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.

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.

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.

Knowing love or the hope of knowing love is the anchor that keeps us from falling into that sea of despair.