Bell Hooks’ Love Lessons in 'All About Love'

Written in a didactic style, “All About Love” merges self-help with moral philosophy. As a feminist cultural critic, Bell Hooks affirms that love is possible within American society despite today’s culture of narcissism and selfishness. She tries to convince her audience how to return to the true meaning of love in order to live in a culture where love can flourish. Love can also have tremendous social effects as it is “crucial to our survival as a nation”. In Hook’s book, men have a tendency towards sexist gender roles and “patriarchal thinking.” Her goal is to instrument social change through her viewpoint on love. In this paper, I will discuss how community (extended family, friendships, etc.) is just as important as the “couple” themselves or nuclear families because love only comes from painful truth-telling; desire may depend on illusion, but outside sources have a perspective other than just the thrill of attraction; love involves work and dedication, but going to work and making money have replaced the core values of love and community (a concept, says Hook, that should be reversed).

In Hooks’ view, women are blindsided since most men use psychological terrorism as a mechanism to make women feel lesser. In this way, women have little hope of pursuing happiness since they keep men around “to take care of all their needs when in reality, women are in a constant state of yearning, wanting love but not receiving it”. In chapter one of her book, Clarity: Give Love Words, Hook claims that women make too much of love. “We need to understand love as the will to nurture our own and another’s spiritual growth because love and abuse cannot coexist. By definition, abuse and neglect are opposites of nurturance and care”. Men are raised to be more fascinated with their sexual performance/satisfaction opposed to being capable of giving and receiving love. Many men, according Hooks, resort to violence in order to silence their partner as a way to avoid witnessing emotional vulnerability. As a result, these men turn away from true love and value relationships in which they are able to be emotionally withholding (when and as they please) while still receiving love from another person.

In correlation to how some men behave, women are also afraid of intimacy; but the major difference between the two genders is that women are more concerned with finding a partner regardless of how suitable they might be. A gendered arrangement in which men are able to fulfil their emotional needs while women, on the other hand, stay deprived, is spawned from this. Men are given a higher standing in which coincides with patriarchal insistence that they are more superior than women. This gives them the idea that they are more suitable to dominate others. In chapter six, Values: Living By A Love Ethic, Hooks says that “awakening to love can happen only as we let go of our obsession with power and domination; men need to learn liberality and ‘the joy that comes from service’”.

In continuation from the discussion of chapter six, “culturally, all spheres of American life – politics, religion, the workplace, domestic households, intimate relations – should and could have their foundation as a love ethic. The underlying values of a culture and its ethics shape and inform the way we speak and act”. What Hooks is trying to say is that “a love ethic presupposes that everyone has the right to be free, to live fully and well”. “Commitment to a love ethic transforms our lives by offering us a different set of values to live by”. Living by a love ethic can help many individuals learn to value loyalty and a commitment to sustained bonds over material advancement. While pursuing in our careers and making money remain important agendas, they never take precedence over valuing and nurturing human life and well being. Living ethically ensures that relationships we encounter in our lives (with strangers too), nurtures our spiritual growth. Hooks also mentions the opposite point of view: behaving unethically (with no thought to the consequences of our actions) is like eating a lot of junk food. Even though it may taste good, our bodies are not receiving the proper nutrition from it and still remain in a constant state of lack and longing. In general, “our souls feel this lack when we act unethically, behaving in ways that diminish our spirits and dehumanize others”.

Furthermore, in chapter four, Commitment: Let Love Be Love in Me, M. Scott Peck says that commitment is inherent in any loving relationship. Anyone who is actually and truthfully concerned for the spiritual growth of another being knows, consciously or instinctively, that he or she can significantly foster that growth only through a relationship of constancy. “Commitment to truth-telling lays the groundwork for the openness and honesty that is the heartbeat of love”. Once a person identifies who they are and accepts themselves, the foundation for necessary self-love is built. As humans, we are born able to respond to care. As we continue to grow, we can give and receive attention, affection, and joy. Being in the presence of a loving environment ultimately determines how we love ourselves and others.

