1LOVE
WHERE TO GO WHEN IN SEARCH OF LOVE
The High Priestess, The Empress, The Emperor
Everything in life is better when we feel loved. Our days are in full technicolor with the sound turned up. Love is driving alone through the idyllic greenery of the English countryside on a rare gloriously hot British weekend. It’s the beauty of black clamshells clinging to the rocks of Portugal’s beaches. Or witnessing the warmth of the local community from the heights of Brazil’s Sugarloaf Mountain. It’s a home-cooked meal. It’s new places and experiences. It’s the kindness of animal companions and the delighted chuckle of infants. Love in all its forms makes us feel alive.
Which is peculiar, because blood, oxygen, and flesh are the things life is made of. Doctors don’t administer love to dying patients in hospitals; love is not a vital sign of life. In Western patriarchal capitalist culture, love is only valued as an appetite. Something we crave and are compelled by. It’s a desire we would (and, in many cases, do) spend and spend and spend on to satisfy. Images of love are prevalent all throughout our popular culture—in our art and global media—and at the same time, love as a subject is critically missing in so many crucial places. It’s not a topic in our national politics, nor are we taught how to love in school; it is rarely given serious thought and inquiry. Even when we explore mental health we may mention care, but not necessarily love. It is quite the trick that love is everywhere; whether it’s present or absent, it is something we are always negotiating and responding to, trying to find balance in a minefield of personal relationships. Yet it is paradoxically trivialized. In our failure to have a broad cultural conversation about love as significant to the experience and meaning of life, it is represented as something elusive and ephemeral, a bonus, a personal luxury, the luck of the draw. Not something we can create and actively work toward, but something we can only hope to encounter by chance.
WHY DOES LOVE MATTER?
Love is an experience we are longing to understand. It is the most popular question of all the tarot readings I have done over the years, because it speaks to our quality of life. We can exist, work, and pass the days. But what I’ve become sure of is we cannot bear life without love. We cannot be aware of ourselves and connected to the body, feeling everything from euphoria to devastation. We cannot live through the range of experiences of one hundred years or less on Earth, with our sense of well-being whole and intact, without loving and being loved. Love experienced in its myriad aspects will always be the only truly compelling reason to keep going.
Part of the difficulty of recognizing love’s presence is that it isn’t tangible. Or something we can go out and get when we want it. It has to be slowly and consistently nurtured and developed, or even conjured and drawn into existence in the alchemical blends of our different lives, actions, and experiences. Love can be unpredictable and arbitrary. Even ineffable—that is, beyond our ability to put into words. How many times have you been asked why you love someone, and in response stumbled your way through a list of some of their better qualities? It isn’t definitive. Love is an elevation. You don’t respond in the same way to everyone who is confident, or funny, or beautiful. Those things, though appealing, are not love itself. We can differentiate between love as affect (the way we are moved by emotion), and our acts of service to each other (love as action and commitment). But in the end, its mystery persists, so that we are much better at saying what love is not; of speaking to how it feels to be unloved, or the grief and despair of losing love, or the pining and emptiness of seeking love and not finding it.
In my early twenties I read All About Love: New Visions by Black feminist writer bell hooks, and I knew, in dialogue with her, that I had found my life’s work. This book is part of a trilogy in which hooks invites us into the intimacy of the missing conversation about love in popular culture. She explores our polarized society and asks the question “What Is Love?” to guide us toward healing and new paths to experiencing truly satiating and spiritually expansive love. I felt relieved that hooks had demonstrated to me that love was a worthwhile subject of study, because understanding love had long been an informal passion project of mine. Following her legacy as one of the most important Black women scholars and activists of our time, similarly I have always written, thought, and spoken about love and its absence. I wasn’t just preoccupied with love because I’d played with Barbies as a child, watched Disney films right into my adulthood, or enjoyed the glamor of romantic Hollywood films as much as the next person. I don’t deny that all this conditioned me to have certain expectations for my life, but I was being stirred into interest by something else.
It’s the reason, raised in a religious home, the Gospel of John with his declaration “God is love” was my favorite. Or why the films Blue Valentine and The Lobster were my instant classics, winning me over with their dystopian cynicism about the possibilities of romantic love. Before Zooey Deschanel charmed us in the hit TV comedy New Girl, I knew her as the antihero of the film 500 Days of Summer, with that infamous “expectations versus reality” scene. (If you haven’t seen this iconic moment, it’s where there are two parallel scenes on screen with different outcomes. One side shows the main character’s expectation of having a wonderfully romantic evening at a party with his love interest, where they are wrapped up in their feelings for each other. On the other side of the screen, you see the reality of how things played out, where she is disinterested and dismissive and he spends the party alone and awkward, only to find out she has just become engaged!) I was interested in love because it was not ubiquitous in the way the artists of our time seemed to promise. This was my very own expectation-versus-reality moment in life. The dream of romantic love did not even begin to cover the disconnect between what I’d imagined about love and what I was experiencing: the lack of it.
LOVELESSNESS
As a young Black woman, throughout my adulthood the promise of intimacy and care seemed to be evading me despite my best efforts. There were many ways I and others around me were experiencing what bell hooks described in her work as a state of “lovelessness.” This was the first time I found that my confusion and mistakes and sense of loneliness were so powerfully spoken to in a book. When she discussed the tense relationships in her family as a social and cultural issue, I saw my own estrangement from my parents as part of that context. For the first time I understood that it wasn’t a personal failing on my part. I wasn’t too flawed or unlovable. What was happening to me, the lack of love, was a widespread cultural phenomenon, an estrangement having an effect on everyone. This was not new (though there are specific ways my identity and relationship to power in society have defined the availability and possibility of love for me, as is the case for each of us). But as with our parents, and their parents before them, it is my generation’s turn to grapple with feeling starved of love. Our turn to decide what love could mean for us, and what our possibilities are for fulfilling our spiritual and emotional needs.
Copyright © 2023 by Leona Nichole Black.
