all about love
Now that I’m 24, I’ve really begun to understand what love is. Not love as a feeling, but love as a choice and action. I used to believe what mattered most was feeling in love with someone. I’ve come to realize feeling ‘in love’ is not enough.
This has caused me to reflect on parents. For many of us, we’ve had our parents provide for us and maybe show us love through their actions, but have lacked the feeling of being loved by our parents, which causes us to seek this feeling externally. This is why many people end up in toxic and destructive relationships because it fulfills that need to feel the feeling of love. We stay in these relationships because this person makes us feel such highs and ignore how low the lows are.
“To truly love we must learn to mix various ingredients - care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust, as well as honest and open communication.” - bell hooks, all about love
bell hooks describes the ingredients of love as including care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, trust, and honest and open communication. I believe our parents did love us but only knew how to show it through two facets — care and commitment.
They put a roof over our heads, made sure we were healthy, clothed us, made sure we excelled in school, and more. I understand many of us view this as the bare minimum, but in our parents’ eyes, they may have been superseding what they had received from their own parents. But in doing this, they neglected the other necessary components — affection, recognition, respect, trust, and honest and open communication.
It makes me think of this TikTok I saw recently from a black therapist talking about how so many of us struggle to believe we’re worth true love, friendships, dream jobs, etc., and how it is linked to whether your parents loved you and believed in you. Our parents may have loved us but many missed the critical components of love, instilling self-worth, affirming us, making us feel seen and validated, and overall speaking life into us outside of career and academic aspirations. Again, without this so many of us have accepted less than we deserve in relationships, friendships, careers, etc., because we’ve never experienced all of the ingredients of love we need and are having to learn how to give and receive that on our own in our adulthood.
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It’s difficult to think about where and who we would be if our parents instilled these ingredients of love into us. But we can’t hyperfocus on that and stop this from believing we deserve more. We deserve the dream relationship, the dream friends, the dream job, the dream apartment, and the dream life. We can’t let the lack we have felt in our childhood stop us from becoming the people we are meant to be.
Now it’s up to us to be the change to ensure that we are loving each other with all ingredients. And this is not specific to just romantic relationships but this includes our friendships, our siblings, our parents, and potential future children. This way we can break the cycle. We must love ourselves and others fully to be loved fully in return.
