All About Love

by bell hooks

  Heterosexual women are often schooled by other women in the art of lying to men as a way to manipulate. Many examples of the support females receive for lying concern the desire to mate and bear children. When I longed to have a baby and my male partner at the time was not ready, I was stunned by the number of women who encouraged me to disregard his feelings, to go ahead without telling him. They felt it was fine to deny a child the right to be desired by both female and male biological parents. (No deception is involved when a woman has a child with a sperm donor, as in such a case there is no visible male parent to reject or punish an unwanted child.) It disturbed me that women I respected did not take the need for male parenting seriously or believe that it was as important for a man to want to parent as a woman. Whether we like it or not we still live in a world where children want to know who their fathers are and, when they can, go in search of absent fathers. I could not imagine bringing a child into this world whose father might reject him or her because he did not desire a child in the first place.

  Growing up in the fifties, in the days before adequate birth control, every female was acutely conscious of the way unwanted pregnancies could alter the course of a young woman’s life. Still, it was clear then that there were girls who hoped for pregnancy to emotionally bind individual males to them forever. I thought those days were long gone. Yet even in this era of social equality between the sexes I hear stories of females choosing to get pregnant when a relationship is rocky as a way of forcing the male to remain in their life or in the hope of forcing marriage. More than we might think, some men feel extremely bound to a woman when she gives birth to a child they have fathered. The fact that men succumb to being lied to and manipulated when the issue is biological parenting does not make it right or just. Men who accept being lied to and manipulated are not only abdicating their power, they are setting up a situation where they can “blame” women or justify woman-hating.

  This is another case where lying is used to gain power over someone, to hold them against their will. Harriet Lerner reminds readers that honesty is only one aspect of truth telling—that it is equated with “moral excellence: an absence of deception or fraud.” The mask of patriarchal “femininity” often renders women’s deceptions acceptable. However, when women lie we lend credence to age-old sexist stereotypes that suggest women are inherently, by virtue of being female, less capable of truth telling. The origins of this sexist stereotype extend back to ancient stories of Adam and Eve, of Eve’s willingness to lie even to God.

  Often, when information is withheld by women and men, protection of privacy is the justification. In our culture privacy is often confused with secrecy. Open, honest, truth-telling individuals value privacy. We all need spaces where we can be alone with thoughts and feelings—where we can experience healthy psychological autonomy and can choose to share when we want to. Keeping secrets is usually about power, about hiding and concealing information. Hence, many recovery programs stress that “you are only as sick as your secrets.” When a former boyfriend’s sister shared with me a carefully guarded family secret regarding incest, which he did not know about, I responded by requesting that she tell him. If she didn’t, I would. I felt that keeping this information a secret from him would violate the commitment we had made as a couple to be open and honest with each other. By withholding this information from him, joining his mother and sisters, I would have been participating in family dysfunction. Sharing with him affirmed my loyalty and respect for his capacity to cope with reality.

  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.

  Widespread cultural acceptance of lying is a primary reason many of us will never know love. It is impossible to nurture one’s own or another’s spiritual growth when the core of one’s being and identity is shrouded in secrecy and lies. Trusting that another person always intends your good, having a core foundation of loving practice, cannot exist within a context of deception. It is this truism that makes all acts of judicious withholding major moral dilemmas. More than ever before we, as a society, need to renew a commitment to truth telling. Such a commitment is difficult when lying is deemed more acceptable than telling the truth. Lying has become so much the accepted norm that people lie even when it would be simpler to tell the truth.

  Practically every mental health care practictioner, from the most erudite psychoanalysts to untrained self-help gurus, tell us that it is infinitely more fulfilling and we are all saner if we tell the truth, yet most of us are not rushing to stand up and be counted among the truth tellers. Indeed, as someone committed to being honest in daily life I experience the constant drag of being seen as a “freak” for telling the truth, even when I speak truthfully about simple matters. If a friend gives me a gift and asks me to tell him or her whether or not I like it, I will respond honestly and judiciously; that is to say, I will speak the truth in a positive, caring manner. Yet even in this situation, the person who asks for honesty will often express annoyance when given a truthful response.

  In today’s world we are taught to fear the truth, to believe it always hurts. We are encouraged to see honest people as naive, as potential losers. Bombarded with cultural propaganda ready to instill in all of us the notion that lies are more important, that truth does not matter, we are all potential victims. Consumer culture in particular encourages lies. Advertising is one of the cultural mediums that has most sanctioned lying. Keeping people in a constant state of lack, in perpetual desire, strengthens the marketplace economy. Lovelessness is a boon to consumerism. And lies strengthen the world of predatory advertising. Our passive acceptance of lies in public life, particularly via the mass media, upholds and perpetuates lying in our private lives. In our public life there would be nothing for tabloid journalism to expose if we lived our lives out in the open, committed to truth telling. Commitment to knowing love can protect us by keeping us wedded to a life of truth, willing to share ourselves openly and fully in both private and public life.

