The Tribune

By ALICIA WALLACE

THIS year, Valentine’s Day is on a Saturday, making it easy for business to capitalise on the human desire to be loved and the social condition to give and expect love to take tangible forms. While gifting can be a beautiful, meaningful way to express love and care, it’s often used as a placeholder, distraction, or cop-out. Love is often reduced to a feeling and separated from the mandate it presents to us.

There is no love that is not active.

There is no love that is not vulnerable.

There is no love that does not come with responsibility.

Giving a red rose and a box of chocolate, going out for a fancy dinner, and/or providing an elaborate one-time experience does not make up for 364 days of abuse, neglect, or indifference. It’s not penance for long-term passivity and lack of intention in seeing and celebrating relationships.

For some, Valentine’s Day may be a good opportunity to start new habits and make commitments to act with love every day. It need not be just another day on the calendar that leads the masses to buy greeting cards, fragrances, stuffed animals, sweet treats, and event tickets. It can mark the setting of new intentions.

In All About Love: New Visions, bell hooks offered “radical new ways to think about love by showing its interconnectedness in our private and public lives.” She shared that she would have been a more loving person if she had grasped what it meant to love earlier in her life.

“Had I shared with others a common understanding of what it means to love, it would have been easier to create love. A good definition marks our starting point and lets us know where we want to end up.”

In many ways, people practice forms of possession and try to exercise control over others, calling it love. It is not only manipulation of the people they claim to love, but a failure to understand love for themselves and the congruence it must have with freedom. Many see, experience, and imitate failures to love, often believing it to be the truest form, causing harm and perpetuating violence, altering families, communities, and society.

This failure exists not only in romantic and sexual relationships, but between parents and children, within friendships, and across larger social spaces. Love is not obedience, sameness, or absence of criticism. It’s not always easy.

Instead, it challenges us.

We come face to face with differences, and love calls us to choose curiosity and kindness in our communication, including debate. Love is not static, and it’s not merely an idea. It’s an action, and we are to look to it for direction, as it can moderate our behaviour and help us to navigate challenging circumstances in ways that are both peaceful and effective.

In chapter one, hooks wrote, “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."

"Love is as love does,” he explains. “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.

In her writing, bell hooks has left us a wealth of knowledge and ideas to consider and apply to our lives in relation to feminism and love. Here are six lessons on love that are worth thinking about, discussing with loved ones, and integrating into our lives this week:

Love is an investment

“Genuine love is rarely an emotional space where needs are instantly gratified. To know love we have to invest time and commitment. Dreaming that love will save us, solve all our problems or provide a steady state of bliss or security only keeps us stuck in wishful fantasy, undermining the real power of the love -- which is to transform us. Many people want love to function like a drug, giving them an immediate and sustained high. They want to do nothing, just passively receive the good feeling.”

Love is a responsibility to one another

“The underlying values of a culture and its ethics shape and inform the way we speak and act. A love ethic presupposes that everyone has the right to be free, to live fully and well. To bring a love ethic to every dimension of our lives, our society would need to embrace change.”

Love is vulnerable

“To live our lives based on the principles of a love ethic (showing care, respect, knowledge, integrity, and the will to cooperate), we have to be courageous. Learning how to face our fears is one way we embrace love. Our fear may not go away, but it will not stand in the way. Those of us who have already chosen to embrace a love ethic, allowing it to govern and inform how we think and act, know that when we let our light shine, we draw to us and are drawn to other bearers of light.”

Love does not cause harm

“All too often women believe it is a sign of commitment, an expression of love, to endure unkindness or cruelty, to forgive and forget. In actuality, when we love rightly we know that the healthy, loving response to cruelty and abuse is putting ourselves out of harm's way.”

Love is not an escape

“But many of us seek community solely to escape the fear of being alone. Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.”

Love for self is a prerequisite for loving others

“One of the best guides to how to be self-loving is to give ourselves the love we are often dreaming about receiving from others. There was a time when I felt lousy about my over-40 body, saw myself as too this, or too that. Yet I fantasized about finding a lover who would give me the gift of being loved as I am. It is silly, isn't it, that I would dream of someone else offering to me the acceptance and affirmation I was withholding from myself. This was a moment when the maxim You can never love anybody if you are unable to love yourself made clear sense. And I add, Do not expect to receive the love from someone else you do not give yourself.”