ENDLESS LOVE, ROMANCE , AND INTIMACY

Book excerpt: As a society we are embarrassed by love. We treat it as if it were an obscenity. We reluctantly admit to it. Even saying the word makes us stumble and blush ... Love is the most important thing in our lives, a passion for which we would fight or die, and yet we’re reluctant to linger over its names. Without a supple vocabulary, we can’t even talk or think about it directly. As the title ENDLESS LOVE, ROMANCE, AND intimacy : indicates, we want to live in a culture where love can flourish. We yearn to end the lovelessness that is so pervasive in our society. This book tells us how to return to love. ENDLESS LOVE, ROMANCE, AND intimacy : provides radical new ways to think about the art of loving, offering a hopeful, joyous vision of love's transformative power. it lets us know what we must do to love again. Gathering love’s wisdom, it lets us know what we must do to be touched by love’s grace. THERE ARE NOT many public discussions of love in our culture right now. At best, popular culture is the one domain in which our longing for love is talked about. Movies, music, magazines, and books are the place where we turn to hear our yearnings for love expressed. Yet the talk is not the life-affirming discourse of the sixties and seventies, which urged us to believe “All you need is love.” Nowadays the most popular messages are those that declare the meaningless of love, its irrelevance. A glaring ex ample of this cultural shift was the tremendous popularity of Tina Turner’s song with the title boldly declaring, “What’s Love Got to Do with it.” I was saddened and appalled when I interviewed a well-known female rapper at least twenty years my junior who, when asked about love, responded with biting sarcasm, “Love, what’s that— have never had any love in my life.” Youth culture today is cynical about love. And that cynicism has come from their pervasive feeling that love can- not be found. Expressing this concern in When All You've ever Wanted isn’t Enough, Harold Kushner writes: “lam afraid that we may be raising a generation of young people who will grow up afraid to love, afraid to give them- selves completely to another person, because they will have seen how much it hurts to take the risk of loving and have it not work out. | am afraid that they will grow up looking for intimacy without risk, for pleasure without significant emotional investment. They will be so fearful of the pain of disappointment that they will forgo the possibilities of love and joy.” Young people are cynical about love. Ultimately, cynicism is the great mask of the disappointed and betrayed heart. When I travel around the nation giving lectures about ending racism and sexism, audiences, especially young listeners, become agitated when I speak about the place of love in any movement for social justice.