This video is sponsored by Wren. Is love in art? Then it requires knowledge, and
effort. Or is love a pleasant sensation, which to experience is a matter of chance... something one
falls into if one is lucky? This little book is based on the former premise, while undoubtedly the
majority of people today believe in the latter. not that people think that love is not important.
They are starved for it. They watch endless numbers of films and happy and unhappy love stories. They
listen to hundreds of trashy songs about love. Yet hardly anyone thinks that there's anything that
needs to be learned about love. Scrolling through posts about romantic relationships nowadays, I kind
of hate it. Not because I'm a cynic or I find PDA to be cringy. In fact, I love, love. I think it should
be central to the way we live our lives. But there are several beliefs about romantic relationships
that i see commonly floating around on the internet that bug me. There's the "if you wanted
to he would" group, the "never settle" advocates, the constant talk about "red flags" and "standards"
and letting random strangers on TikTok make you question your healthy relationship. "You don't find
that suspicious... you don't find that suspicious??" As a preface, I'll probably talk more so
about things I see and hear from straight women since that's what I identify as. But the
fundamental concepts that I talk about for love do apply to all romantic relationships, regardless
of gender or sexuality. Before I get to specific content I see online, let's talk about two broader
questions. Is love passive or active? In other words, is love a state that exists independently and is
waiting for us to fall into, or does it require our participation and effort to bring about? Two, is
our conception of love grounded in anything real, or are we comparing our relationships to hyper
real love? Now we can't love if we're all dead from climate change, right? Smooth segway into a
sponsorship... I know... Well i'm here to briefly talk about Wren. Wren is a website where you can take
a short quiz to calculate your carbon footprint and find ways to reduce it. They have multiple
carbon reduction projects that you can help fund such as tree planting, mineral
weathering, and rainforest protection. Once you sign up to make a monthly contribution
to offset your carbon footprint, you receive monthly updates about the projects you support.
You get to see what your money is spent on with photos and details of every tree planted, every
acre reforested, and every ton of carbon offset. Check out the link in the description box for
more info. The first 100 people who sign up using my link will have 10 extra trees planted in their
name! Thank you again, Wren for sponsoring this video. Okay, so first, is love passive or active? Based on
the quote I recited at the beginning of the video, you can probably guess that I believe love is
active. I want to be clear, a lot of the things that I will be saying in this section of the video
can be found in Eric Fromm's the Art of Loving. It was written in 1956, so obviously some of the
things are outdated but I still feel as though a lot of it is applicable to present day. See Fromm
notices that most people view love through a passive lens. Love is somehow out there waiting
for us to stumble upon. You hear phrases such as "true love comes to those who wait" "do not chase
love. It will just find you when the time is right" and so people focus on making themselves as
lovable as possible rather than loving. Fromm likens dating to modern capitalism, modern capitalism
works on the premise of mutually beneficial exchange. I buy your product and you get my money.
To participate in the dating world is to place yourself in what Fromm calls the personality market.
You try to make yourself as lovable as possible which is really dependent on the time period
and culture. For a long time, the dream man was ambitious, physically strong, a protector. But now
there's a lot more demand for men who crochet and will cry into our shoulders. A lot of people also
try to make themselves lovable for certain types of people. For example, if Person 1 wants a goth
tiddy gf and Person 2 wants a computer science boy, they're probably going to dress differently
and get well versed in different talking points. But by then, they've already become selective about
which market they're putting themselves out onto. They are already deciding what kind of love should
come their way and so really love becomes what will satisfy your desire to not be lonely. Fromm
compares this self-interested search for a partner to a bargain, because you can almost think of it
like a graph. You have fallen in love when you find the optimal sweet spot between social value
and desire for you. This strategical exchange doesn't really treat people as people. Instead ,
we become commodities on this personality market and we're all trying to increase our market value
by adhering to what others want. I know a lot of straight women are happy and think it's quite
progressive that more straight men are moving from a Alpha gymbro lifestyle, to adopting more
nerdy soft or feminine traits. I see so many comments being like "Oh, men are finally listening
to what women want!" And don't get me wrong, I definitely prefer the latter type of men as well,
but should we really be happy about this? Like the men are just adhering to changing social values
to be more desirable on this personality market. But is a man who is traditionally masculine
necessarily a worse lover than a man written by a woman? Instead of congratulating people
for becoming a better commodity to soothe our awareness of our existential loneliness, why do we
not focus on loving itself? This is what I mean by passive versus active conceptions of love. Someone
