If you do not know what you feel, then it is difficult to choose love; it is better to fall. Then you do not have to be responsible for your actions.
Interpretation
Understanding your emotions is crucial for making informed choices about love.
This quote by Bell Hooks highlights the importance of self-awareness in romantic relationships. It suggests that if you are not in tune with your own feelings, navigating the complexities of love can be challenging, and sometimes it may be easier to let love happen spontaneously rather than intentionally making choices that require emotional responsibility.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of emotional awareness in relationships.
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 PhD’s, 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 — 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.
Looking at them now, thought Jim, you'd never believe they weren't in love with each other, and not with a hopeless, doomed obsession like poor Isabel Meredith. This was what love ought to be like: playful and passionate and teasing, and dangerous, too, with sharp intelligence in it.
I love you so much that nothing can matter to me - not even you...Only my love- not your answer. Not even your indifference
If music be the food of love, play on, Give me excess of it; that surfeiting, The appetite may sicken, and so die.
Women love always: when earth slips from them, they take refuge in heaven.
Hugs can do great amounts of good - especially for children.
I have learned to become not an M.D. but a 'C.D.' for the wounded people I meet. Yes, a 'Chosen Dad' who may not like their behavior but loves and reparents them and helps them to heal their lives and find self-worth and self-esteem and save their lives.
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