understanding of love and lovelessness
bell hooks' seminal works like "Teaching to Transgress" and "All About Love" have profoundly influenced my understanding of love and lovelessness over the past 25 years. Her writings expanded my perspectives on teaching, activism, and human connection so deeply that I often joke her work is responsible for 90% of the stretch marks on my heart and mind. In "All About Love," hooks gets at the heart of why articulating a coherent ethic around love is so challenging yet vital. "Taught to believe that the mind, not the heart, is the seat of learning, many of us believe that to speak of love with any emotional intensity means we will be perceived as weak and irrational," she writes. Yet the longing for love persists across cultures—we all want to know how to truly love and be loved, even as lovelessness seems to hold sway in our politics, religions, families, and romantic spheres.
hooks argues that overcoming this lovelessness requires letting go of our individual and cultural obsessions with power and domination. While her words were written in 2000, her analysis of how domination dynamics like white supremacy and patriarchy perpetuate oppression sadly remains all too relevant today. She highlights the paradox that even those who denounce injustice often aren't willing to challenge the hierarchical mindsets underlying it. "There is a gap between the values they claim to hold and their willingness to do the work of connecting thought and action, theory and practice to realize these values and thus create a more just society," she explains.
Everywhere we learn that love is important, and yet we are bombarded by its failure. In the realm of the political, among the religious, in our families, and in our romantic lives, we see little indication that love informs decisions, strengthens our understanding of community, or keeps us together. This bleak picture in no way alters the nature of our longing. We still hope that love will prevail. We still believe in love’s promise.
I don’t claim to know what fuel works best for everyone, but what I know for sure is that I believe in love’s promise and I run best on love. For me, love is sustainable, renewable, and it burns clean. That doesn’t mean I don’t get angry. Anger is a soul-sucking lifetime companion, but it’s also a great catalyst for two of the grittiest, truest forms of love: justice and equity.
hooks explains that we can only awaken to love if we let go of our obsession with power and domination. While "All About Love" was written in 2000, her observations about domination, white supremacy, the patriarchy, and power offer important insight into what we’re experiencing right now. She explains that people who are willing to speak out against injustice are not smarter or kinder than their neighbors, but are “willing to live the truth of their values.”
By embracing empathy and rejecting domination, we can begin to build a society where love is not just an aspiration but a lived reality. This is the heart of turning towards each other—choosing connection, understanding, and love over division, judgment, and power. It is a radical, transformative act that can reshape our world.