Letters to a Young Feminist by Phyllis Chesler

Author:Phyllis Chesler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 2018-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

LETTER TWELVE

“Love Is Not Love Which Alters When It Alteration Finds.”

IS YOUR LOVE FOR ANOTHER PERSON more important than your love for God or country or family? If love is about union with someone or something larger than ourselves then know the following:

No true union can succeed with half-people. Union—and transcendence—requires two whole people. This idea may be totally foreign to you since you live in a culture (patriarchy) that eroticizes social and biological differences, or opposites. This makes your task an exciting and pioneering one: to forge relationships of equality and to come to your beloved(s) whole.

So much of what passes for love is merely economic dependence. Women tend to romanticize economic and legal dependence. Perhaps men romanticize domestic and sexual-reproductive service.

Love is not love if it forces you to compromise who you are. Love is a process and a discipline. It is not only what you feel for someone else. Like freedom, it is a path, a practice, which no legal contract can guarantee or enforce.

People may live together and not love each other at all, they may abuse each other, stifle all joy. For example, many parents who say they love their children do not behave as if this were true. Some people remain together because they are terrified of loneliness, or for the sake of the children. These are not crimes, but do not confuse such human arrangements with free love.

Loving freely means first “seeing” yourself and then your beloved for who she or he uniquely is, not who you need them to be. You cannot love someone and expect them to compromise some core part of their identity because you need them by your side at every major event in your life. Loving involves letting go—and going on, sometimes alone, to those places to which your soul is drawn.

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