  To know love we have to tell the truth to ourselves and to others. Creating a false self to mask fears and insecurities has become so common that many of us forget who we are and what we feel underneath the pretense. Breaking through this denial is always the first step in uncovering our longing to be honest and clear. Lies and secrets burden us and cause stress. When an individual has always lied, he has no awareness that truth telling can take away this heavy burden. To know this he must let the lies go.

  When feminism first began, women talked openly about our desires to know men better, to love them for who they really are. We talked about our desires to be loved for who we really are (i.e., to be accepted in our physical and spiritual beings rather than feeling we had to make ourselves into a fantasy self to become the object of male desire). And we urged men to be true to themselves, to express themselves. Then when men began to share their thoughts and feelings, some women could not cope. They wanted the old lies and pretenses to be back in place. In the seventies, a popular Sylvia greeting card showed a woman seated in front of a fortune-teller gazing into a crystal ball. The caption on the front of the card read: “He never talks about his feelings.” On the inside the response was: “Next year at 2:00 P.M. men will start talking about their feelings. And at 2:05 women all over America will be sorry.” When we hear another person’s thoughts, beliefs, and feelings, it is more difficult to project on to them our perceptions of who they are. It is harder to be manipulative. At times women find it difficult to hear what many men have to say when what they tell us does not conform to our fantasies of who they are or who we want them to be.

  The wounded child inside many males is a boy who, when he first spoke his truths, was silenced by paternal sadism, by a patriarchal world that did not want him to claim his true feelings. The w
ounded child inside many females is a girl who was taught from early childhood on that she must become something other than herself, deny her true feelings, in order to attract and please others. When men and women punish each other for truth telling we reinforce the notion that lies are better. To be loving we willingly hear each other’s truth and, most important, we affirm the value of truth telling. Lies may make people feel better, but they do not help them to know love.

  Four

  Commitment: Let Love Be Love in Me

  Commitment is inherent in any genuinely loving relationship. Anyone who is truly concerned for the spiritual growth of another knows, consciously or instinctively, that he or she can significantly foster that growth only through a relationship of constancy.

  – M. SCOTT PECK

  COMMITMENT TO TRUTH telling lays the groundwork for the openness and honesty that is the heartbeat of love. When we can see ourselves as we truly are and accept ourselves, we build the necessary foundation for self-love. We have all heard the maxim “If you do not love yourself, you will be unable to love anyone else.” It sounds good. Yet more often than not we feel some degree of confusion when we hear this statement. The confusion arises because most people who think they are not lovable have this perception because at some point in their lives they were socialized to see themselves as unlovable by forces outside their control. We are not born knowing how to love anyone, either ourselves or somebody else. However, we are born able to respond to care. As we grow we can give and receive attention, affection, and joy. Whether we learn how to love ourselves and others will depend on the presence of a loving environment.

  Self-love cannot flourish in isolation. It is no easy task to be self-loving. Simple axioms that make self-love sound easy only make matters worse. It leaves many people wondering why, if it is so easy, they continue to be trapped by feelings of low self-esteem or self-hatred. Using a working definition of love that tells us it is the action we take on behalf of our own or another’s spiritual growth provides us with a beginning blueprint for working on the issue of self-love. When we see love as a combination of trust, commitment, care, respect, knowledge, and responsibility, we can work on developing these qualities or, if they are already a part of who we are, we can learn to extend them to ourselves.

  Many people find it helpful to critically examine the past, particularly childhood, to chart their internalization of messages that they were not worthy, not enough, that they were crazy, stupid, monstrous, and so on. Simply learning how we have acquired feelings of worthlessness rarely enables us to change things; it is usually only one stage in the process. I, like so many other people, have found it useful to examine negative thinking and behavioral patterns learned in childhood, particularly those shaping my sense of self and identity. However, this process alone did not ensure self-recovery. It was not enough. I share this because it is far too easy to stay stuck in simply describing, telling one’s story over and over again, which can be a way of holding on to grief about the past or holding on to a narrative that places blame on others.

  While it is important for us to understand the origins of fragile self-esteem, it is also possible to bypass this stage (identifying when and where we received negative socialization) and still create a foundation for building self-love. Individuals who bypass this stage tend to move on to the next stage, which is actively introducing into our lives constructive life-affirming thought patterns and behavior. Whether a person remembers the details of being abused is not important. When the consequence of that abuse is a feeling of worthlessness, they can still engage in a process of self-recovery by finding ways to affirm self-worth.

  The wounded heart learns self-love by first overcoming low self-esteem. Nathaniel Branden’s lengthy work Six Pillars of Self-Esteem highlights important dimensions of self-esteem, “the practice of living consciously, self-acceptance, self-responsibility, self-assertiveness, living purposefully and the practice of personal integrity.” Living consciously means we think critically about ourselves and the world we live in. We dare to ask ourselves the basic questions who, what, when, where, and why. Answering these questions usually provides us with a level of awareness that enlightens. Branden contends: “To live consciously means to seek to be aware of everything that bears on our actions, purposes, values, and goals—to the best of our ability, whatever that ability may be—and to behave in accordance with that which we see and know.” To live consciously we have to engage in critical reflection about the world we live in and know most intimately.

