ENDLESS LOVE, ROMANCE , AND INTIMACY

As a society we are embarrassed by love. We treat it

as if it were an obscenity. We reluctantly admit to it.

Even saying the word makes us stumble and blush ...

Love is the most important thing in our lives, a passion for which we would fight or die, and yet we’re

reluctant to linger over its names. Without a supple

vocabulary, we can’t even talk or think about it

directly.

As the title ENDLESS LOVE, ROMANCE, AND intimacy 

: indicates, we

want to live in a culture where love can flourish. We yearn

to end the lovelessness that is so pervasive in our society.

This book tells us how to return to love. ENDLESS LOVE, ROMANCE, AND intimacy 

:

 provides radical new ways to think about

the art of loving, offering a hopeful, joyous vision of love's

transformative power. it lets us know what we must do

to love again. Gathering love’s wisdom, it lets us know

what we must do to be touched by love’s grace.

THERE ARE NOT many public discussions of love in

our culture right now. At best, popular culture is the one

domain in which our longing for love is talked about.

Movies, music, magazines, and books are the place where

we turn to hear our yearnings for love expressed. Yet the

talk is not the life-affirming discourse of the sixties and

seventies, which urged us to believe “All you need is love.”

Nowadays the most popular messages are those that declare the meaningless of love, its irrelevance. A glaring ex

ample of this cultural shift was the tremendous popularity

of Tina Turner’s song with the title boldly declaring,

“What’s Love Got to Do with it.” I was saddened and

appalled when I interviewed a well-known female rapper

at least twenty years my junior who, when asked about

love, responded with biting sarcasm, “Love, what’s that—

 have never had any love in my life.”

Youth culture today is cynical about love. And that cynicism has come from their pervasive feeling that love can-

not be found. Expressing this concern in When All You've

ever Wanted isn’t Enough, Harold Kushner writes: “lam

afraid that we may be raising a generation of young people who will grow up afraid to love, afraid to give them-

selves completely to another person, because they will

have seen how much it hurts to take the risk of loving and

have it not work out. | am afraid that they will grow up

looking for intimacy without risk, for pleasure without

significant emotional investment. They will be so fearful

of the pain of disappointment that they will forgo the possibilities of love and joy.” Young people are cynical about

love. Ultimately, cynicism is the great mask of the disappointed and betrayed heart.

When I travel around the nation giving lectures about

ending racism and sexism, audiences, especially young listeners, become agitated when I speak about the place of

love in any movement for social justice.