Redefining Love & its Wounds: In Gratitude to bell hooks
Over the last year, I have been slowly reading bell hook’s All About Love. It was recommended to me years ago by a mentor to read with my partner to work through some issues we had at the time. But it was my surprise and grief at hearing of bell hook’s passing in 2021 that finally inspired the deep dive into this book, in which hooks describes her “new visions” of what love is and can be.
hooks has long been an inspiration to me, ever since I read her Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom in an undergraduate course on Literacy & Community ten years ago. I was struck then by the same awe that I felt reading All About Love — delighted and inspired at her combination of critical thinking and practical spirituality. And how the example of her own experiences as a Black female intellectual is often at the forefront of her research.
In Transgress, she spoke of the need to bring eros, the force of passion and love, into the classroom. It is a challenge I have contemplated ever since — what would love in a classroom look like? For hooks, it seems to mean allowing human warmth, affection, and care into a space where detachment and distance are often the norm. So far, it has meant for me trying to show up with an open heart to class, even when I’m tired. And interacting with students as a whole human being, rather than a distant figure.
But in All About Love, hooks goes further in her definition of love. She defies popular definitions — and even hundreds of years of romantic poetry and literature — and defines love not as a noun, but as a verb. She says love is not a feeling state, but instead an action. What’s more, an action we must choose. This new definition startled me as I contemplated what it truly meant. We do not passively wait for love, but create it ourselves.
In other words, it is up to me whether love is present in my life.
As I navigate my newfound situation cohabitating with my partner, I have been reminded of hook’s definition on an almost daily basis. That I am not waiting for my partner to show acts of love to me — we are co-creating love together. This has felt scary and unfamiliar at times — I have not honestly been the first to act or take initiative in any other romantic relationship I’ve had. I am in many ways, as hooks identifies, a woman “waiting for love.” It has become quietly empowering to recognize that my everyday actions — folding laundry, making dinner, walking the dog — are acts that add up to commitment. That add up to something like love.
hooks quotes M. Scott Peck in her ultimate definition of love as “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” How active, I thought. How outward-looking — more like a flower’s slow turn towards the sun. To extend. So to pick up dog food on my way home from work so my partner has more time for his hobbies that feed his heart. This is love?
Perhaps the radicalness of this stems from the fact that many of us didn’t experience love in childhood. hooks doesn’t shy away from this important aspect of love — its lack and the woundedness this causes. “It took me years to let go of learned patterns that negated my capacity to give and receive love,” hooks writes when discussing her first relationships. She notes that many of us experience care — warmth, having our needs met, even affection — but not love from our families.
She notes how intergenerational this becomes — when one generation doesn’t experience love, it is difficult for them to know what love even looks like in caring for their children. “Few of us enter romantic relationships able to receive love. We fall into romantic attachments doomed to replay familiar family dramas.”
hooks traces this back partly to the capitalist, negatively patriarchal dominant culture. “A commonly accepted assumption in a patriarchal culture is that love can be present in a situation where one group or individual dominates another.” Power in a way is the opposite of love. And while often cultural critiques can remain in the abstract, hooks brings us right back to the personal — she describes her experience as an intelligent female child unappreciated as such in her patriarchal childhood home. She allowed me to see that power can be disguised as control, and how anyone can take on these tendencies learned from our culture — not just men. I began to reflect deeply — do I always put my needs first in my relationship with my partner? What would it be like to rearrange, to put his needs equal to my own?
hooks certainly doesn’t limit her definition of love to romantic partnerships in this book — she explores self-love, divine love, loving through grief, and love in community. Her definition of love is one that can be applied to all facets of life — because it is not a transient feeling but an act of will. Love is instead a capacity we cultivate that then extends out to every part of life. While I was especially struck by hooks’ discussion of romantic love, her chapter on community also touched me deeply as one who has lived in intentional communities. She emphasizes, “Communities sustain life — not nuclear families, or the ‘couple’ and certainly not the rugged individualist.”
She again quotes M. Scott Peck’s definition of community as a group who has “learned how to communicate honestly with each other…and who have developed some significant commitment to ‘rejoice together, mourn together.” I realized that some of the difficulties in the communities I have lived in perhaps came from the inability to fully communicate — not seeing the need to constantly create relationship instead of it being assumed as a given because of shared value systems. As hooks reminds us, relationship is never a given, it is a creative act.
“Only love can heal the wounds of the past. However, the intensity of our woundedness often leads to a closing of the heart, making it impossible to give or receive the love that is given to us. To open our hearts more fully to love’s power and grace we must dare to acknowledge how little we know of love in both theory and practice.”
To begin to imagine and create loving acts, to realize what love can be, is a messy process. It takes the willingness to make missteps and try again. To be humble and self-aware. To be whole in our woundedness. This past year for me has been a personal struggle to be open and vulnerable to others both in relationship and in community. I have uncovered old wounds and experienced new ones that made me feel like I’d reached my limits of loving. There have been moments when uncertainty has made love seem like a lost cause or a naive dream. But with hooks’ book — and really the example of her whole life — I have been reminded that woundedness is not a barrier to loving the self or others. I have been given a vision of possibility.