  Usually it is through reflection that individuals who have not accepted themselves make the choice to stop listening to negative voices, within and outside the self, that constantly reject and devalue them. Affirmations work for anyone striving for self-acceptance. Although I had for years been interested in therapeutic modes of healing and self-help, affirmations always seemed to me a bit corny. My sister, who was then working as a therapist in the field of chemical dependency, encouraged me to give affirmations a try to see if I would experience any concrete changes in my outlook. I wrote affirmations relevant to my daily life and began to repeat them in the morning as part of my daily meditations. At the top of my list was the declaration: “I’m breaking with old patterns and moving forward with my life.” I not only found them to be a tremendous energy boost—a way to kick off the day by my accentuating the positive—I also found it useful to repeat them during the day if I felt particularly stressed or was falling into the abyss of negative thinking. Affirmations helped restore my emotional equilibrium.

  Self-acceptance is hard for many of us. There is a voice inside that is constantly judging, first ourselves and then others. That voice enjoys the indulgence of an endless negative critique. Because we have learned to believe negativity is more realistic, it appears more real than any positive voice. Once we begin to replace negative thinking with positive thinking, it becomes utterly clear that, far from being realistic, negative thinking is absolutely disenabling. When we are positive we not only accept and affirm ourselves, we are able to affirm and accept others.

  The more we accept ourselves, the better prepared we are to take responsibility in all areas of our lives. Commenting on this third pillar of self-esteem, Branden defines self-responsibility as the willingness “to take responsibility for my actions and the attainment of my goals . . . for my life and well-being.” Taking responsibility does not mean that we deny the reality of institutionalized injustice. For example, racism, sexism, and homophobia all create barriers and concrete incidents of discrimination. Simply taking responsibility does not mean that we can prevent discriminatory acts from happening. But we can choose how we respond to acts of injustice. Taking responsibility means that in the face of barriers we still have the capacity to invent our lives, to shape our destinies in ways that maximize our well-being. Every day we practice this shape shifting to cope with realities we cannot easily change.

  Many women are married to men who were unsupportive when they decided to further their educations. Most of these women did not leave the men in their lives, they engaged in constructive strategies of resistance. One woman I spoke with was inhibited because her husband worked in a plant and she felt uncomfortable having more education than he did. Yet she wanted to reenter the workforce and needed an advanced degree to do so. She made the choice to take responsibility for her needs and desires, believing it would also enhance the well-being of her family. Returning to work boosted her self-esteem and changed the passive-aggressive rage and depression that had developed as a consequence of her isolation and stagnation. Making this decision and finding ways to realize it was not an easy process, however. Her husband and children were often disgruntled when her independence forced them to accept more household responsibility. In the long run, everyone benefited. And it goes without saying that these changes boosted her self-esteem in ways that showed her how self-love made it possible to extend herself in a constructive way to others. She was happier and so were those around her.
/>   In order to makes these changes she had to make use of another vital aspect of self-esteem, “self-assertiveness,” defined by Branden as “the willingness to stand up for myself, to be who I am openly, to treat myself with respect in all human encounters.” Since many of us were shamed in childhood either in our families of origin or in school settings, a learned pattern of going along with the program and not making a fuss is the course of action we most frequently choose as a way to avoid conflict. As children, conflict was often the setting for put-downs and humiliation, the place where we were shamed. Our attempts at self-assertion failed as an adequate defense. Many of us learned that passivity lessened the possibility of attack.

  Sexist socialization teaches females that self-assertiveness is a threat to femininity. Accepting this faulty logic lays the groundwork for low self-esteem. The fear of being self-assertive usually surfaces in women who have been trained to be good girls or dutiful daughters. In our childhood home my brother was never punished for talking back. Asserting his opinions was a positive sign of manhood. When my sisters and I voiced our opinions we were told by our parenting adults that this was negative and undesirable behavior. We were told, especially by our dad, that female self-assertion was not feminine. We did not listen to these warnings. Even though ours was a patriarchal household, the fact that females far outnumbered the two males, my dad and my brother, made it safe for us to speak our minds, to talk back. Luckily, by the time we were young adults the feminist movement had come along and validated that having a voice and being self-assertive was necessary for building self-esteem.

  One reason women have traditionally gossiped more than men is because gossip has been a social interaction wherein women have felt comfortable stating what they really think and feel. Often, rather than asserting what they think at the appropriate moment, women say what they think will please the listener. Later, they gossip, stating at that moment their true thoughts. This division between a false self invented to please others and a more authentic self need not exist when we cultivate positive self-esteem.