who thinks of love passively asks "How do I become loved? Someone who thinks of love actively asks
"How do I love?" When relationships end, people tend to focus on how to improve their lovability by
working out, getting their hair done, buying new clothes, advancing their career as exemplified
by post-breakup glow-up videos on Youtube. "I'm gonna have a post-breakup glow-up, basically just
doing my hair and makeup." "So we're going to get my hair done, I'm going to self tan. We're going to
whiten my teeth, we're going to do a face mask exfoliate, wax my eyebrows, wax my upper lip, shave,
do a full face of makeup. Hopefully put extensions in, get my nails done, get my toes done, we're gonna
do the most." And yes, I know people often claim that these transformations are for self-love
and not others but I'm highly suspicious of how changing so much of your physical appearance
is self-love. Sure you will feel more confident, but it's because you now feel more desirable to
others. We're always so concerned with being loved I know it's a popular joke for people to comment
things like "throwing myself off of the empire state building" or "eating glass for breakfast"
under happy couple posts and it's funny, okay, don't get me wrong. But it's funny because we feel
that there is a level of truth to it. Seeing other people in happy relationships prompts us to feel
sad or slightly jealous that we are not being loved enough. Rarely do they ever make us think
about how we can improve as a lover and maybe help bring that kind of love into our lives. We seem to
take our concept of love itself for granted. Most people assume that love is just intuitively
known and it does not need to be learned. Everyone will just naturally know what it is.
But this stems from the problem of treating love as an object, a noun, a feeling something that just
happens to us. Fromm and also Bell Hooks (RIP queen) say we need to shift our perspective
and understand love as an activity. Fromm actually calls love an art, and just like being good at any
art such as playing an instrument, dancing, painting, it requires constant practice, dedication, and faith.
Just as how you can't be a good piano player by only playing when you feel like it, you can't be
good at love if you only choose to love when it is convenient and enjoyable for you. Fromm also says
that an art requires faith. When you practice an art, and you run into a difficult skill rather than
give up because it's hard. You have to have faith in eventually succeeding and dedicate effort
to that art until you succeed. The same is with love. I'll get more into this later on with the
overuse of the term "red flags" but i feel like people start to doubt their whole relationship
just because they saw one random person on TikTok say something. Of course, if there's constant
cheating, lying, abuse, etc. These are clear signs to leave. Wiring our brains to think about love as
something active rather than passive is actually really helpful in separating love from abuse
and dishonesty. I want to read a passage from Bell Hooks All About Love that I really like. To
begin by always thinking of love as an action rather than a feeling is one way in which anyone
using the word in this manner, automatically assumes accountability and responsibility. We
are often taught we have no control over our feelings, yet most of us accept that we choose our
actions. That intention and will inform what we do. We also accept that our actions have consequences.
To think of actions shaping feelings is one way we rid ourselves of conventionally accepted
assumptions, such as that one simply falls in love without exercising will or choice, that
there are such things as "crimes of passion" i.e., "he killed her because he loved her so much". If we
were constantly remembering that love is as love does, we would not use the word in a manner
that devalues and degrades its meaning. I think that most importantly when you work on an
art, creating a wonderful result is what leaves you with fulfillment, right? For instance, by finishing
a beautiful painting, an artist bestows meaning upon their life because the painting, as a product
of the artist's efforts, reflects their incredible abilities back onto themselves. The artist realizes
that they are the reason why this canvas is so beautiful. Thus, love is to nurture the flourishing
of someone else and you recognize your own worth through their flourishing. If we treat love as
an active art rather than a thing, love is about giving rather than receiving. A lot of people think
that giving equals sacrifice and that's why it's so honorable to do it. But Fromm says that giving
does not have to require us sacrificing anything . When done for the sake of giving, and not some
other goal, giving is actually the best way to combat our existential loneliness. When
you give you experience your own strength, energy, and aliveness. This is true when you
give anything such as giving money or giving food to your children. But this is especially
true in giving love because when you give love, you give all the things that make up you.
Your interests, your emotions, your passions your knowledge... quote "he enhances the other's sense of
aliveness by enhancing his own sense of aliveness." Sadly, in heterosexual relationships I still think
this idea of the man being the giver and the woman being the receiver is present, and a lot of
women happily endorse this idea because it's nice and easy to be the receiver. My man should ask me
to be his Valentine. He should be giving me flowers. My man should be doing this and that for me. I see
this sentiment get worse because of social media, portraying perfect images of people's boyfriends.
