Abuse and neglect negate love. Care and affirmation, the opposite of abuse and humiliation, are the foundation of love. No one can rightfully claim to be loving when behaving abusively.
Interpretation
Love cannot exist alongside abuse or neglect, as genuine care and affirmation are essential foundations of love.
This quote by Bell Hooks emphasizes that love is incompatible with abuse and neglect. It asserts that true love is built on principles of care and affirmation, highlighting that any actions reflecting abuse or humiliation undermine a claim of love. Hooks argues that love requires a nurturing environment, and one cannot genuinely express love while engaging in harmful behaviors towards another.
In practice
This quote can be used during discussions about healthy relationships in a counseling session.
Privilege is not in and of itself bad; what matters is what we do with privilege. I want to live in a world where all women have access to education, and all women can earn PhDβs, if they so desire. Privilege does not have to be negative, but we have to share our resources and take direction about how to use our privilege in ways that empower those who lack it.
Self-love is the foundation of our loving practice. Without it our other efforts to love fail. Giving ourselves love we provide our inner being with the opportunity to have the unconditional love we may have always longed to receive from someone else.
While privacy strengthens all our bonds, secrecy weakens and damages connection. Lerner points out that we do not usually "know the emotional costs of keeping a secret" until the truth is disclosed. Usually, secrecy involves lying. And lying is always the setting for potential betrayal and violation of trust.
When we only name the problem, when we state complaint without a constructive focus or resolution, we take hope away. In this way critique can become merely an expression of profound cynicism, which then works to sustain dominator culture.
Once you do away with the idea of people as fixed, static entities, then you see that people can change, and there is hope.
I still think it's important for people to have a sharp, ongoing critique of marriage in patriarchal society β because once you marry within a society that remains patriarchal, no matter how alternative you want to be within your unit, there is still a culture outside you that will impose many, many values on you whether you want them to or not.
I like my body when it is with your body. It is so quite new a thing. Muscles better and nerves more.
Separated lovers cheat absence by a thousand fancies which have their own reality. They are prevented from seeing one another and they cannot write; nevertheless they find countless mysterious ways of corresponding, by sending each other the song of birds, the scent of flowers, the laughter of children.
To fall in love is easy, even to remain in it is not difficult; our human loneliness is cause enough. But it is a hard quest worth making to find a comrade through whose steady presence one becomes steadily the person one desires to be.
If I had a gun, I'd shoot a hole into the sun and love would burn this city down for you.
Am I jealous? he thought, astonished. Jealous of the chance object to which she has attached herself? Jealous of something that does not concern me? One can be jealous of a love that has turned away, but not of that to which it has turned.
I may not be a smart man, but I know what love is.
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