have to be expressed as an ongoing relationship. You can love and be transformed by it, even if there is no committed relationship or even much contact happening beyond the initial connection.

Thought: I notice this confuses me. Why if love is an action (where ongoing commitment is important) can this also be true love?

True love thrives on the difficulties.

Book Recommendation: Love and Awakening - John Welwood

A soul connection is loving somebody for who they could become and them bringing out the best in us, in turn. It's about pushing each other to grow in the most beautiful beings we could be.

Like so much else, people have also misunderstood the place of love in life, they have made it into play and pleasure because they thought that play and pleasure was more blissful than work; but there is nothing happier than work, and love, just because it is the extreme happiness, can be nothing else but work. – Rainer Maria Rilke

There is a tension between true love being a catalyst for change, but only for us, and only for the best intentions. We can't mold somebody into something they aren't but love can bring out the best in them that is already there, even if the other doesn't know or can't see it yet. There's a very fine distinction between these, one is selfishly oriented manipulation, whereas the other is true love.

True love is unconditional, but to truly flourish it requires an ongoing commitment to constructive struggle and change.

Choosing to be fully honest, to reveal ourselves, is risky.

Since true love sheds light on those aspects of ourselves we may wish to deny or hide, enabling us to see ourselves clearly and without shame, it is not surprising that so many individuals who say they want to know love turn away when such love beckons.

Love takes your ideas, your desires, and your actions and welds them together in one experience and one living reality which is a new you.

Book Recommendation: Illusions - Richard Bach

We can recognize that moment of mysterious connection between our soul and that of another person as love's attempt to call us back to our true selves. Intensely connecting with another soul, we are made bold and courageous.

Thought: This rings personally true for me, so much. I've had experiences like this where because of the other person I could see clearly where I was lacking and what I should be doing in life. This clarity is powerful and also frightening because at least for me, back then, I was not ready for that change. I hid away, not growing, not picking up the call to rise and become a better me.

Chapter 11 - Loss: Loving Into Life and Death

Unlike love, death will touch us all at some point in our lives. We will witness the death of others or we will witness our own dying, even if it's just in that brief instance when life is fading away.

Whenever there is ... a choice between the living and the dead ... the choice will always be for death, for death is the end or the goal of life. – Thomas Merton

Book Recommendation: Original Blessing - Matthew Fox

Even though we are more likely to be hurt by someone we know than a stranger, our fear is directed toward the unknown and the unfamiliar.

Love empowers us to live fully and die well. Death becomes, then, not an end to life but a part of living.

Book Recommendation: The Wheel of Life - Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

Book Recommendation: Intimate Death - Marie De Hennezel

Death helps us see life through the lens of love. It helps us see who we could have been, and make peace with this.

Our first home in the womb is also a grave where we await the coming of life. Our first experience of living is a moment of resurrection, a movement out of the shadows and into the light. When we watch a child physically coming out of the womb, we know we are in the presence of the miraculous.

Death is among us. To see it always and only as a negative subject is to lose sight of its power to enhance every moment.

People don't show grief and even though we should expect to see a lot of people around grieving because loved ones die all the time, we don't. It's not "hip" to show your sorrow.

When we deny the full expression of our grief, it lays like a weight on our hearts, causing emotional pain and physical ailments. Grief is most often unrelenting when individuals are not reconciled to the reality of loss.

I try daily to learn to leave folks as though we might never be meeting again. This practice makes us change how we talk and interact. It is a way to live consciously.

Book Recommendation: Our Appointment with Life - Which Nhat Hanh

To be here now does not mean that we do not make plans but that we learn to give the making of future plans only a small amount of energy.

Accepting death with love means we embrace the reality of the unexpected, of experiences over which we have no control. Love empowers us to surrender. We do not need to have endless anxiety and worry about whether we will fulfill our goals or plans. Death is always there to remind us that our plans are transitory. By learning to love, we learn to accept change. Without change, we cannot grow. Our will to grow in spirit and truth is how we stand before life and death, ready to choose life.

Chapter 12 - Healing: Redemptive Love

Love can heal our wounds, it helps us reinterpret the past, seeing it in a new, helpful way.

Book Recommendation: The Fire Next Time - James Baldwin

At times we will all be confronted with suffering, an unexpected illness, a loss. That pain will fome whether we choose it or not and not one of us can escape it.

Book Recommendation: The Family - John Bradshaw

As with all ... addiction, letting go and choosing wellness [is] our only way of rescue and recovery.

Book Recommendation: The Salt Eaters - Toni Cade

We want others to be in our lives. Even if we are fundamentally alright by ourselves, this longing doesn't go away.

Life without communion in love with others would be less fulfilling no matter the extent of one's self-love.

All religious traditions acknowledge that there is comfort in reaching for the sacred through words.

Book Recommendation: The Raft Is Not the Shore - Thich Nhat Hanh

As we begin to simplify, to let the clutter go, whether it is the clutter of desire or the actualaterial clutter and incessant busyness that fills every space, we recover our capacity to be sensual.

Cynicism is the greatest barrier to love.

In a world anguished by rampant destruction, fear prevails. When we love, we no longer allow our hearts to be held captive by fear. The desire to be powerful is rooted in the intensity of fear. Power gives us the illusion of having thriumphed over fear, over our need for love.

Thought: Maybe power does help to conquer fear in a very real sense, if you are afraid of a lion prowling your home outside but you arm yourself with a spear or a gun (acquire more power) there is no reason to be afraid anymore. You could kill the lion, and vanquish the source of the fear.

Chapter 13 - Destiny: When Angels Speak of Love

Angels are real. They are with us, every day, everywhere, guiding us subtly on our path.

Book Recommendation: The Man Who Wrestled With God - John Sanford

Love does not lead to an end to difficulties, it provides us with the means to cope with our difficulties in ways that enhance our growth.

Book Recommendation: Soul Good - Jack Kornfield and Christina Feldman

There is joy in struggle.

Book Recommendation: Coming Out Of Shame - Gershen Kaufman and Lev Raphael

As long as we feel shame, we can never believe ourselves worthy of love.

Book Refommendation: Banished Knowledge - Alice Miller

Book Recommendation: Are You Somebody? - Nuala O'Faolain

If there was nothing else, reading would—obviously—be worth living for. – Nuala O'Faolain

The presence of angels, of angelic spirits, reminds us that there is a realm of mystery that cannot be explained by human intellect or will.

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.