Love as an ambitious, immaterial idea is difficult to conceptualize, and it can be hard to understand if you are seeing the fruitful benefits of practicing love. From humans’ pursuits to understand love in any capacity we can, I’ve compiled a collective of various admirable female literaries through their writings of love. Love comes in many forms — to the self, communally, platonic, romantic, familial, and so on. We can expand our love for ourselves and others by allowing various fluid self-expressions, loving through action, and finding love through community.
What love is not: exclusion
In the practice of self-love comes the acceptance of practicing self-expression. ‘Being a woman’ is not constricted to the practice of femininity. The rising conceptualization of self-care for women as ‘embracing femininity’ that I grew up consuming on the internet can be harmful. Rhetoric equating femininity with submission and characterizing femininity as inherent to practicing womanhood leaves no room for fluidity and self-expression beyond normative feminine standards. Additionally, when self-care is described as solely commodity-based, such as through the purchasing of face masks and clothing, the essential non-material practices of love are erased. These practices of love for oneself and the existence of others may include: undoing harmful self-sabotaging practices, balancing self-discipline and relaxation, language, promise-keeping, time, touch, patience, and consistency. Furthermore, allowing for the practice of love means fighting for access to bodily autonomy, advocating for economic mobility through expansion of the welfare state, and building and maintaining community networks.
What love needs: inclusivity of various expressions of love
Cathy J Cohen’s Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?
All individuals that engage in “‘nonnormative’ procreation patterns and family structures,” both heterosexual and queer, must be able to express familial and romantic love in ways beyond the nuclear family structure. It is essential to undo the associations between different expressions of sexuality and love (i.e. single-mothering, polyamory, etc.) as some being more normal and others deviant. We must be able to practice love in different ways.
What can be love’s redefinition: action
bell hooks’ book All About Love
Love toward the self means providing the acceptance and affirmation you wish to receive from other individuals. Love can be cultivated from a “commitment to truth telling.” Love is not simply a feeling, but an action, and the framing of love as an action grants the ability to hold accountability and responsibility when practicing love. Love consists of many “ingredients—care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust, as well as honest and open communication.”
How love can be practiced further: community
In adrienne maree brown’s article Love as Political Resistance: Lessons from Audre Lorde and Octavia Butler, brown emphasizes the practice of self love that comes from the building of communities. brown argues that self love comes from love through communal exchanges in which one practices honesty and healing. As well, brown argues that with the practice of love in all relationships, one should not prioritize romantic relationships as though they sit at the top of a hierarchy. By breaking away from a hierarchical framing, a final imperative takeaway is the articulation of love as not limited.
Picturing love through poetry
As romantic love is of importance to some, following are a few of my favorites poems written in Orion Carloto’s Film for Her:
I crave a bond so mad, devoted to consumption, aching delicately with joy, engulfed in a cocoon of miracles where we lie together at the edge of desire. —Naked Orchids
I’ve seen my eyes shut and relived visions of you through many passing moons, yet, [with] the way my name dances out of your mouth…my dreams failed to prepare me for someone like you. —Deja Vu
…knows that the grave time spent in her company is only temporary…The woman who came before me taught you brutal descent, but I will teach you how to bide. Endow my offered affection with great patience and tender kisses, for our entanglement tastes like fresh raspberries plucked from honey-coated fingertips. —Santal 33
As we redefine the expressions of love within familiar relationships and in the building of the new, we can hope to reframe our practices of love to be conscious, inclusive, and fluid to ourselves and others.