love
In the essay “Love and Need,” Thomas Merton contends: “The expression to ‘fall in love’ reflects a peculiar attitude toward love and life itself—a mixture of fear, awe, fascination, and confusion. It implies suspicion, doubt, hesitation in the presence of something unavoidable, yet not fully reliable.” If you do not know what you feel, then it is
... See morebell hooks • All About Love: New Visions (Love Song to the Nation Book 1)
For romantic relationships, continued curiosity is key—the question is, where do you find people you’re curious about
We need to highlight the role women play in perpetuating and sustaining patriarchal culture so that we will recognize patriarchy as a system women and men support equally, even if men receive more rewards from that system.
bell hooks • The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love
The thing no one tells you about marriage is this: in order to form deep bonds of intimacy in heterosexual relationships, in order to truly love and be truly loved- both partners must do the very thing they’ve been taught their entire lives NOT to do. They must learn to disobey the script they were handed at birth called “how to be a man” and “how... See more
Have a foundation of friendship, avoid the four horsemen (contempt, criticism, defensiveness and stonewalling), make sure positive interactions outweigh negative ones 5:1, and be attuned to each other’s bids for attention.
The work of men is to lose the self, the work of women is to build the self precisely because we are conditioned to do the opposite. If marriage books recognized this pre-requisite work on the self, they would be WAY more effective in teaching us how to come together.