A review by decaying
Be Not Afraid of Love: Lessons on Fear, Intimacy, and Connection by Mimi Zhu

challenging emotional hopeful informative inspiring reflective fast-paced

5.0

Love exist as a constant in our lives. That, I can say with certainty. It exists in the relationships that we forge. The way we care for ourselves. It exists plastered in heart-shaped boxes of chocolates that seems to always fill the grocery aisles, looming throughout the dreaded month of February. Love is everywhere. 

As someone who exists within the aromantic spectrum, I always have a never-ending crave to learn, explore, and understand what love is. It is always something that felt like I’m always on the cusp of understanding it, but never wholly. My understanding and relationship with love always felt fragmented. Like, I don’t believe anyone truly understand what love is nor any of us have any clue what we’re doing. Do we truly understand what love is? Is there a definitive meaning to it?

In many ways, Mimi Zhu’s “Be Not Afraid of Love” gave me a reassurance. It offers an understanding of love that is constantly expanding, with no means of an end nor a fixed shape. Love that transforms and transcends. There’s no definitiveness of what love is and that’s the most gracious thing about it; that we can find love in anything and everything. And I find that incredibly liberating. The book echoes familiar concepts and ideas from bell hooks’s “All About Love” that I find it difficult to separate the two. While hooks’s book suggests that we ought to look at love a little closer, Zhu’s book lets us know the different ways we can nurture and nourish it. The two complement each other incredibly well in that way.

In this book, Zhu spoke not only of her difficult experiences with past relationships. She also expanded on the various systemic issues that contributes to our convoluted and unfortunately, dysfunctional relationship with love. Her exploration is brimming with empathy and it’s difficult to not be swayed by the poignancy of her storytelling. It offered a level of consideration and understanding of the complicated ways people can be, but without at the expense of our well-being.

I really loved how Zhu tells her stories. The best way that I can describe her writing is that it is lovely. It’s hard to not think of love while I flicked through one chapter after the other. It has really expanded on my understanding on love with a spiritual perspective that I rarely ever considered. This book left me awestruck. This book tells me that there’s an endless possibility to love and there’s always room for me to be more loving in my life.
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