Love Is a Verb

Love as weather, love as work

Listen to how we speak and love sounds like something that befalls us. We are swept off our feet, struck, smitten — even the gentle word, falling, describes an accident of gravity. The grammar tells a story: love is a force that happens to you, and your only job is to be lucky enough to stand in its path.

The cultural feminist and critic bell hooks spent a whole book quarrelling with that grammar. In All About Love (2000) she argues that our confusion about love begins with treating it as a noun — a feeling we have or lack — when it is really a verb, a thing we do. Her north star is a definition she borrows from the psychiatrist M. Scott Peck: love is “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” Will. Intention. Action. Not the swoon, but the choice underneath it.

This is older than either of them. In 1956 the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm opened The Art of Loving by insisting that love is an art, like medicine or music — something one practises and gets better at, not a sensation one waits to receive. Most people, he wrote, treat the problem of love as a problem of being loved, or of finding the right object, when the real question is the capacity to love: an active “standing in,” he says, not a falling for.

The ingredients of the verb

If love is a practice, you should be able to say what the practice consists of — and hooks does. She describes the work of loving as a brew of distinct, learnable ingredients: care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, trust, and open, honest communication. Notice what’s missing from the list: intensity, jealousy, the dizziness of new-relationship energy. Those are weather. The ingredients are things you can choose to offer on an ordinary Tuesday.

Care is paying attention to someone’s wellbeing and acting on it. Recognition is the labour of actually seeing the other person, as they are rather than as you need them to be. Respect keeps you from treating them as an extension of yourself; trust lets you put weight on them; honest communication is the daily maintenance that keeps the rest from corroding. Fromm’s parallel list — care, responsibility, respect, knowledge — lands in almost the same place from a different door. Across three thinkers and four decades, love keeps turning out to be a set of verbs.

Cathexis is not love

Here is where Peck makes his sharpest cut, and it’s worth keeping. Much of what we call “falling in love” is what he names cathexis — the act of investing our emotional energy in a person until they feel like part of ourselves. Cathexis is real and lovely; it is the warm pull toward someone, the way they become important to us. But it is not, by itself, love. We can cathect a car, a house, a feeling. The pull arrives on its own; it asks nothing of us.

Love, in Peck’s telling, is what may or may not follow the pull: the deliberate, ongoing will to nurture another person’s growth, which often persists long after the swoon has cooled and sometimes has to be summoned when the warm feeling has gone missing entirely. “Genuine love,” he writes, “is volitional rather than emotional.” That distinction is freeing. It means the fading of butterflies is not the failing of love — they were never the same thing. The butterflies were cathexis; the love is the choosing that you do next.

Love and abuse cannot coexist

The most consequential thing that follows from “love is a verb” is also the hardest, and hooks states it without flinching: love and abuse cannot coexist. If love is the will to nurture someone’s growth, then anything that shrinks, frightens or harms them is — by definition, not by degree — its opposite. “Abuse and neglect negate love,” she writes; they are not a fierce or wounded form of caring. Care and affirmation are the foundation of love, and cruelty is simply lovelessness wearing love’s name.

This matters most for anyone taught the opposite — that jealousy proves devotion, that “they only do it because they love you,” that control is how love looks up close. hooks’ clarity is a gift to that person: you did not deserve harm, and naming it is a step toward love, not a betrayal of it. The healthy response to cruelty, she notes, is to put yourself out of harm’s way. (This is a guide, not therapy — if any of this is live for you, a service like the National Domestic Violence Hotline is there for exactly that conversation.) The aim isn’t to weaponise the word against a struggling partner, but to keep it honest. A relationship can hold conflict, repair and plenty of bad days and still be loving. What it cannot do is hold love and abuse at once.

When the feeling ebbs

So what do you do on the days the feeling simply isn’t there — the flat stretches, the season after a new baby, the long ordinary middle of a life together? The whole argument of this guide is its answer: you act lovingly anyway. Not by faking an emotion, but by doing the verbs — the cup of tea, the real question and the real listening, the repair after the snap, the turning-toward instead of away — trusting that feeling often follows action rather than only leading it.

This is not a counsel of grim endurance. Acting lovingly when the feeling ebbs is precisely what protects the feeling, because warmth is fed by what we do far more than the other way round. It is also what makes love durable enough to build on: a thing that depended entirely on a mood would be no foundation at all. “We choose to love,” hooks writes — and the choosing matters most on the days the mood gives us no help.

Feeling and doing are not the same switch

The hardest moment in any stretch of ordinary love is the one where the feeling says don’t and the values say do. Therapist Russ Harris, writing out of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, names the skill that bridges that gap: psychological flexibility — the capacity to hold a difficult internal state without either suppressing it or letting it commandeer your behaviour. In ACT with Love (2009), Harris argues that what derails couples is not the presence of hard feelings — frustration, hurt, loneliness, the creeping thought my partner doesn’t care — but the automatic assumption that those feelings must be believed and acted on immediately.

