Why Are We so Afraid to Love and to Lose?
As we drown into the capitalistic urges, we resent for the lives we don´t live. Can literature help us understanding our feelings and needs?
In a world where everything is political, by the plate of food we eat, the tv program we watch, the street we walk by and the ideas we have, it is indispensable to be constantly searching for our truth. We have been taught how to survive in a capitalist society, but not how to live in one. When all our goals are directed toward earning money, we forget who we are. To love, to question, to create and to dream is to revoke our human rights.
“Living consciously means we think critically about ourselves and the world we live in. We dare to ask ourselves the basic questions who, what, where and why. Answering these questions usually provides us with a level of awareness that enlightens.” (Bell Hooks, All ABout Love, page 54)
We often perceive love as the romanticized version of it. This version is rooted in our culture and is always reinforced by media content. It is represented by a feeling, a passion that burns and hurts. In movies, it´s always a heterosexual couple that has some type of connection and then, magically, they´re in love. The idea that loves only exists in romantic or sexual relationships prevents us from seeing it in our daily lives, among family and friends and inside of ourselves. If we cannot recognize affection, we cannot potentialize it into the best that it can be.
For industry and the media, loneliness is rentable. People are more concerned about consuming; they try to heal themselves with acquisition and possession because it´s easier to satisfy a material desire than an emotional need. But consumption could never fill a void that is human and spiritual.
“Fixating on wants and needs, which consumerism encourages us to do, promotes a psychological state of endless craving.” (Bell Hooks, All ABout Love, page 111)
While reading “All About Love: New Visions” written by Bell Hooks, an American author, social activist and celebrated academic, we start to see and understand love as behaviours, not only emotions. This way, we can learn how to maximize our relationships. Training our interpersonal communication is especially important in this process, as we learn to listen and dialogue.
In thirteen chapters, this amazing writer approaches many important concerns and reflections in a light and cohesive way, making the reading easier and more fluid.
“When we see love as a combination of trust, commitment, care, respect, knowledge, and responsibility, we can work on developing these qualities or, if they are already a part of who we are, we can learn to extend them to ourselves.” (Hooks, page 54)
To talk about the fear of loving, nothing best to represent it than the 5th chapter of “Women Who Run with Wolves”, written by Clarissa Pinkola Éstes, a storyteller, writer, and Jungian psychologist. In this chapter, we are introduced to “The Skeleton Woman: Healing Through Relating”.
This Inuit legend tells of an unlikely love story between a young fisherman and a ghoul of the sea. A beautiful, hand drawn animation, directed by Edith Pieperhoff.
To understand how this tale connects itself with our fear to love, we must recognize the Life/Death/Life nature: “a cycle of animation, development, decline, and death that is always followed by re-animation.” Our inability to deal with the skeleton woman archetype is what causes the end of many relations. Love is not something you obtain; it is something you create. Dealing with the ugly, raw, and difficult parts is essential so passion can bloom. With that said, love and abuse do not coexist.
“In all love relationships Death must have her share. […] What dies? Illusion dies, expectations die, greed for having it all, for wanting to have all be beautiful only, all this dies.” (Estés, page 137)
Why are we so afraid to commit? Because we cannot deal with what might end, what might die. We are so preoccupied with dealing with grief that we don´t realize that is a natural part of our lives. The forces of Life/Death/Life are not villains, and by understanding the immense value they have in every cycle, we are grateful for them. Our misbelief and distrust cannot stop us from experiencing true emotions.
“What is the not-beautiful? Our own secret hunger to be loved is the not-beautiful. Our disuse and misuse of love is the not-beautiful. Our dereliction in loyalty and devotion is unlovely, our sense of soul-separateness is homely, our psychological warts, inadequacies, misunderstandings, and infantile fantasies are the not-beautiful. Additionally, the Life/Death/Life nature, which births, destroys, incubates, and births again, is considered by our cultures the not-beautiful.” (Éstes, page 172)
Our necessity of accepting vulnerability as a blessing and not a failure is urgent. Reading literature, specially written by woman, is a way of working our patience, our values, our needs. When we learn how to hear our own voice, it´s revolutionary what it can be done.
“Anyone who does not know love is still in death”
