What Is Love? A Deep Dive Into bell hooks’ Vision of Love

Hey everyone, it’s Couture Talks with Dulce, and today, I have a big question for you: Do you know what love is? Whether your answer is a confident yes or a confused no, I’ve got the perfect book to help deepen your understanding of what love truly means (and what it doesn’t!). Lately, I’ve been reading All About Love: New Visions by the legendary bell hooks, and trust me, this is a must-read.

For those who don’t know, bell hooks (she intentionally styled her name in lowercase!) was a groundbreaking feminist, cultural critic, and social activist whose work transformed the way we think about race, gender, love, and liberation. Some of her most iconic books include Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love, and Feminism Is for Everybody. hooks dedicated her life to making feminist thought accessible and calling out systems of oppression, all while centering love as a radical and healing force.

All About Love has gone viral on social media, sparking important conversations around healing, accountability, and the ways we show up for each other in relationships. The impact of this book has been massive, especially among younger generations craving more authentic and meaningful connections. So let’s dive into All About Love and explore why this book, and its message, are so important today. ✨ This is Part 1 of my analysis, so stay tuned for more! ✨

There’s something about bell hooks’ All About Love that hits you with truths that should feel like common sense, but as we all know, common sense isn’t so common. I’ll be the first to admit it: even I’ve had to check myself while reading this book. The reality is, many of us were never taught the full picture of what love looks like, and if adults never learned it in their own homes, they’re likely to pass those gaps down to their children without even realizing it.

Not enough adults and parents have shown unconditional love throughout their lives. They have not been met with care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust. That fact is heartbreaking because all humans deserve unconditional love, or should at least experience it.

Bell hooks uses a quote from The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck, which states that the textbook defines love as: “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” He then expands on this: love is an act of will. Will implies choice, therefore, we choose to love. True love is a conscientious commitment to growth for ourselves and others.

The Essence of True Love

Many of us confuse love with attention and affection. We’ve all met toxic people or have done toxic things to others consciously or unconsciously. Most of us are good people who indulge in toxic habits, but we are human. We aren’t perfect. A lot of us are conditioned to receive and give toxic love because of our childhoods. All roads lead back to the development of a child. If a child grows up in an abusive, dysfunctional family, they may confuse love with abuse. They will accept it, and worse, recreate it in their relationships, thinking that is what love is.

Parenting adults who abuse their children often believe that love and abuse can coexist. That belief is false. Most of us grew up in households where we were cared for with affection or "cathecting," as hooks explains, but not truly loved.

Care is a part of love, yes. But it is only a dimension of love. Hooks describes the key components that make up real love: care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, trust, honesty, and open communication. When we get used to the care and affection our parents give us, we might not even notice when real love is missing and end up accepting neglect or mistreatment as normal. Sometimes, we even pick those kinds of relationships because they feel less overwhelming or demanding.

As hooks points out, many of us don’t understand what love is because we’re scared to face how little love there is in some of our relationships. Instead of being honest with ourselves, we avoid taking responsibility and accountability for looking at the truth. But we have to remember: Love is an action, a choice, not a feeling.

"Actions have consequences," hooks writes. Hooks suggests that seeing actions as influencing feelings helps challenge common cultural beliefs, like the idea that parents always love their children or that love just happens without any effort or choice. Some of us grew up hearing, "I'm doing this because I love you," while being harshly punished. This creates confusion, as it mixes love with pain. If punishment is meant to show love, children are left wondering why love hurts. Deep down, many of us knew that wasn’t true.

And yet, in our society, parents do this all the time. Children are told they’re loved even while they are being harmed. They are treated with conditional love, forced to constantly prove why they deserve affection. I’ve never understood that. If you want to have children, don’t you want to treat them better than you were treated? Don’t you want to raise them with the love you wish you had?

In All About Love, bell hooks shares how her family praised her for being smart because of her school grades, but then turned around and told her that being too smart would land her in a mental institution. She reflects that if her grandparents had treated her parents with love, then they might’ve known how to pass that on to their own children. But since they were only met with care, not love, they were just caring, not loving.

This idea also connects to the work of Lucia Hodgson, whose book Raised in Captivity: Why Does America Fail Its Children? discusses how many children in the U.S. grow up in homes lacking real love. These children are subjected to physical and verbal abuse, neglect, cruelty, and even death. Hodgson argues that children are the real victims of intimate terrorism, as they lack a collective voice and have no recognized rights, leaving them at the mercy of the adults responsible for them.

Bell hooks explains that the family home is one of the most tightly controlled and powerful institutions in society. It can often become authoritarian and oppressive. While adults facing domestic violence can organize, speak out, and fight for their rights, children are left in a much more vulnerable position, dependent on the same adults who may be harming them. Abuse and neglect cancel out love, and someone who mistreats others cannot truthfully claim to be loving.

Without justice, there is no love.

It’s heartbreaking to see children of dysfunctional families learning behaviors of verbal and physical abuse. This creates bullies out of children with no self-awareness because they were never shown otherwise. These bullies become dysfunctional adults who lack kindness and constantly abuse others.

Adults need to understand the true meaning of love before choosing to care for another human. Judith Viorst said, “We cannot be whole human beings indeed, we may find it hard to be human without the sustenance of the first [parent-child bond] attachment.” This isn’t some huge phenomenon. It’s a simple cause-and-effect problem that needs to be addressed now before we create another generation of adults who don’t know how to give or receive love.

I hope you all enjoyed Part 1 of my deep dive into All About Love: New Visions, and that something here resonated with you or sparked your curiosity to pick up the book yourself. It’s truly a beautiful, eye-opening read on what unconditional love means. Whether you’re navigating self-love, healing from the past, or just rethinking what love looks like in your life, this is the perfect starting point.

And guess what? Part 2 is on the way! We’ll explore self-love, greed, the power of community, and the spiritual side of love. Stay tuned! You won’t want to miss it! 💕✨