You know, the ones where a girl shows off all the sweet things her boyfriend does for her and the
comments are filled with stuff like "my standards just got higher" "why doesn't my boyfriend do this
for me"
"if he wanted to he would" Again, the dominant narrative here is that love equals being loved,
which equals getting stuff. Of course, it feels nice to receive things and it's important to have
a lover that gives things as symbols of love. But ladies, basing love on what you receive makes love
a passive commodity. You gotta focus on love as an action and give back. And giving love is not about
giving material objects, it's about giving you as a person. Sharing your thoughts, your humor, your
joy, and your sadness. That's what giving love is. One of the most loving couples i've come across
are Hannah and Shane. They talk about how so many people pity Hannah as some poor sacrificial
giver because they think she just gives without receiving things we typically associate with love
back such as traditional forms of pleasure. "One time a woman who, uh, asked if I was shane's cousin. And he said no this is my girlfriend. And she like, came up to me and took my
hands began to cry. And was like, that that's the most beautiful thing I've ever
heard, like, you're an angel. Which was super uncomfortable, because that insinuates that I'm an
angel because Shane is a terrible choice. People wonder why Hannah, who has high social value as a
pretty woman would partake in this unfair exchange. It goes back to this dominant idea of love
being finding the best bargain on the market. But Shane and Hannah don't care about this
dominant conception of love. They love each other because they give their personhood
to each other and they love the person they each are without primarily focused on what's in it for
them. At this point, maybe you're like "Okay Oivia, good job on becoming the most idealistic lover
girl with zero connection to reality! As romantic as giving for the sake of giving sounds, without
care about receiving material gifts, we all want to feel loved. Doing the loving is so much effort
and I'm too insecure to not crave being loved! Plus you can't just erase the value that material
gifts have in our capitalist culture." And to all that, I say, you are right. You are a hundred
percent right, you got me, which is why proper loving is counter culture. It's near impossible
because it's so opposed to how current culture is. How can I focus on giving when I'm
surrounded by people on social media showing off what they receive? When our culture
is so based on consumerism, on who has what, and obviously I'm going to be obsessed with increasing
my social value when that's how I'm constantly judged... How can I dedicate that much time
to practicing love as in art when society tells me there are other important things
to do? Like having a good career? I need to spend time on school and work so I only have
time to practice love on a select number of people. And for all these reasons that's why
I say our conception of love is messed up. According to Jean Baudrillard, we interact
more with what he calls hyper reality than reality itself. To explain what hyperreality
is, I think it's best to just dive into one of Baudrillard's examples. Consider the movie
"Apocalypse Now", a film about the Vietnam War. The acting, the special effects, the sets, the
editing, everything about the film is made so that when we watch it on our screen it feels as
real as possible. Heck, it becomes more real than the real war. Most of our understanding of the real
Vietnam War comes from brief video clips online, some news articles documenting the big highlights.
Maybe a speech from some politician. But we have no real experience of the real Vietnam War. And the
little bits and pieces we get from the news is an extremely watered-down version of the war. They
tell us how many people died, shows short clips of soldiers fighting, and innocent residents harmed.
But what about the thousands of stories that go unheard? The film "Apocalypse Now" ends up actually
feeling more real than the real war. When people talk about the Vietnam War, they picture scenes
from the movie rather than the actual war. The media that was originally an imitation of reality
ends up being more real, thus hyperreal. The hyperreal was originally a copy of something real.
