I cracked open All About Love by bell hooks this morning for the first time in a long time. The book is as important as any religious text. A rich exploration of a thing we’re all expected to understand but rarely consider head-on. It is wild how, when we attempt to get back to basics, we find instead never-ending complexity in ideas we thought we kinda agreed on.
The first chapter begins:
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.
Amen. Instead we have a shit storm of intention and interpretation and attachment and we call all of it love.
Before she delves into all the corners of what love is and means, hooks establishes the definition she’ll work from, borrowed from M. Scott Peck: the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.
Peck is clear to distinguish that willpower is absolutely involved, that loving is an act of intent and action. This is in contrast to what most of us are taught early on, that love is a feeling. Being drawn to a person, emotional investment in someone, is not actually loving. It is called cathexis. Cathexis is all about the focus we put on a particular person, the mental or emotional energy. When we call cathexis love, we distort love. We believe that it’s possible for a caregiver to be violently abusive and still “love us.” That is not love. It is not the will to nurture. Love doesn't harm.
This all got me thinking about what I mean when I say the words I love you. Not so much in the moments I holler to my kid out the car window or say bye to a friend after coffee. Those are loosely translated as I got you.
When I say “I love you”—and really mean it—I’m saying my heart is full right now and I want to share a little with you. There’s actually no “I.” No “you.” Just an open tap and a little something good flowing your way.
Maybe it’s this sense that “it’s not about us” that has made me someone who says the words with relative ease. Both in the casual tossed-off way and a more earnest form. I’ve experienced a full heart a lot in life and it’s an important thing to spread around.
It gets more complex in romantic relationships. I appreciate Peck’s distinctions because I’ve been saying for years now that I don’t think you can be “in love” with another person. That love is an energy, like a river. You can be in it, and you can be in it with someone, and we can and should call that “in love,” but a human can’t be the subject of another human’s love. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard a man say “I love you” without feeling slight nausea. Believing he actually means he wants or claims me. Mixing sex and love while also distinguishing between them is an insanely complex project. One we expect everyone to be good at, without guidance, while carrying on with the rest of their full lives. It’s nuts.
These have become the questions central to my writing over the past couple years. Where does love come from? How do we learn to love purely? Is it sustainable in daily life? Is it possible for two people to have an ongoing sexual relationship that continues to nurture not one, but two, spiritual paths?
Haven’t cracked it yet. Maybe a good place to start is to stop saying “I love you.”
Optional Assignment:
Take 10 minutes—ideally right now—to write down what you mean when you say “I love you.” What do you hear when someone says it to you? If you’re not big on those words, write about that.
Put your answers in the comments if you’re brave enough to share.
In a relationship to a boyfriend when I say I love you what I mean is that I recognize a feeling in you that you also recognize in me. Like a mirror. When I say I love you I am saying that I acknowledge and deeply appreciate the kindness and compassion in your words expressed to me, that sex feels like a holy river of deep inseparable forever oneness, that the tender gaze in your eyes nourishes and fills me with the capacity to love myself deeper.
In friendship, say with my womenfolk, love means Namaste.
I love you= Your presence in my world matters more to me than the fate of the honeybees; When your heart needs a band-aid, mine cries a mop; Your laugh, especially when you're so all-degres tickled, no sound comes out, is helium to my lungs, is the burner to my hot air balloon's rainbow-striped, insulated nylon. I love you=I like blistered cherry tomatoes on my shishkabobs but you don't, so I leave them off; If there's limited hot water in the tank, you can shower first. I love you= I will sit beside you even though you slurp your cereal; I will leave the movie theater and go get us both popcorn.
And I love YOU, specifically my dear Serena= we can share chapsticks, or, if there's that one little waxy bit left in the cap, you can have it. I'll go without. I would be chapped for you.