This past year, my life has been full of heartbreak and grief. I have grieved the loss of love, specifically the lack of love from the men in my life.
After experiencing heartache that was caused by men I love, I began to ask myself if I had ever experienced love in its purest form. And I slowly but surely came to the conclusion that I have never been loved… at least not by a man.
To clarify, I am not talking solely about romantic love. I am talking about all forms of love from all men in my life; whether it’s platonic love, sibling love, or family love; whether it’s my guy friends, guy cousins, or my brother. However, ultimately, I am referring to my father. I have never been loved– not by a man, especially not by my father.
Let me explain.
For the entirety of my life, I have witnessed a dysfunctional relationship between my father and my mother. There have been ups and downs, unfaithfulness, various separations, and threats of divorce, but the story has yet to end in divorce. As I started to experience romantic love as an adult, I began to ask myself questions about what true love should look like. Clearly, the answer did not lie within my parents’ relationship.
So I searched and reflected on anything I could find– social media, TV shows, movies, podcasts, and even books. My quest to discover what love truly meant had ignited. Love became a blurry and lingering presence in my life.
I began to notice it everywhere, especially in pop culture. I’ve been seeing it recently with the increase in popularity of The Bachelor and Love is Blind. At work, I would have conversations with my coworkers about the latest episodes. This allowed us to have conversations about love and relationships. It was meaningful in my journey to understand love. Although we would get strange looks, it meant something to have consistent and healthy conversations about love.
And maybe it’s just my for you page, but all I see are discourses about love on TikTok. People make videos about healthy relationships, codependency, or even attachment styles. Others simply post videos of themselves crying because of a breakup and you realize that so many other people are experiencing the loss or lack of love. I’d also like to add that there is an entire side of TikTok that shows beautiful, heartfelt poems about love and I wish we allowed space for more of that.
But very recently, I saw a TikTok video that struck me with a daggering realization. It was a TikTok trend where people talk about something they are afraid of posting on social media. A young Latina woman, like me, talked about her desire to end the cycle of Latina Women remaining in abusive and broken relationships and marriages. Her video had thousands of likes and comments.
And it struck me. This isn’t just my family, my parents’ relationship, or just my mother, this is the reality for a lot of women in my culture.
My desire to understand love became a desire to understand if love and abuse can coexist. Is there such a thing as dysfunctional, imperfect love and why is it ever-present in my culture? I yearned for answers and I desperately needed to understand something that perhaps could not be understood or revealed.
This is the premise of bell hooks’, All About Love: New Visions. She argues, indeed, that, “love and abuse cannot coexist.” In fact, she defines love in the words of M. Scott Peck, “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” In defining love in this manner, she claims that true love will never be “hurtful” or “abusive.”
Hooks’ description of love allowed me to reflect on the possibility that my father may have never loved my mother because to love someone means to care for them and not consistently hurt them. I thought about whether or not this made my father a bad person or if perhaps he simply did not know how to love someone. And finally, I asked myself if my father had ever loved me.
Hooks writes, “Like many adults who were verbally and/or physically abused as children, I spent a lot of my life trying to deny the bad things that had happened, trying to cling only to the memory good and delicious moments in which I had known care.”
My relationship with my father has always been dysfunctional. I had always believed that my father loved me despite experiencing his wounding offenses. Only, it was not love that I experienced. Rather, I experienced moments of care and affection– an extension of love but not love itself, as hooks further describes, “a lack of sustained love does not mean the absence of care, affection, or pleasure”
The final verdict is that I still love my father. For others who’ve faced similar experiences, this isn’t always the case. There isn’t a right or wrong way to react to these experiences. In the case of my mother, she remained with my father after years of mental abuse and betrayal. Was it because she loved him? If loving someone means extending yourself to that person for their own growth, at what point do we draw the line? Where does the limit stand? When do you walk away?
Further, can we hurt those we love? And if we hurt someone does that mean we never really loved them? Is love unconditional? Does love mean sacrifice? It is with these thoughts that I write this reflection of my own experiences; of the love that exists within me but also all around me. This is a response to my lingering questions about love.
For a lot of the women in my life, love is unconditional. For them, you remain loyal to someone as an act of love– not only for your partner but for your family. A lot of them, like my mother, look to the bible to learn about love.
In an attempt to understand love from this point of view, I’d like to address how love is described in the bible. For starters, the ultimate act of love came from God himself, “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” In other words, love is sacrifice; to love means to give. In this context, it makes sense why a lot of women in my culture remain loyal to their husbands even after hurt and abuse exist. They forgive and sacrifice until they have nothing left to give.
Additionally, the bible explains love and marriage as a sacred promise to God. Unfortunately, this idea is taken quite literally: what God brings together, no one can separate– not even abuse. Perhaps, it is a mixture of religious definitions and regulations that influence women in my culture to remain in dysfunctional relationships. The irony, I believe, is that their forgiveness, sacrifice, and loyalty all come from a place of love; a love defined by their own terms. In this case, a love that permits abuse.
