檳榔嶼

- The men in my life have always been the folks who are wary of using the word 'love" lightly. They are wary because they believe women make too much of love.
  - Our confusion about what we mean when we use the word "love" is the source of our difficulty in loving.
  - Dictionary definition of love tend to emphaisze romantic love, defining love first and foremost as "profoundly tender, passionate affection for another person, especially when based on sexual attraction."
- Diane Ackerman's, <<A Natural History of Love>> : "Love is the great intangible... Everyone admits that love is wonderful and necessary, yet no one can agree on what it is. We use the word love is such a sloppy way that it can mean almost nothing or absolutely everything."
- M. Scott Peck's classic self-help book, <<The Road Less Traveled>> : "the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth. 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."
- To 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.
  - Most of us learn early on to think of love as a feeling. When we feel deeply drawn to someone, we invest feelings or emotion in them. That process of investment wherein a loved one becomes important to us is called "cathexis".
    - We all know how often individuals feeling connected to someone through the process of cathecting insist that they love the other person even if they are hurting or neglecting them. Since their feeling is that of cathexis, they insist that what they feel is love.
- When we understand love as the will to nurture our own and another's spiritual growth, it becomes clear that we cannot claim to love if we are hurtful and abusive.
  - An overwhelming majority of use come from dysfunctional families in which we were taught we were not okay, where we were shamed, verbally and/or physically abused, and emotionally neglected even as were also taught to believe that we were loved.
  - For most folks it is just too threatening to embrace a definition of love that would no longer enable us to see love as present in our families. Too many of us need to cling to a notion of love that either makes abuse acceptable or at least makes it seem that whatever happened was not that bad.
  - "dysfunctional" as a useful description and not as an absolute negative judgment.
  - care is a dimension of love, but simply giving care does not mean we are loving. 
- Most of us find it difficult to accept a definition of love that says we are never loved in a context where there is abuse. Most psychologically and/or physically abused children have been taught by parenting adults that love can coexist with abuse. And in extreme cases that abuse is an expression of love.This faulty thinking often shapes our adult perceptions of love. We try to rationalize being hurt by other adults by insisting that they love us.
  - For example, many of the negative shaming practices we was subjected to in childhood continued in our romantic adult relationships.
  - A lack of sustained love does not mean the absence of care, affection, or pleasure. In fact, most long-term romantic relationships have been so full of care that it would be quite easy to overlook the ongoing emotional dysfunction.
- In order to change the lovelessness in my primary relationships, I had to first learn anew the meaning of love and form there learn how to be loving.
  - I got what I was accustomed to getting - care and affection, usually mingled with a degree of unkindness, neglect, and, on some occasions, outright cruetly.
  - Many of us choose relationships of affection and care that will never become loving because they feel safer.
  - So many of us long for love but lack the courage to take risks. The truth is, far too many people in our culture do not know what love is.
- It is particularly distressing that so many recent books on love continue to insist that definitions of love are unnecessary and meaningless. Or worse, the authors suggest love should mean something different to men than it does to women.
  - This type of literature is popular because it does not demand a change in fixed ways of thinking about gender roles, culture, or love.
- Since many women believe they will nevern know fulfilling love, they are willing to settle for strategies that help ease the pain and increase the peace, pleasure, and playfulness in existing relationships, particularly romantic ones. The fact that women, more than men, buy self-help books is not indication that these books actually help us transfrom our lives.
- To begin by always thinking of love as an action rather than a feeling is one way in which anyone using the word in this manner automatically assumes accountability and responsibility. We are often taught we have no control over our "feelings."
  - To think of actions shaping feelings is one way we rid ourselves of conventionally accepted assumptions such as that parents love their children, or that one simply "falls" in love without exercising will or choice, that there are such things as "crimes of passion", i.e., he killed her because he loved her so much.