by Omolara Okunoren
Photo by Geneva O’Hara of the Museum of Modern Art, NYC
“Life is not worth living if we do not know love.”
All About Love: New Visions by bell hooks
I recently had a coffee date with a friend at our local Caffé Nero. We hadn’t seen each other in weeks as we had gone home for the Christmas break, and exam season quickly took over our lives. It was lovely catching up and discussing how we enjoyed Nosferatu (2024) and how the exam period had brutally stolen 20 years off our lifespan. I always enjoy our catch-ups because we speak about the most profound things, such as family and our experiences as women of colour.
During our catch-up, the subject of love came up, and we both gushed over and adored the idea of a “pure, abundant love”—a love from the soul that helps us flourish alongside those around us. I have been recently obsessed with ‘pure’ love—regardless of the relation, whether it be family, friends, or romantic. As long as it is love genuinely operating from the heart, I find myself often discussing it with close friends and family.
But what is love?
In the book All About Love: New Visions, bell hooks defines love as the “will to extend one’s self to nurture one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” James Baldwin, in Nothing Personal, describes this feeling as “the work of mirroring and magnifying each other’s light,” regardless of whether it pertains to family, friends, or romance. Moreover, my close friends often say that love makes them feel safe and secure, or it helps them feel like their true selves—magnetic and confident.
The fact that we all define love in various ways is significant because that’s the beauty of it all. How I define love varies for many people due to our differing experiences, narratives, and journeys. For instance, all the rom-coms I’ve watched (When Harry Met Sally, 1989; 10 Things I Hate About You, 1999; and Rye Lane, 2023), reading bell hooks’ All About Love: New Visions, listening to “You’ve Got The Love” by Florence and the Machine, and just experiencing life itself have all shaped my definition of love. I see love as both a feeling and a state of being that exists in all of us to help people we care about grow, while others may see it as something entirely different.
I can pinpoint the significant taproot of my recent love obsession. It is rooted in Mitski’s “My Love Mine All Mine,” which is perhaps the main reason I deeply feel my frontal lobe developing at 21. “My Love Mine All Mine” sang to my soul and is about how we can own and control our love, which will always be eternal. This song struck such a chord with me because times are currently so difficult, with so much chaos, crisis, and capitalism overwhelming the world. Yet, a great comfort of mine is knowing that we all have control over this omnipotent, abundant feeling called love. It cannot be commodified, exploited, or stolen from us—it’s entrenched in us, radiating in and out of our bodies and shining onto the world.
It is “my love mine all mine,” as Mitski sang; love is ours, regardless of who, what, when, why, or how. Trains continue to be unexpectedly cancelled, making us late to our destinations, British weather continues to torment us, and we argue, fight, or fall out with people. However, a key mantra that I always repeat to myself is that it is endearing to know that we always have love: to be loved, to be loving, and to be love itself.
TO BE LOVE ITSELF
To be love itself is to know that love cannot exist without us. I have enjoyed asking myself recently, “Who am I without love?” I then always repeat the same answer: I am love, this beaming feeling and state of being. It depends on me; I can choose what to do with it. Moreover, to be in love itself makes us feel forever young, yet it also ripens us alongside our life experiences and social world. My friend once beautifully put it: “We are all clouds, and each raindrop is a collection of the people we love and our experiences,” nurturing the earth’s soil to create more beauty and pour more love into the world.
TO BE LOVING
This is another beautiful thing about being loving. We can open our hearts to let those we cherish into it. We control and manoeuvre who Cupid’s arrow hits. I truly believe that the people we choose to love represent who we are and build little pieces of us, our social world, and our journeys. Moreover, we can love and express it in an array of ways—from how we speak, act, gift, hug, kiss, and touch the people in our hearts. We all have our unique love language and behaviour, and that’s the most special part. Love is universal and a part of human existence, but how we experience it is not universal.
TO BE LOVED
It’s truly a privilege to be loved—to be able to find people, in this vast and oftentimes cold world, who know, see, and understand you “just as you are,” as Mark Darcy from Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001) proclaimed. I know I am lucky to be loved, as I feel love when I ruminate about:
- My step-mum and I watch rom-coms together, such as How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days (2003) and Love Actually (2003), while my dad remains censorious about the genre.
- My friend and I had morning catch-ups every day during the third year of university; she would eat her overnight oats, and I would eat my plain oats, discussing everything on our minds at the crack of dawn.
- Boogying in the sweatiest student nightclub with my friends, not worrying about our morning shifts or 9 am lectures the next day, and heckling together, “The night is still young” as we grip onto each other as we dance.
- Bonding with a friend who became like a sister to me, sleeping over at her house, and always being excited for our 2-hour yap sessions about everything going on in the world before bed.
- My mum tidies my room, makes my favourite dish, and greets me with the longest hug every time I return from university.
As I write this piece, I think of many other marvellous memories and have to force myself to stop. That’s the thing about reflecting on being loved—the more you blissfully spiral and appreciate the people in your life who love you with their entire heart, the more you open your heart and feel the memories, feelings, and pleasure of love shine back into you.
CLOSING THOUGHTS
Love exists everywhere! It is often hard to describe and understand this feeling, but when we look into the eyes of our loved ones, cheer on our long-distance friends’ successes from our own homes, make the cheesiest jokes with friends, hear a song on the radio that reminds us of a sweet memory, rant to our parents during a 20-minute phone call, or look into the sun to appreciate the universe’s beauty—that’s when we remember and cherish that we are all able to be loving, loved, and love itself.
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