Good morning good afternoon, good evening. Welcome to this channel. My name is Tyler Simone, and you are watching reading in black.

First of all, welcome I’m happy you’re here. If you’re new to my channel, hello, nice to meet you.

 If you’re not new and you’ve been here for a while, I missed you. Thank you for coming back. today’s video is all about love.

 But before I get into it, I need to tell you the truth. I got a new book delivery the other day, and one of the books in the package was a book that I’ve been wanting for a while, and I told myself Tyler just wait. 

It didn’t work out, a long story short, and I started reading all about love by bell hooks.

 And I’m sorry about it, but I’m not really sorry about it. I mean, it’s bell hooks.

 She is an icon. She is very well known for her writings about the intersectionality of race and in class and gender.

 She writes about a bunch of different things art sexuality feminism. She’s a very proud feminist.

 And not only is she a writer, but she’s also a culture critic, and her critiques of the culture definitely make their way into her writings which is what I am loving the most so far.

 I ordered this book thinking that I would start it at some other point; I opened the book.

 I read the introduction, and I fell in love.

 It is literally a novel all about love. Where do I even begin

? I learned that she has a strong love interest, and she says that that love interest didn’t necessarily come from the love that she received, but it came from the love that she was not receiving.

 And it came out of the absence of love which I think is valid for many of us. We want what we don’t have, and because love is kind of shoved down our throats all of our lives wanting love and what does love mean.

 I think there’s this natural curiousness for love, and we’re not aware of what love is, or that love is even a thing until you don’t have it.

 And you feel that pain from whatever happened. she says that I cannot remember when that feeling of being loved left me; I just know that one day I was no longer precious to those who had initially loved me.

 Well turned away, she talks about being trapped in the past and being trapped in the past as far as constantly looking for something that you lost in the past.

 In this case, we’re talking about love. You know we all go through things. You get hurt by people, and you’re forever scarred by whatever that is. It’s a wound and for some of us.

 We are not ever open to love in the same ways. We are more guarded, and we are more cautious because nobody likes being heard, and that’s kind of just the effect of it.

 But she’s saying that she was trapped in the past for a long time because she wasn’t able to mourn the love.

 That was instead of mourning the love that was and moving on and opening her heart again to new love, she was trapped in the past. 

And when you’re trapped in the past, and you’re holding on to something, or you’re trying to find that love that you had.

 You can’t be open to love in the present. That’s easier said than done, which is why I think many people go on in life and because they are healed.

 They end up hurting other people, and it’s just this whole terrible cycle of lovelessness.

 She talks about lovelessness. I’ve never heard the word. I’ve never seen it before. But lovelessness is just the absence of love, and she says that our society is headed toward complete lovelessness.

 We’ve been on this journey for a while now, sadly. But the way that our culture is at the moment and the way it has been for a while is that we don’t talk about love.

 We know that it exists. We know that there’s this quest for love and people want to love, and we need love.

 But nobody really talks about what they need to feel loved.

 So, according to this book, bell hooks went through this separation from a partner that she was with for over a decade, about 15 years.

 And she talks about how the event itself didn’t hurt as much as the new terror that she had when it comes to love and having hope that love even exists.

 So she was with this person for about 15 years. So I’m sure there’s a bunch of sadness about not having this person around anymore and missing that interaction that you had.

But what she’s saying is that she had less hope in the idea that love even existed at all.

 Let me know what you guys think about this.

 But when we get into relationships with people and we get all wrapped up in it.

 And it ends up not being what you think it is. or the connection is just lost. You leave that relationship, of course, knowing you’re going to miss the person.

 And that is sad in itself, so that may be part of why you’re so emotional about it.

 But also there’s this underlying feeling that you thought you knew what love was and you thought that you were experiencing it, but it turned out to be so bad that now you’re thinking, well, that couldn’t have been love because people don’t do that to people that they love.

 Yeah, I mean, the loss of hope for love is something that many people deal with.

 I think youth culture today is cynical about love. I looked at the word cynical it means skeptical. Just so you know, and that cynicism has come from their pervasive feeling that love cannot be found, and she quoted another writer named Harold Kushner.

 And he says, I’m afraid that we may be raising a generation of young people who will grow up afraid to love, afraid to give themselves entirely to another person.

 Because they will have seen how much it hurts to take the risk of loving and have it not work. 

Out I’m afraid they will grow up looking for intimacy without risk, for pleasure without significant emotional investment.

 So if you think about it, you can’t have true intimacy without emotional investment.

