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Love as an Active Choice
(2018)
Thanks to Nestor Haddaway, one cannot simply ask, >What is love?< without instinctually following it with the lyrics >Baby don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me, no more<, and I couldn’t bring myself to do it in this essay. However, now that I have posed the question – and gotten that song stuck in my head I’d like to ask the question in a better way: How does one love? The root of society’s widespread confusion on love is that it is not asking the right question. By asking how to love, one can then move on to ask more specific questions, particularly, how to maintain one’s individuality in love. I argue, with the help of Erich Fromm’s book >The Art of Loving< and Bell Hooks’ book >All About Love< that this image of a moving statue, >Man and Woman<, by Tamara Kvesitadze (Fig. 1) represents the answer to this question with its oscillation between the individuality and the connectedness needed for mature love. Contrary to the common conceptions that love is simple and out of one’s control, love is an active balance – a constant motion – between being together and yet separate.