Love Is A Choice
Two close friends of mine got into different relationships a few months ago. I hate when this happens. It's not that I mope around groveling in my boredom without them. Well, at least not during the day. And it's not that I hate seeing them fall for someone either, this part can be quite exciting. It is the playing out of the same old trope. A cycle of loss. A punch in the gut. Once they start dating someone, we don't talk anymore, and a "love hierarchy" is instilled.
All this stewing has me up at night again. I find myself reopening my copy of All About Love: New Visions that I keep conveniently placed on my nightstand like an emotional fire extinguisher of some sort.
Our view of love as a society has failed, I whisper to the dark. My moonlit curtains sway in silent solidarity. Why?
Images of love have been in our hands and on our walls for decades now. A Hollywood that is driven by money, power, and sex is not one for teaching us love, but they sure dish it and we eat it up. But no matter how many times we watch two people fall in love on our screen, we come up short at actually defining love. "It's a feeling," most would say, a feeling of care towards another person or one self. This definition is false. It's a lie!
Ever since I learned the words I have wanted to scream it into any ear that will listen, and now is my chance. If I got the chance to actually scream it, I would probably say "you cannot love someone without understanding what it is or how," but if I got the chance (me writing this is said chance), then I would say- in much more pointed detail, as follows.
I would lay it out simply (with the help of bell hooks in my back pocket) in three steps:
- Define love
- Live by that definition
- Do not prioritize one love over another (if there is a hierarchy then love cannot thrive)
If we cannot simply define what love is, we are stuck searching after something we cannot picture. The definition that has helped me reshape love is Eric Fromm's definition echoed by bell hooks in her novel All About Love: New Visions, where he quotes defining love as “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” And continues saying: “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.”
I love this definition. The act of trying your hardest to do what is best for someone and treating their needs as important as your own. Love is the active choosing of the right decision for another through every individual choice we make. Seeing love as an act of intention opens the door for true and healthy love.
If we see love as an act rather than a feeling, we can start to live with intention. We can start differentiating love versus care. We can feel that we care about someone even on a deep level and still not love them. When faced with any decision big or small and we do not actively make choice in their best interest, we are not loving someone. You can care deeply for a family member or friend, but you cannot love them if you know they are alone and do not choose to help them if you can help it, for example. Living and acting through love, as in acting in the person we love's best interest (including ourselves, self love is just as hard and as important) means treating the one's we love equally. There is no hierarchy in love.
Our society has led us astray. We are lonelier than ever, creatures of community kept isolated in our rat race routines. We have long been sold the idea that romance is the answer, the end-all be-all. A wedding is at the end of every storybook, a kiss at the end of every romantic movie. Love time and time again is represented by two people forming a romantic bond. Romance and sexuality is everywhere, and society has tangled up the roles that love should be playing in our lives due to the lack of understanding of what it really entails.
True platonic love is often incorrectly placed in an imaginary hierarchy of needs as we are pressured to spend the majority of our free time in the search and nurturance of romance. Intimacy, emotional vulnerability, and deep bonds of trust have been long entangled with romance and sexuality. We feel that if we are not in a relationship then we are running out of time, that we are doing something wrong. Ridged western views of romance keep our friends at an arms length as many of us feel we cannot truly be vulnerable or casually intimate for fear of judgement and shame.
This is why you find your friends leaving you once they get into relationships. They have been made to believe this lie that the only true path to intimacy is through one person. That our friends are place holders to bridge the gap until we can be in a relationship. Our society's views of love have gutted what it means to be human. To be alive is to be supported by groups of others who love us, not just one connection. We are born to mothers, who were born to their mothers. We eat because the soil was fed by the scraps of those before us. Living is a celebration of support, a coming together of people to love one another. We are born from one another, billions of us, to return to the same damp soil, the same warmed bed to the ancestors of our ancestors before us.
I never thought about how my story might end. I always just assumed I would get married and have babies and the rest was a hazy vision, that perhaps somewhere behind this thick fog was the answer. It took me a long time to recognize that this dream I had was never mine to begin with. I've been working on rewriting my ending, and I believe I want a house of my own and a garden. I want to have learned all that I can and yes, been in love with someone. More than anything I want community. Friends, family, partners in whom I can love and lean on. I want to love be loved more than anything.
The love I have for my friends makes me sad sometimes. I wish to cup their sweet faces in my palms and tell them that I love them, and that I wish for them to love me back. But I don't scream it at them or even say it softly, and I won't. I cannot make those decisions for them. I will choose to love them as much as they will let me.
So, I leave you with this. Romance may or may not find you, but this is no great tragedy. You must never feel you must search for a "great love", a great and mysterious someone who is the answer. You are the answer, being alive and the people around you are the answer. Go, love the people you have already.
And read bell hooks. Huzzah!
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