Recently a friend gifted me with bell hooks’ all about love: new visions. For those not in the know, bell hooks is a pseudonym for the talented scholar, author, and activist, Gloria Jean Watkins (1952-2021), whose work often examined intersections between race, gender, and class. Published in 2000, all about love is a work of non-fiction deconstructing the aspects of love in modern society, and debunking what love is not.
Combining ideas from M. Scott Peck and Erich Fromm, hooks begins with a definition of love as “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” Here, the use of “spiritual” is not a synonym for religion but rather refers to the idea that there’s some animated part of the self–a life force or soul. When the spirit is nurtured, one gets closer to self-actualization. In this way, spiritual growth encompasses the connection between mind, body, and spirit.
“Love is as love does,” meaning love is a choice and an action, rather than just a feeling. If love is an action, it’s heavily dependent on will, intention, and choice. If we choose to love, we choose to nurture and grow. Here we move away from the more conventional idea that love is instinctual. When we’re taught to view love as a feeling rather than an action, we may end up in situations where we’re not actually receiving or giving love. When we are loving, hooks says, we express care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, trust, and honest and open communication. When we view love as an action, we automatically demand accountability and responsibility.
Hooks also employs the term “cathexis,” to refer to the process of mentally investing in someone. When we feel genuinely drawn to a person, we invest feelings or emotions in them. But cathecting is not the same as loving, and we may confuse the two. Perhaps this is why when so many of us are drawn into toxic or unhealthy relationships, we’re left confused as to why someone who ‘loves’ us is treating us poorly. Using a definition of love based in nurture and growth would mean that those who are hurting or neglecting us cannot love us. They can still cathect. Moving away from the idea that we can’t control our feelings, hooks encourages the idea of love as an action because most people accept that we can choose our actions.
We don’t often think ‘what is love?’ We assume we know what it is because we’re taught from a young age that we feel it on instinct with family, close friends, romantic partners, etc. But have we experienced it when put into the framework of love is as love does?
We often hear the phrase “I don’t like them, but I love them.” Is this possible? Do we love those for whom we’re not nourishing spiritual growth? And vice versa? This doesn’t mean that those outside of this space are bad people or are negative characters in our lives. Viewing a relationship as dysfunctional could be as hooks says “a useful description and not an absolute negative judgement.”
While these ideas contain multitudes of nuances, I find it true that the societal tendency to treat love as a mystical and indefinable experience lets a lot of people off the hook because they feel they have no control over who and how they love.
Love is the result of actions, and cultivating meaningful and trustful relationships requires work.
What is love to you?