Love as a Practice

On the love we learned and the love we choose

We use the word love constantly and rarely truly think about what it means. We fall in love, fall out of love, love our children, our friends, our work, even our morning coffee. The word carries so much and we ask so little of it. What do we actually mean when we say we love someone? And what does it ask of us in return?

The writer and activist bell hooks spent much of her life thinking about this. She argued that love is not a feeling. It is a practice, a combination of care, commitment, honesty, respect, trust and responsibility, sustained over time and sometimes in the face of real difficulty. This is a radical concept for many of us. We grow up absorbing the idea that love is something that happens to us, like the weather. hooks insists it is something we do, like tending a garden. And like gardening, it requires patience and attention as well as a willingness to get your hands dirty.

In my work as a therapist, I see the consequences of this confusion. Clients arrive with experiences they were told were love, relationships marked by control, withdrawal, criticism or silence, leaving them bewildered about why love felt so painful. Others come with the sense that they are loved in theory but not in practice, that the words are there but the feeling is missing. And some come having learned early on, that their own needs were too much or simply invisible and have built a life around that belief.

And I truly believe these are creative, intelligent responses. If you grew up in a family where expressing your feelings led to conflict or dismissal, learning to keep quiet was a creative way of surviving. If you learned that love was conditional on your performance, then becoming an over achiever or a people-pleaser made perfect sense. These are not pathologies, rather they are the best strategies to deal with difficult situations with available resources to you.

The difficulty comes when we carry those patterns long after they serve us. The child who learned to be quiet becomes the partner who cannot say what they need. The child who performed for love becomes the adult who cannot rest or constantly puts other’s needs first. And often, these patterns are so familiar that we don't recognise them as patterns at all, they just feel like who we are.

This is where awareness becomes so important. Not intellectual understanding but a slower, more embodied kind of noticing. What happens in my body when I try to say something vulnerable? What do I feel when someone offers me care without conditions? Where do I tense, soften, withdraw, reach out? When we begin to pay attention at this level, something shifts. Not because we force ourselves to change, but because seeing clearly what we do and why we do it creates the possibility of choosing differently.

Love also lives in the quality of our attention. The philosopher Martin Buber wrote about the difference between treating another person as an object, someone to be managed or predicted and meeting them as a whole being, with their own depth and mystery. He described the practices of care, inclusion and openness to dialogue as expressions of what he called ‘dwelling in love.’ The Gestalt therapist Lynne Jacobs has taken up this idea , arguing that these three practices are not separate virtues but facets of the same orientation, a commitment to an ever-widening attention to the people and contexts around us. When we narrow our attention and stop being curious about another person, when we reduce them to a problem or a projection of our own needs then we move away from love. When we widen it and we make the effort to see someone as they actually are, in all their complexity and contradictoriness, we move back toward it. Love, then is not a feeling that arrives but a quality of presence we cultivate.

hooks understood this. She saw love not as a private emotion between two people but as a way of being in the world, a commitment to honesty, to care and to showing up even when it is uncomfortable. She also understood that many of us were never taught how to do this. We absorbed messages about love that were confused, contradictory, or simply wrong, and we did the best we could with them.

And there is hope, we can examine what we were given, honour the parts that served us, and leave behind the parts that no longer work. We can practice saying what we feel and hearing what others feel without becoming defensive. We can bring more awareness, more honesty and more care into the relationships that really matter to us. So perhaps we could start to think of love as a skill and like any skill, something we can get better at the more we practice.

for RB

references
Martin Buber, I and Thou, translated by Ronald Gregor Smith (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1937).
bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions (New York: William Morrow, 2000).
Lynne Jacobs, "Ethics of Context and Field: The Practices of Care, Inclusion and Openness to Dialogue," British Gestalt Journal, 2003, Vol. 12, No. 2, pp. 88-96.