bell hooks

I feel our nation’s turning away from love as intensely as I felt love’s abandonment in my girlhood.

All About Love: New Visions provides radical new ways to think about the art of loving, offering a hopeful, joyous vision of love’s transformative power. It lets us know what we must do to love again.

When we are loving we openly and honestly express care, affection, responsibility, respect, commitment, and trust.

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.”

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 want to know love. We are simply afraid the desire to know too much about love will lead us closer and closer to the abyss of lovelessness.

Men theorize about love, but women are more often love’s practitioners.

n a world without love the passion to connect can be replaced by the passion to possess. While emotional needs are difficult, and often are impossible to satisfy, material desires are easier to fulfill.

Instead of looking for justice in the public world, individuals turned to their private lives, seeking a place of solace and escape. Initially, lots of folks turned inward to family and relationships to find again a sense of connection and stability. Coming face to face with rampant lovelessness in the home created an overwhelming sense of cultural brokenheartedness.

Whether we learn how to love ourselves and others will depend on the presence of a loving environment.

Self-love cannot flourish in isolation. It is no easy task to be self-loving.