this blog was recently brought to my attention. i wrote this back in in April and its noteworthy to revisit as I glamour at the difference of my thought process from then to now.  check it out!

April 2011

I was in a very brief discussion earlier about love on twitter and I noticed something about my responses that conflicted with something I very much want to believe in.

A friend said he didn’t know how to address the concept of love and I agreed with him by stating it was ambiguous and that I would rather chase rainbows. The thought caught wind to others and further clarification was desired.

Crazy thing is, I’ve wrote about the concept of love several times, and each time my opinion varied based on personal experience, observations, and what I may have learned or read about from some scholarly article, blog, or religious text during that moment of my life. But my recent opinion of it was a little more pessimistic than the latter times.

This recent encounter with the topic, it seems that I completely disregarded anything optimistic and uplifting I ever felt about “love” and I found myself projecting on a platform of confusion and hurt based on recent events in my life.

The concept of love varies depending on which type we are talking about. There are many forms of love, yet my mind instantly associated love with the romantic form, eros. My response resonated with disdain. As I reflected on my subconscious reaction I realized it was an expression that I’ve observed frequently before through my peers and popular media projections of the black males disinterest in love that I never fully identified with until now.

I’ve had a few discussions within the past two hours that inspired me to type out my thoughts to better organize and understand this process.

So let me just clear this now, I sincerely believe in agape (unconditional/spiritual) and philos (brotherly/sisterly) love. And I suppose I believe in eros (physical/romantic) love, but f*ck b*tches and get money lol. J/K. I believe in romantic love, I’m just not in the emotional/mental/trusting/vulnerable space for it until I feel like I’ve overcome the residual effects of the past.

This really isn’t a blog about how I feel about love because I’m obviously a chameleon when it comes down to it nor am I an authority of the concept, but really, my curiosity to how does love fit in the socialization process of our immediate environments, society as a whole, and our experiences.

For most inner city black men/boys, there aren’t many examples of love beyond the love displayed within a family, and unfortunately for most, it is only experienced through a mother’s love and siblings due to the absences of many fathers. That leads to a lack of healthy, positive examples of love between a man and a woman which one should first be introduced to in the home.

Many rely on observations of love from what they see in from their peers/streets or are subconsciously exposed to through media. It appears to me, that the most common example of love is the love of money. For black people most  desires stem from poverty stricken circumstances but then, there are communities of other backgrounds that endure the same circumstances that don’t share the same passion/lust for money. Without delving too deep into what I believe the root causes of this process, I’ll just say integration (assimilation) may not have been the best outcome for black folk during the Civil Rights era.

It seems that the love of money/success trumps the spiritual purpose of love. As many are so willing to sell (out) themselves for the sake of money, will quickly rationalize or justify their immoral behaviors based on how much money they can make off it.

Next, the experiences of black men/boys and black women/girls with love. I think many will agree that there is a lot of unjust trauma and strain in the relationships of black people. We suffer from the systematic ramifications of slavery, Jim Crow, racially inequitable and discriminatory policies, self-hate, and the media. All working simultaneously and subsequently to suppress us from learning to love each other the way we need to unite and thrive. Examples and observations of healthy relationships are the foundations of love. There is no premise for us to be in favor of love because it is almost impossible to understand and apply to our lives if we have never observed or experienced it.

I don’t believe it’s the direct experiences of two people that cause the most strain. It is how each individual feels about themselves and a mutual understanding of where they both are when entering a relationship. Also, the lack of  OG presence and tutelage to bestow wisdom to situations to put in context and cultivate the younger generation through a healthy process to learn about the positive & negative experiences of love.

The socialization processes of men and women differs. It seems like women have been conditioned since birth to believe in the premise of romantic love and men haven’t. So is there any surprise in the disparity of women who openly desire love vs men?

These are some brief, quick type of thoughts that I had that I hope would open a honest dialogue in whatever medium to those that choose to read, share, rebut what they feel about love and the socialization process that guides its meaning as well as solutions or recommendations to evolve beyond said socialization processes.

 

I’ll leave yall with a popular passage co-authored by Too Short &  Snoop Dogg  about love:

“If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.  And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful;  it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.

So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.”