This Pod asks what love is, what it should ask of us, and how we know when love is making us more fully human rather than smaller, more fearful, or less free.

Love is one of the words we use most often and examine least carefully. We use it for romance, friendship, family, devotion, longing, sex, loyalty, sacrifice, attention, and care. We say we love people, places, ideas, pets, books, songs, and ways of life. But we rarely stop to ask whether all of these loves are the same, or whether some forms of love ask more of us than others.

In this Pod we'll look at love from many angles. We will read writers who treat love as tenderness and devotion, and others who show how love can become projection, possession, self-erasure, or escape. We will ask what it means to love someone without controlling them, what truth has to do with love, whether desire helps us see clearly or not, and how love changes when it has to live inside ordinary life.

We'll explore the hard question on what kind of love helps us live well, and what kind we may need to question, reshape, or leave behind.

Preparation between sessions is designed to take under two hours. 

For this Pod, we will draw our conversation catalysts from the range of sources below, including poems, essays, short stories, memoir excerpts, visual art, and film or television. The final selections may shift slightly in response to the interests, questions, and energy of the group. 

The first session readings will be shared three weeks before the start of the Pod. 

Sources we'll draw from: 

• Sonnet 116 (“Let me not to the marriage of true minds”) by William Shakespeare (poem) 

• Love After Love by Derek Walcott (poem) 

• The Ache of Marriage by Denise Levertov (poem)

• Variation on the Word Sleep by Margaret Atwood (poem) 

• [i carry your heart with me(i carry it in] by E. E. Cummings (poem) 

• Sonnet XVII (“I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz”) by Pablo Neruda (poem) 

• True Love by Sharon Olds (poem) 

• Love Is Not All by Edna St. Vincent Millay (poem) 

• The Conditional by Ada Limón (poem) 

• Wild nights – Wild nights! by Emily Dickinson (poem)

• Scaffolding by Seamus Heaney (poem) 

• Marriage by Gregory Corso (poem) 

• To My Dear and Loving Husband by Anne Bradstreet (poem) 

• What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver (short story) 

• The Story of an Hour by Kate Chopin (short story) 

• Hills Like White Elephants by Ernest Hemingway (short story) 

• In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried by Amy Hempel (short story) 

• About Love by Anton Chekhov (short story) 

• A letter on love, from Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke (letter) 

• “Love as the Practice of Freedom” and selected chapters of All About Love: New Visions by bell hooks (essay/philosophy) O

• Gravity and Grace by Simone Weil (philosophy) 

• The Reasons of Love by Harry Frankfurt (philosophy)

• “Love’s Bond,” from The Examined Life by Robert Nozick (philosophy) T

• The title essay from Love’s Knowledge by Martha Nussbaum (essay/philosophy) 

• “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” by Audre Lorde (essay) 

• The speech of Aristophanes and Diotima’s ladder of love, from the Symposium by Plato (philosophy) 

• The Art of Loving by Erich Fromm (philosophy)

• “Loving Your Enemies” by Martin Luther King Jr. (sermon/essay) 

• “Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person” by Alain de Botton (essay) 

• “Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough” by Lori Gottlieb (essay) 

• Selections from Marriage: A History by Stephanie Coontz (history/essay)