Self-love will not flourish in isolation. Hooks emphasized that many people find it helpful to critically examine the past, particularly their childhood, in order to chart their internalization of messages that they were not worthy, not enough, that they were crazy, stupid, monstrous, etc.. Learning how we have acquired feelings of worthlessness rarely enables us to change things; however, this process does not ensure self-recovery (examining negative thinking and behavioral patterns). In chapter two, Justice: Childhood Love Lessons, Hooks observed that childhood experience is important to the adult experience of love because the family is “the original school of love”. Affirmation, however, can help restore emotional equilibrium. Taking responsibility means that in the face of barriers (racism, sexism, homophobia, etc.), we still have the capacity to invent our lives, to shape our destinies in ways that maximize our well-being. “Everyday, we practice this shape shifting to cope with realities we cannot easily change”. Being “self-assertive” includes the willingness to stand up for yourself while being who you are openly. You must treat yourself with respect in all human interactions. “Sexist socialization teaches females that self-assertiveness is a threat to femininity. Accepting this faulty logic lays the groundwork for low self-esteem”.

In chapter eight, Community: Loving Communion, Parker Palmer states that “community cannot take root in a divided life. Long before community assumes external shape and form, it must be present as a seed in the undivided self: only as we are in communion with ourselves can we find community with others”. Communities sustain life – not just the “couple” or nuclear families. M. Scott Peck, as referenced in chapter four, defines community as the coming together of a group of individuals “who have learned how to communicate honestly with each other, whose relationships go deeper than their masks of composure, and who have developed some significant commitment to ‘rejoice together, mourn together,’ and to ‘delight in each other, and make other’s conditions our own’”. Children are born into a world surrounded by the possibility of communities. “Family values” within our society highlights the nuclear family, made up of a father mother, and a couple of children. “Capitalism and patriarchy together, as structures of domination, have worked overtime to undermine and destroy a larger unit of extended kin. Replacing the family community with a more privatized small autocratic unit helped increase alienation and made abuses of power more possible”.

The extended family is a good place to learn the power of community. However, “it can only become a community if there is honest communication between the individuals in it”. If love is not experienced in our extended families of origin, an opportunity to build community and know love would be in friendship. Many people look into friends for the care, respect, knowledge, etc. that we did not find in the family in order to nurture our growth. Oftentimes, we take friendship for granted even when they are the interactions where we experience mutual pleasure. Usually, we place them in secondary position, especially in relation to romantic bonds. A devaluation of friendship creates an emptiness we may not notice when we are devoting all of our attention to a chosen loved one. “Committed love relationships are much more likely to become codependent when we cut off all our ties with friends to give these bonds we consider primary our exclusive attention”. Finding strength in a friendship can be found by being willing to confront openly the shift in your ties and to make necessary changes. What we are able to learn through experience is that “our capacity to establish deep and profound connections in friendship strengthens all our intimate bonds”.

Within a loving community, we are able to sustain ties by being compassionate and forgiving. According to Eric Butterworth’s Life Is for Loving, his book mentions that “if we want freedom and peace and the experience of love and being loved, we must let go and forgive” because forgiveness is an act of generosity. True forgiveness requires us to understand the negative actions of others. Service is another dimension of communal love because moving from solitude into community heightens our capacity for fellowship with one another. Through fellowship, we are able to learn how to serve one another. “Enjoying the benefits of living and loving in community empowers us to meet strangers without fear and extend to them the gift of openness and recognition. Just by speaking to a stranger, acknowledging their presence on the planet, we make a connection. Everyday we all have an opportunity to practice the lessons learned in community. Being kind and courteous connects us to one another”.

In conclusion, as found in chapter ten, Romance: Sweet Love, approaching romantic love from a solid foundation of care, knowledge, and respect actually intensifies romance in a relationship. The mind does, however, have creative ways to console itself. Relationships do not grant perfection, but they do provide the irrationality of satisfaction. At times, desire can triumph the will, but these cynical delusions are pushed to the side by Hooks in a brave new world that is ready to assert mutual love between a free woman and a free man.