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.

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.