But then we start to interact with the hyperreal more than reality, and so new forms of media
end up imitating hyperreality rather than reality. It becomes a loop of copies, copying copies,
copying copies, until our lives are looking at copies of copies of copies. I believe Stephen
West from Philosophize This! gave an example of how TV shows originally drew inspiration from real
people in real lives, but over time new TV shows became inspired by past TV shows. Creating shows
that are now completely detached from reality. For instance, How I met your mother or Friends,
comes out and we in real life start to frame what happens to us in relation to these TV shows. We
create character tropes all the time, that we then form our real relationships around. Such as people
saying, "I want to be just like Lily and Marshall or Monica and Chandler." We see people have magical
love at first sight moments on screen and then build expectations of having the same magical
feeling in real life. "I would be forever wed..." The imaginary dictates reality. These expectations
and tropes constrain us in thinking love needs to be a certain way, or that if we start off as
the hyper girlfriend, calm boyfriend trope we need to maintain that trope. But the thing is,
these expectations and tropes are not based in reality. Now how does everything we've talked about
apply to common phrases online? Let's start with "if he wanted to he would". Two things about this
mindset bother me. One, it builds the expectation that our partners, specifically men, should know
what to do and know what we want without us communicating it. Two, as many people have pointed
out it's literally contradictory. Girls say "if he wanted to he would" and so they don't tell their
man what they want because he should just do it if he wants to, but then if guys had the same
mindset then they would not make the first move either because they're thinking "if she wanted
to, she would." And so no one would do anything. Also, sometimes people want to do things but are
not sure if they should are scared, anxious, shy or maybe they value your input. Which I really
hope they do. Communication is so, so important. If you truly love someone, you would not base your
partner's worth on whether they give you exactly what you want. You would care about how much
you're giving them and whether you're both having a reciprocal relationship. Before Valentine's
Day, I saw quite a few TikToks talking about how women in heterosexual relationships should
wait to see if their man does something romantic for them without saying anything, or if you do say
something you should only mention it once. If your man doesn't do anything or forgets that thing you
had said once, it's a sign to end the relationship. "And they know that it's important to you,
you would only have had to say it once, right? Because if they loved you they would remember
things that were important to you and it would be important to them too. Move in silence on
Valentine's Day. Don't say anything. Hide the gift you're getting them, hide the things that you're
doing for them, not in a manipulative way. Just wait. If you walk away from that day disappointed,
feeling unappreciated, feeling alone, feeling like they're right. it's just a day. It's commercialized.
It doesn't mean anything. They show me they love me every day, so it doesn't really
matter. And I do care about them and I
do... Stop, okay." The thing that bugged me the most is
that these TikToks would say, even if he shows you that he loves you every other day, if he misses
the mark on this one commercialized, arbitrary day, then sorry he clearly doesn't love you. There is
so much concern around what can my man do for me, can he meet my standards, that this one day can
determine the trajectory of the rest of your relationship? I know it's different for everyone,
maybe your boyfriend has amazing memory and grew up in a loving environment. But for my boyfriend
and I, we both have a lot going on in our lives And so it's unreasonable to expect us to remember
something someone said once. Just because I forget that he wanted a poke bowl today for dinner,
does not mean he's not important to me. My boyfriend also grew up in a household without much
celebratory spirit. He didn't receive gifts for his Birthday, for Christmas. Him and his friends
never even exchange gifts on special occasions and so is it really fair for me to judge his
love based on what he gives me if he has never been taught to give material gifts? Even as I'm
saying this i understand how hard it can be to not let these little things affect you. We are
surrounded by people who post picture perfect moments of their relationship and it constantly
makes us fixate on how good the love we receive is. We are convinced that we should never settle, that
there is some person out there who will give us a love as perfect as the ones we see in films and
TV shows. I experience this sometimes too, um, okay that was a lie. I actually experience this all the
time. One of my greatest fears is not being loved, so honestly this whole video is almost like
a lecture to myself. I've definitely got a lot to work on in the realm of love, so please don't
think I feel superior to everyone because Iam not but that's why it's important to have a good
level of self-love. So that you can squash paranoid worries about not being loved enough and
judge your relationship with a more clear head. And remember that these movies are not real, they are
hyperreal. The love on your TV screen looks more perfect and more real than reality, so it makes
you crave that hyperreality. But it is a mere copy. "Red flags" is another term that has gained immense
popularity. I think it is absolutely important to watch out for red flags in a relationship but
this term has gotten overused. People watch a 15 second clip online and suddenly everyone's
got a psychology degree. Here's how author Kim Baker defined red flags. Red flags are whispers
from our intuition that something isn't quite right. A red flag is that sinking feeling we get in
our stomachs when something bad happens. There are slivers of evidence usually showing up early on,
that this relationship is not the right one for us. A red flag warns that deal breakers are headed our
way. Now I want to place emphasis on deal breakers, something that we absolutely cannot tolerate or is
too much effort to fix. Conversely, not knowing how to cook or having a perm is not a red flag. That's
just called "not your preference". Don't let random strangers who know nothing about your relationship
control you and tell you what is a red flag. I hope we all dedicate more time to thinking about how
to love others, how to build self-love, and avoid letting hyperreal displays of love mislead us.
You can like and sub, if you want. Leave a comment if you want. Thank you so much for watching, let's
keep talking and I hope to hear from you soon. Bye!! Captions by Julia M.
