We Won’t be Able to Change How We Fight Without Changing How We Love

Abstract

This article draws from and elaborates on some ideas conveyed in my book, Why Men Hurt Women and Other Reflections on Love, Violence and Masculinity (2022), to reflect on the relationship between love and violence. It contends that as a society we will not be able to change how we fight or oppose each other, at least we will find it more difficult to reduce the magnitude of men’s violence against women, without changing the dominant narrative of love. Although the reflection on the relation between violence and love applies to other kinds of aggression and intimacy, such as between men’s violence against and love for other men, the focus of this article is men’s violence against women they love. Love and violence, the article shows, are not necessarily and always incompatible but instead are sometimes nested in each other.

Keywords

• violence
• men
• masculinity
• love
• botho