How can we best live our lives?

Much of academia aims to answer this question, usually by selecting one aspect of life and investigating its history and future, constructing an ideal form or purpose for this aspect and then theorizing about the necessary steps to get there. For example, disease. Psychiatry and science aim to eradicate disease (this is the ideal form), studying the intricacies and backgrounds of particular diseases, their causes, and their effects. Science then takes this information and experiments with methods to prevent disease. Vaccines. Chemotherapy. Surgery. Medicine.

My field of study is love; my question, how do we best love?

More than merely an aspect of life, love is at the core of existence. Its presence or absence early in life drives the way we interact, intuit, behave, think, feel, live. Love is a motivating force; more than just a feeling, love is an action and way of life.

Love is a way of relating: to ourselves, family, friends, romantic partners, God or the divine, and the environment. Through listening and communication, art, intimacy, healing, service, kindness, meditation, care, compassion, peace, nonviolence, altruism, truth, justice, honesty, valuing, questioning, activism. This is what I plan to study—how do we best relate to the world, to each other, and to ourselves through these various methods?

The necessary step to arriving at any possible hypothesis to this question is to stud love in the past and present, theory and practice, cross-culturally. This entails thorough research and reading of texts that theorize about love, tell stories of love, and provide insight on the intricacies of relating. Hand-in-hand with texts are classes—classes about love, value, development, meaning, literature, communication, devotion, activism, family; tied together by the common thread of relating. For example, I have learned through my readings the three categories of love practiced by ancient Greeks: Eros, romantic love; Philia, brotherly and parental love; Agape, divine and ideal parental love. Some of my classes will fit into the study of these three categories: romance and sex, family, religion, and spirituality. Yet to base my entire study of love upon one conception of it would only present me with insight within that conception, preventing any cross-cultural insight. To study disease, I would study many of its forms and manifestations. To study love, I will deeply immerse myself in as many conceptions and manifestations—and practices—of love as I possibly can. Both breadth and depth.

Within this open approach, I will study love through the lens of Feminist Studies. As a woman studying the way we relate to each other, holding the intention of changing the way we love, I call myself a feminist. I stand for the rights, voices, and fulfillment of the needs of all, including women, and I recognize the oppression of women in the history of humankind. Love is not oppression.

Love itself is a feminist and a humanist, for love is mutually empowering and non-discriminating. Yet love ahs a history of oppression and is also tied to the oppression of women. The norm of love that I was taught while growing up in Los Angeles was one that clearly did not empower women; it was one that asked women to sit patiently by the phone and believe in a modernized version of the cult of domesticity; it taught me that as a woman, I was not enough. According to bell hooks in her work All About Love, quoting author John Bradshaw, “ending patriarchy is one step in the direction of love.” Part of my focus in studying love will explore this: the tie between feminism and love, our learned cultural norms of love, and the ways in which we grow into or out of them.

“Schools for love do not exist,” bell hooks writes. “Everyone assumes that we will know how to love instinctively. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, we still accept that the family is the primary school for love. Those of us who do not learn how to love among family are expected to experience love in romantic relationships. However, this love often eludes us. And we spend a lifetime undoing the damage caused by cruelty, neglect, and all manner of lovelessness experienced in our families of origin and in relationships where we simply did not know what to do.” In school, we are taught math, science, English, history, and social science, but not love. This produces a cohort of men and women who are experts in their specialized fields—neuroanatomy, hydroponics, ancient Swahili poetry—and succeed in the workplace, but then return to their abusive, or divorced, or loveless homes, where they struggle to raise children, sometimes facing a midlife crisis, often using their work as an escape from the realities of home. I am not presenting this as a universal case; I am bringing this case to surface as a subject that needs urgent attention, solely because it exists. Before and while we even begin to practice being the best human beings, entrepreneurs, artists, and family members we can be, we need to study how to do so. These are my intentions. Thank you.