Book: Love

Overview
Leo Buscaglia’s 1972 book Love is a warm, exhortative meditation on love as a learned, intentional practice rather than a mere feeling or fate. Drawing on humanistic psychology and personal storytelling, he argues that love is an active verb: a daily commitment to awareness, responsibility, and choice that expands a person’s capacity for joy, connection, and growth. Love, for Buscaglia, is not sentimentality or control; it is a discipline that frees both the lover and the beloved to become more fully themselves.

Origins and Structure
The book grew out of Buscaglia’s famed “Love 1A” course at the University of Southern California, conceived after a student’s suicide prompted him to question why schools teach everything except how to live and care. Its chapters feel like extended conversations from that classroom, informal, anecdotal, and elliptical, moving across themes such as self-acceptance, risk, communication, touch, freedom, education, and the embrace of change. There is no heavy theory or rigid argument; the organizing thread is the lived experience of learning how to love.

Core Ideas
Buscaglia maintains that love begins with self-knowledge and self-regard, not as narcissism but as the ground from which generosity and empathy can arise. A person who accepts their uniqueness is more able to honor the uniqueness of others. He stresses that love and growth are inseparable: relationships flourish when partners support each other’s unfolding, not when they possess, label, or demand conformity. Possessiveness, idealization, and dependency are the enemies of love because they trade freedom for security and stunt development.

Risk is central. To love is to choose vulnerability, to invite possible rejection, disappointment, and loss. Buscaglia insists that the alternative, emotional safety through withdrawal, is a slow kind of dying. He reframes mistakes as necessary experiments, failures as data for becoming more alive and skillful. The present moment is the true theater of love; postponement is a habit of fear.

Communication and listening are practical tools of loving. He encourages directness, clarity about needs, and the courage to say yes and no without manipulation. Genuine listening, which suspends judgment and seeks understanding, is presented as a form of love in itself. He returns often to the importance of touch and affection, hugs, eye contact, laughter, as embodied affirmations that we are seen and valued.

Love thrives on choice and responsibility. Rather than casting others as the cause of our feelings, Buscaglia asks readers to own their responses, to notice how expectations and labels distort reality, and to keep choosing behaviors that build trust and delight. Freedom is not the opposite of commitment; love’s commitment is precisely to protect the other’s freedom and one’s own, so that both can grow.

Style and Voice
The tone is conversational, humorous, and openly sentimental, animated by stories from Buscaglia’s Italian family, his students, and his travels. He quotes poets and sages but avoids jargon, preferring simple illustrations that make behavioral change feel immediate and possible. The book models a pedagogy of encouragement: readers are reminded to practice, to forgive themselves, to try again. The energy is expansive and affectionate, more like a hug than a thesis.

Impact and Legacy
Love helped popularize humanistic ideas about personal growth and relational responsibility for a broad audience in the 1970s. It inspired courses, workshops, and a culture of everyday practices, hugging, gratitude, attentive listening, that readers could enact without specialized training. Critics sometimes fault its optimism and lack of analytical rigor, yet its enduring appeal lies in reclaiming love as a skill that can be learned, celebrated, and taught. The book invites readers to become active artisans of love, crafting lives in which freedom, presence, play, and care are daily choices rather than distant ideals.