All About Love
by Bell Hooks
List Price: $13.00
Pages: 272
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0060959479
Publisher: HarperCollins
Chapter One
The men in my life have always
been the folks who are wary of using the word "love" lightly. They are
wary because they believe women make too much of love. And they know that
what we think love means is not always what they believe it means. Our
confusion about what we mean when we use the word "love" is the source
of our difficulty in loving. If our society had a commonly held understanding
of the meaning of love, the act of loving would not be so mystifying.
Dictionary definitions of love tend to emphasize romantic love, defining
love first and foremost as "profoundly tender, passionate affection for
another person, especially when based on sexual attraction." Of course,
other definitions let the reader know one may have such feelings within
a context that is not sexual. However, deep affection does not really
adequately describe love's meaning.
The vast majority of books
on the subject of love work hard to avoid giving clear definitions. In
the introduction to Diane Ackerman's A Natural History of Love she
declares "Love is the great intangible." A few sentences down from this
she suggests: "Everyone admits that love is wonderful and necessary, yet
no one can agree on what it is." Coyly, she adds, "We use the word love
in such a sloppy way that it can mean almost nothing or absolutely everything."
No definition ever appears in her book that would help anyone trying to
learn the art of loving. Yet she is not alone in writing of love in ways
that cloud our understanding. When the very meaning of the word is cloaked
in mystery, it should not come as a surprise that most people find it
hard to define what they mean when they use the word "love."
Imagine how much easier it
would be for us to learn how to love if we began with a shared definition.
The word "love" is most often defined as a noun, yet all the more astute
theorists of love acknowledge that we would all love better if we used
it as a verb. I spent years searching for a meaningful definition of the
word "love," and was deeply relieved when I found one in psychiatrist
M. Scott Peck's classic self-help book The Road Less Traveled,
first published in 1978. Echoing the work of Erich Fromm, he defines love
as "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." Since the choice must be made to nurture growth, this definition
counters the more widely accepted assumption that we love instinctually.
Everyone who has witnessed
the growth process of a newborn child from the moment of birth on sees
clearly that before language is known, before the identity of caretakers
is recognized, babies respond to affectionate care. Usually they respond
with sounds or looks of pleasure. As they grow older they respond to affectionate
care by giving affection, cooing at the sight of a welcomed caretaker.
Affection is only one ingredient of love. To truly love we must learn
to mix various ingredients-care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment,
and trust, as well as honest and open communication. Learning faulty definitions
of love when we are quite young makes it difficult to be loving as we
grow older. We start out committed to the right path but go in the wrong
direction. Most of us learn early on to think of love as a feeling. When
we feel deeply drawn to someone, we cathect with them, that is, we invest
feelings or emotion in them. That process of investment wherein a loved
one becomes important to us is called "cathexis." In his book Peck rightly
emphasizes that most of us "confuse cathecting with loving." We all know
how often individuals feeling connected to someone through the process
of cathecting insist that they love the other person even if they are
hurting or neglecting them. Since their feeling is that of cathexis, they
insist that what they feel is love.
Excerpted from All About Love © Copyright 2009 by Bell Hooks. Reprinted with permission by HarperCollins. All rights reserved.
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