 It’s just not possible to be intimate with someone; you have to be emotionally available.

 Emotionally open. Emotionally invested. And so that may be part of the confusion where people think that what they’re doing will get them a particular result.

 But they’re not really doing enough. You have to open yourself up to receive love to get it back. And I don’t know where I was going with that point, but in my opinion, so many people don’t know what love is.

 Because they’ve never seen it and you get all these different ideas of what love is from other people.

 And there’s no one way to show love because not everybody wants to be loved in the same way.

 Not everybody receives love in the same exact way. Still, that basic foundation of love that we should all be learning when we’re little so that we grow up to know love is just not how classes exist for every dimension of sexuality, even masturbation, yet schools for love do not exist. 

What an amazing world it would be if there were love classes. Classes on the love you could take to find out how to love yourself and love other people. 

She goes on to say that everyone assumes that we will know how to love instinctively. Everyone believes that because you’re a human being. 

Okay, maybe not everyone people believe that because you’re a human being.

 You have that in you you know how to love. It should just be something you know. Something you’re born with. and that’s not true despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

 We still accept that the family is the primary school for love. So not only do we believe that we are born with this instinct to love, and we all should know how to do it. But we also believe that our family is supposed to teach us how to love.

 And I agree our family should be teaching us how to love how to treat other people.

 How to show love. How to love ourselves right. But she says those who do not learn how to love among family are expected to experience love in romantic relationships.

 And if you think about it, it makes no sense to assume that that’s how the world is gonna work.

 If someone is born into a family, who doesn’t show them, love. Who doesn’t teach them about the meaning of love? And how they can love themselves when they grow up, and they get into these relationships.

 They have no idea what love is, so you are now in a relationship with another human being to learn how to love the person. The worst possible situations happen when two people in a relationship don’t know what love is.

 They don’t know what the other person’s love language is and how they receive love.

 It’s just a whole. It’s a whole mess. We spend a lifetime undoing the damage caused by cruelty, neglect, and all manner of lovelessness experienced in our families of origin and in relationships where we simply did not know what to do.

 We spend our whole entire lives healing from people and situations where love did not exist.

 But if we knew what love was from the beginning, we have ended up in these situations.

 She also spoke about how men are typically the writers of most books on the love that we all know.

 And what was interesting about it is that she said apparently women would love to hear the perspective of a man when it comes to love over a woman’s perspective.

 We don’t really hear how men genuinely feel about love and their genuine emotions.

 And so, I think that perspective is a little bit more interesting, but she also said that men are known to be emotionless sometimes.

 They don’t know how to express emotion. They are taught not to, and so how much sense does it make that the authors of many of these books are men talking about love when men are creatures who do not know emotion the way women do.

 That made so much sense to me, and I just had an epiphany after that moment.

 Another thing that she mentioned that really stuck out to me is that the world we live in is typically silent about love.

 In my opinion, the world is silent about love, but it’s loud about love as well. 

It’s loud about love in a way where it’s romanticized. Everybody wants it.

 We know that we need it, and there’s like this constant quest for love. 

But as far as having conversations about what love actually is and how to show that, that doesn’t exist too often.

 In everyday life, males and females alike are relatively silent about love.

 Our silence shields us from uncertainty so that fear of maybe loving someone and then getting heartbroken.

 We want to know love. We are simply afraid the desire to know too much about love will lead us closer and closer to the abyss of lovelessness.

 This is basically well the way that I took it. It’s basically referring to the fear that we develop after getting heartbroken.

 It’s that fear of actually putting yourself out there again wholeheartedly. And it is a risk that risk in love is terrifying. And because it’s scary, I think that most people subconsciously run away from it in different ways.

 Sometimes they sabotage their own relationships. They do things that they know are not okay. Sometimes the relationship is going perfectly fine, and they just completely leave it.

 They don’t really have any explanation, but there is that fear. So people show it in different ways, and I think it’s just the general risk that people are afraid of.

 I 100% agree with bell hooks when she says that we need to talk about love more, and love is really needed to survive the world of our country of the nation of everything.

 And the absence of love is literally the explanation for why things get so crazy and the reasons why people are so angry and violent towards each other.

 It’s an absence of love. Lovelessness causes dysfunction and negativity, which leads to nothing good.

 I hope this discussion opens your mind a little bit more to love and what love is, and what love means to you.

 Please comment down below if you have anything you want to add about love, like this video, and subscribe before you go if you are not subscribed yet.