“I love love. For a long time I was so embarrassed that one of my greatest desires was to be loved by another. I wanted somebody to love me completely so I wouldn’t have to. The love I was dreaming of I knew I deserved to feel, but I was self-jeopardizing. I didn’t want to come face-to-face with what was alienating about me, or to focus on being strong, so I threw myself into unruly circumstances. As if under the spell of some perplexed masochism, I kept putting myself in situations where it was impossible to thrive. hooks describes this with deliberation—“It’s easier to articulate the pain of love’s absence then to describe it’s presence and meaning in our lives.” We are more comfortable suffering than we are succeeding. There is more art devoted to the loss of love, or the unrequited pursuit of it, than the actual experience of loving, or being in love; the gushing, the fulfillment, the incessant tepidness, the vacuum of warmth that envelopes you with a fervent completeness. That kind of art is limited. We want to be saved, but only in jest, because we’re not investing the time to actually have a fulfilling kind of love as that would mean really looking at ourselves. The problem is that we don’t consider how we interact with what love is, we only view it through the guise of others. We listen to others, but not ourselves; not our own needs. Through my teens and into my twenties I spent so much of my life pleasing others—sexually, or otherwise. Thinking that if I loved enough they would too.”
— For the love of love
