All About Love summary

Imagine you’re creating an online dating profile. You’ve got a great picture next to all your interesting hobbies, and now you have to list your qualities. What are the chances that you’ll describe yourself as someone who lies? Slim, right? 

We’ve been raised with the notion that lying is wrong – but strangely enough, when it comes to relationships, our society actually encourages men and women to lie to each other. 

How many times have you heard that people need to love themselves first before they can love others? This advice is repeated over and over again by well-meaning friends and family, psychologists, and self-help books. And the truth is, they all have a point. 

When we love ourselves and nurture our own growth, we can then do the same for others. This sets the stage for positive relationships. However, self-love isn’t something that we’re born knowing how to do; we have to work to learn it.

If you were asked to list the members of your family, where would you start and end? Most people just think of their nuclear family, meaning their parents and any siblings. This is because society tends to emphasize the nuclear family while ignoring extended family – the grandparents, aunts, uncles, and the like, who form a community that each of us is born into. 

Communities are ideal spaces to learn how to love. By disregarding the community of extended family, we lower the chances of children experiencing love. In isolated nuclear families, women might start to depend only on their husbands, while children become totally dependent on their mothers. This creates a setting where abuse and neglect can occur unchecked.

Say you’re having coffee with a friend, and the topic of relationships comes up. You ask your friend what they want in a partner. They describe how they’d like to be treated and outline what they’d want their partner to do for them. 

While it makes sense to expect to get something in our relationships, we often focus on this and ignore another important component: the fact that we also have to give. We all need to receive things like time, care, affection, and attention. And when partners give to each other generously so that both have their needs met, there is shared growth and nurturing in the relationship. 

When was the last time you watched a romcom, or read a romance novel – a few weeks ago? A few years? Either way, you’re probably familiar with the standard storyline: boy meets girl, and they inexplicably fall in love – neither has any control over the situation.

The idea that we don’t choose who we love doesn’t just exist in romcoms and books; many people expect their own romantic relationships to work that way. But accepting this lack of control stops us from being intentional in love; it prevents us from taking the time to figure out what we need in a partner and what we can offer that partner in return. Being selective in our romantic relationships gives us a better shot at choosing partners who are right for us, and with whom we can grow.