I’d like to turn to another expression or representation of love. Specifically, a portrayal of parental love. Sean Baker’s, The Florida Project (2017), depicts a young mother, Halley, protecting her daughter Moonee as the ultimate act of love. Despite their financial struggles and the harsh realities of their world, Halley does everything in her power to care for her daughter. Throughout the film, it is evident how much Halley loves Moonee. However, in the end, Moonee gets taken away from her mother after it’s revealed that Halley was working as a sex worker while she kept Moonee in the bathroom.
This story portrays the powerful love of a mother and the sweet, tender, and complex love that exists in parental love; for Halley to have loved Moonee so much, but in the end to commit a heinous act against her daughter; for love and abuse to coexist. The question lingers, is this an act of love? Where do we draw the line?
In the end, everyone has their own definition and influences of love. For some, love and abuse can coexist; to love is to forgive. For others, love is unconditional. Maybe, love is powerful and has no limits not even to the extent of putting your loved ones in danger. It is clear that love is reflected, proclaimed, and defined in distinct ways.
But I reclaim hooks’ heartfelt statement, “Love and abuse cannot coexist.” And I welcome you to reflect on this statement. In a world where love is multilingual and universally defined, I welcome you to explore the possibility that love is good.
Love is forgiving, as I have seen within my culture. Love is sacrifice, just as the bible describes it. And love is powerful and limitless, as portrayed in The Florida Project.
But most of all, love is an act that brings good to the world. It is an action that heals and nurtures. It allows us to thrive and grow in the face of pain. When we truly understand that love is good, it allows us to recognize when to walk away and where to draw the line between love and abuse; torment and delight.
Love exists and breathes within us. Love is waking up every day and choosing yourself. I have known love because I exist; because I welcome love and know that it is good.
This is something no one can ever take away from us. This is the gift of love. Indeed, love is all around us, so explore it and learn from it! Watch movies about love! Read books about love! Listen to music about love! Engage in conversations about love! Ask questions about love!
What does love mean to you? How do you show love? How do you receive love?
This is the ultimate act of love; to be open and understand that love is good.
Part 2:
The genre that I chose for this assignment was an op-ed. For a long time, I had been thinking a lot about love. It was constantly on my mind. As I briefly mentioned above, it was also all over my social media. Additionally, the idea came to mind while The Bachelor and Love is Blind were airing and people would constantly talk about it.
The more I thought about it and the more I saw other people discuss it around me, the more my yearning grew. I decided to pick up bell hooks’, All About Love. The specific reason was that I wanted to understand love in a more academic and might I even say, “serious” manner. As I read her book, hooks noted that a lot of people are afraid to talk about love or even take it seriously as a topic of academia. When you see love mentioned in society, it’s usually through pop culture and it is never taken seriously. Additionally, it is mostly always labeled as a topic for women, not men. When the opportunity came to write about any topic and in any genre, I took my chance to write about my perspective on love. However, I didn’t necessarily think that an academic paper or research paper would serve my purpose well. My purpose was to encourage people to have honest conversations about love and not feel like it’s silly to do so. My purpose was to highlight hooks' arguments and raise my own opinions about them based on my experiences and then invite other people to further engage in their own reflections with themselves and/or others. That is why I thought that an op-ed was the perfect way to do so. It is not too academic that people shy away from it and it is not too casual that I am discredited as an author. I also wanted to have the liberty to reflect and share my opinions. At the end of the day, that is what my arguments are…opinions. Thus, I thought an op-ed fit just right in this context.
I was inspired by Tressie McMillan Cottom’s article, “The Enduring, Invisible Power of Blond.” In her article, she provides the context of the situation that inspired her to write the op-ed in the first place. The context is relevant to the topic itself and it further supports her arguments and perspective. It also gives the reader a clearer understanding of her point of view, which in my opinion makes her arguments stronger.
In my case, I believe the context was indeed important to note. The topic of love stemmed from my recent experiences that shaped a lot of the questions and arguments that I proposed. After providing context and a deeply vulnerable revelation, I further explored the topic of love and abuse in different contexts that were outside my own. My hope was that it wouldn’t necessarily feel like a memoir, because that was not my intention. Instead, I wanted to reflect on love as seen in different mediums. I hope that everything still feels connected and related to each other.
I think for the most part, op-eds have a general audience and are far more widely read. However, certain topics are more niche than others, which limits that range of audience. I think first, I was addressing a diverse audience, both men, women, and non-binary folks– mostly everyone because love is universal and I don’t think it is necessarily a niche topic. More specifically, I was directly addressing the Latine community. I was addressing my community.
Additionally, I was addressing people who believe that love is an unserious, soft, and feminine topic. I wanted to counter those points of view through my reflection. However, it is likely that people who believe these things would never read an op-ed about love to begin with. I think that is why stylistically, I wanted to refrain from “poetic” language, although I’m not sure if I did a great job of that. I think also, stylistically, I wanted to make a statement at the beginning. I wanted to write something that would draw readers into this topic that may be of little importance to a lot of people. Again, because love is rarely talked about! Perhaps, the hook was a little dramatic and sappy, but it felt right in this context.
By providing other references like the bible or other films, I was able to strengthen my point of view and also communicate to the reader efficiently. I believe I was trying to find a balance between sappy and formal/academic. I hope that I was able to reach a wider, more unusual audience.