To create loving men, we must love males.

– bell hooks, The Will to Change

In my recent quest to become a more loving man, I came across bell hook’s “The Will to Change”. Having found it on r/Feminism, I was nervous that I would be thoroughly berated for the sins of my sex. So I was delightfully surprised that she believed that everybody has equal capacity to love. And specifically, that men deserve to love and be loved!

But something didn’t sit right with me. Hooks asserts that to become loving, men must free themselves of patriarchal expectations and get in touch with their own femininity. Don’t get me wrong. This is necessary and valuable advice. But it bothered me because it put love solely in the purview of the feminine.

No matter how many patriarchal ideals I shed, I still experience the world as a man. My testosterone-tinged qualia put the tenderness and vulnerability that Bell Hooks expects just slightly out of my grasp. I can get there but I must reach.

Why create this gap between men and love? Must I worship God in Latin? Must I transact in this foreign currency for which I need to barter and bargain because I cannot mint it? If I must pay a cost in order to love, then I cannot give it freely.

And Hooks, being a feminist, understandably focuses on a variety of male-female relationships. But this framing implies that male love is only valid in the context of a recipient.

On my spiritual path, I aspire to simply love, as an intransitive verb, with no object. I want to be love.

We know that from time to time there arise among human beings people who seem to exude love as naturally as the sun gives out heat

— Alan Watts, Spectrum of Love

Like a flower that has perfume… that flower is for everybody and for the one who takes trouble to breathe it deeply and look at it with delight.

— J. Krishnamurti, Freedom From The Known

So then it becomes necessary to find a love that comes natively to me. It’s not unexplored territory. The ancient Greeks have a rich taxonomy of love. Christians too have a rich understanding of love, rooted in their worship of an undeniably loving man. Luckily, my culture has many role models to follow also.

I could love like Krishna, who flirted so hard with the Universe that everyone around him couldn’t help but fall for his charm.

I could love like Lakshmana and Hanuman, whose loyalty and devotion led them to follow their lord to the edges of the earth (well, to Sri Lanka, but close enough).

I could love like Shiva, who so grieved his wife that he transmuted his unbridled energy into a fearsome, cosmic dance.

Coming to more modern, pragmatic advice, I try to draw from the work of Dr. Steven Stosny, whose workshop first awakened me to the notion I even had the capacity to love! His thesis is that men can be more loving by deepening their masculine “core values”: to improve, appreciate, protect, and connect.

Part of my journey is convincing myself that masculine love is love in its own right. And if I manage to tap into this native energy, then just maybe tender and kind love will come more easily too.

These are all forms of the same energy. And you have to take it and let it grow where you find it. If you find that only one of these forms exists in you, if at least you will water it, the rest of the plant will blossom as well.

— Alan Watts, Spectrum of Love

Or, if I may rephrase bell hooks:

To create loving men, we must love male love.