ACT calls the alternative defusion: noticing a thought as a thought rather than treating it as a transparent report on reality. “My partner doesn’t care” is a story your mind is producing — plausible, perhaps, even rooted in something real — but it is not the same as a fact about the world. Creating even a hair’s breadth of space between that thought and your next action gives the values room to steer. Harris frames the central question of loving as: What kind of partner do I want to be right now? — not: How do I feel right now? The two questions often have different answers, and the first is the one that governs a practice.

This is not a counsel of emotional suppression. You are not asked to pretend the hurt isn’t there; you are asked to hold it consciously rather than be piloted by it. A partner who is genuinely hurt and who chooses — from acknowledged hurt, with full awareness — to act caringly anyway is not performing. They are doing the most demanding version of the verb. Fromm and hooks name the same motion from the outside (love is willed action); ACT gives you the interior account of what that willing actually looks like in the body and the mind: it looks like feeling the pull to withdraw, noticing the pull, and turning toward anyway.

Five things to practise offering

If psychological flexibility tells you how to keep going when feelings resist, David Richo’s framework in How to Be an Adult in Relationships (2002) offers a concrete answer to what to keep going with. He names five things that love practises offering — he calls them the five A’s — and the list is designed to be both complete and actionable:

Attention is full presence: not the presence that half-listens while composing a reply, but the kind that is genuinely available to what the other person is expressing. Acceptance is receiving the whole person — not a curated version, not the person you need them to be, but the one who actually shows up, including the parts that disappoint you. Appreciation is active gratitude, the habit of noticing and naming what is good rather than letting it recede into the background of assumption. Affection is warmth that is expressed rather than merely felt — the touch, the word, the look that bridges inner regard and outer presence. Allowing is respecting the other person’s autonomy and separateness, resisting the undertow of control.

Richo’s deeper move is in the direction of the list. These are things you practise offering, not things you practise demanding. The shift from “am I being attended to, accepted, appreciated?” to “am I attending, accepting, appreciating?” is the shift from neediness to maturity — from love as a resource you extract to love as a capacity you develop. The fifth A carries this furthest. Allowing includes, at its limit, a paradox that genuine love permits the beloved not to love you back. Real allowing cannot be conditional on reciprocation; the moment it becomes so, it has turned into leverage. This is uncomfortable but clarifying: a love that is unconditional in the offering — that allows the other person their full freedom — has moved out of the transactional entirely. You are no longer practising love in order to receive it. You are practising it because it is who you are choosing to be.

The five A’s sit naturally alongside hooks’s ingredients: care, recognition, respect — they are different cuts across the same territory, and having multiple maps of the same ground only makes navigation easier. What Richo adds is the explicit move from the passive to the active voice. Love is not something you wait for the relationship to provide; it is something the relationship is made of, woven from the acts of two people each deciding, on any given day, to offer it.

Older than Fromm, wider than the couple

It is worth saying that hooks, Peck and Fromm did not discover this; they rejoined a very old conversation. The Greeks already split the feeling from the practice: eros was the swoon, but agape was the willed, unconditional love — the love you are told to extend even to an enemy, which only makes sense if love is an act of the will rather than a mood. Older still, the Buddhist traditions built love into a daily discipline: mettā, loving-kindness, is something you sit down and cultivate — wishing well first to yourself, then to those you love, then to strangers, then to the people you cannot stand — a love trained like a muscle. “Love is a verb” is not a twentieth-century insight. It is one of the things humanity has worked out again and again, in different scripts, for thousands of years.

And once love is a practice rather than a possession, it stops belonging to the romantic couple. hooks meant it that way: All About Love argues for a “love ethic” that reaches past the bedroom into friendship, community and justice — love as a way of treating everyone, not a private arrangement between two people. This is the quiet door out of amatonormativity. The verbs — care, recognition, respect, the turning-toward — work just as well between friends, in a chosen family, across a polycule, among comrades in a movement. It is no accident that the communities pushed off the standard couple-script, queer ones above all, have so often practised love at its widest: building kinship where the law gave them none. The feeling may need a beloved. The verb only needs someone to do it to.

A library, and a quiet vow

This guide sits near the end of the Field Guides on purpose, because in a way it is the whole library restated as a vow. Every other guide describes some shape love can take, some script it can follow, some wound it can carry — the forms in the Atlas, the attachment styles, the habits that corrode. None of those is the thing itself. The thing itself is small and unglamorous and entirely in your hands: the daily decision to extend yourself for another person’s flourishing, in whatever structure you’ve chosen to do it.

You don’t get to choose whether the feeling comes — that part really is weather. But the verb is always available. Whatever shape your love takes, it is finally made of what you actually do, again and again, on the easy days and the hard ones. That is the most hopeful thing about love being a verb: it means love is never something you have to wait to be struck by. It’s something you can start, right now, by doing it.

Threads to

If love is the verbs, then the guide on the habits that corrode it is its shadow — the anti-practices to catch early — and attachment, grown up explains why the verbs come easily to some of us and have to be learned by others. To see love freed from the demand that it look one particular way, read the tyranny of the couple. For the doing itself, keep an Appreciation Jar, make a regular date of the State-of-Us ritual, and draw each other’s Love Map so recognition stays current. Then walk Long Together for a relationship that intends to last — and meet the words for all of it in the Lexicon.

When love constitutes the self, not the other way around

Western romantic culture begins from a specific philosophical premise: two pre-formed, sovereign selves who independently exist and then elect to love each other. The relationship is something they enter and can exit; their selves precede and survive it. This premise is so embedded in how English-speakers talk about love that it rarely surfaces for examination. But it is not universal. Ubuntu philosophy — the African relational ethics systematised in scholarship by Thaddeus Metz (2007, Journal of Political Philosophy) and others — holds a different account: umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu, a person is a person through other persons. On this view, the self is not a pre-formed container that love later fills but a capacity that only comes into being through acts of solidarity, identification, and mutual recognition. There is no private self that love happens to, because personhood itself is constituted through the relationships that make it visible.

For loving as practice, this is a significant reframe. If selfhood is relationally constituted, then love is not the expression of a finished self but the practice through which a self continues to come into being. You cannot practice love from outside the relationship any more than you can practice conversation in isolation. The quality of the love you practice — its attentiveness, its generosity, its willingness to be changed — shapes not just the relationship but the person practicing it. This makes loving simultaneously more consequential and more available than the Western frame suggests. It is more consequential because it participates in making you who you are; more available because it does not require the arrival of the right feeling before the action is possible — the action is itself the substrate from which the feeling emerges.

The connection to non-normative and queer relationship structures is direct. Chosen-family networks, polyamorous constellations, and friendship-based care webs often embody Ubuntu logic without naming it: the self is multiply constituted through many threads of care rather than anchored in a single dyadic bond, and the practice of love is inherently communal and distributed rather than concentrated in one person. What can look from outside like complexity or instability is often a more honest rendering of the Ubuntu premise — that the self is not a unit but a meeting point, and that love practiced across many relations weaves a richer fabric of personhood than any single bond could carry alone.

The daily reps: love done badly, then better

Fromm called love an art and hooks called it a verb, but both can land as a noble abstraction — a thing to admire from the page. The couples therapist Lair Torrent, in The Practice of Love (2022), drags the idea down into the body and the calendar. He means practice in the most literal, unromantic sense: the way you practise a martial art, or sit a meditation, or run scales. It is something you commit to daily, and something you are — at first, and for a surprisingly long while — simply bad at. Love, on this account, is not a feeling that sustains itself once kindled; it is a set of repeated actions that, performed often enough, slowly rewire how two people meet.

Torrent’s distinctive move is to integrate family-systems therapy with mindfulness and Buddhist practice. The reason love takes so much practice, he argues, is that intimacy is precisely the place where our oldest wounds reactivate. The reactive patterns we absorbed in our family of origin — the flinch, the shutdown, the pre-emptive attack, the script for what you do when someone gets close — fire fastest with the person we are closest to. The “practice,” then, is the moment-to-moment work of catching the old reaction in the half-second before it runs: noticing the inherited pattern firing, and choosing a more present response instead of obeying the script. This is the somatic, daily-discipline cousin of the psychological flexibility Harris describes — less a question of values clarification than of nervous-system noticing, the trained pause between trigger and habit.

What separates Torrent’s framing from the rest of this library is its insistence on repetition and on failure. You will not master this. You will be present, and then you will lose it; you will get reactive, snap, run the old script, and only afterward realise the inherited pattern had you by the collar. Torrent’s claim is that this is not the practice breaking down — it is the practice. The cycle of failing at presence, noticing, repairing, and returning is the discipline itself, the same way a meditator’s whole practice is the act of noticing the mind has wandered and gently bringing it back. There is no version where the wandering stops; the returning is the thing. Love practised this way is not a state you achieve and then inhabit. It is scales, played daily, badly and then a little better.

This reframes the failures that ordinarily shame us. The reactive moment, the day the feeling ebbs, the snap you regret — none of these mean you are doing love wrong. They are the reps. Torrent’s quiet encouragement is that the people who love well are not the ones who never get reactive; they are the ones who have practised the return so many times that the gap between the old reaction and the present choice has narrowed from minutes to seconds, and who have made peace with the fact that it will never close completely. You show up tomorrow and do it again — a little less badly than today, and with the same forgiveness for yourself you are learning to extend to the person across the table.