In a culture obsessed with idealized images of love, why is teaching love as a practice so uncommon?
This is the question feminist sociologist bell hooks aims to answer whilst providing teachings about love in her iconic Love Trilogy: All About Love, Salvation and Communion.
University students may know hooks from a sociology or women’s and gender studies class, as her work in social criticism and feminism is significant. However, the importance of her work on the practice of loving cannot be understated.
The end of December marked the 25th anniversary of hooks’ first collection of essays in the series, All About Love, yet her advice remains as culturally relevant as ever.
In the preface of this collection, hooks says that very early on in her life, it occurred to her that “life was not worth living if we did not know love.” Her trilogy builds on this sentiment, expanding ideas of love from not just the romantic, but also the platonic, familial and — what hooks repeatedly emphasizes as the most important form — self-rooted inner-love.
Ranging from teachings about childhood to late adulthood, All About Love discusses general practices for redefining what “love” truly is and subsequently expanding true love in your everyday life.
The essay collection and the two that follow it build upon the definitions of love laid out by psychiatrist M. Scott Peck and social psychologist Erich Fromm, wherein love is described as “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.”
To hooks, it is important to note that this definition implies agency over loving, defining it as something that requires “will,” as she aims to teach it as a skill that can be honed and improved, not as something passive that requires no effort to sustain — which is an all-too-common, grave misunderstanding in her view.
This definition develops throughout All About Love and finds a way to apply to all the loving relationships in our lives, including with ourselves. This collection seeks to teach readers that feeling is necessary to living, and any other reality is unhealthy, no matter how uncomfortable emotions can become.
The two following books in the series, Salvation and Communion, narrow in on different cultural groups to analyze and teach how one’s societal experiences change their understanding of love.
Salvation follows the experience of love specifically through an African American lens. Throughout this collection of essays, hooks considers various liberation movements from the 20th century, the work of writers like James Baldwin and Maya Angelou, as well as cultural norms for African American men and women — all to build an understanding of how teaching the practice of loving changes based on one’s social position.
Salvation’s methodology of intersectional analysis continues in Communion, where hooks considers how Western ideas of loving affect women, narrowing in specifically on women in their midlife, but connecting these thoughts back to the broader experience of Westernized femininity.
Despite the social specifications in All About Love’s successors, hooks’ Love Trilogy is a transformative read for everyone, regardless of their social position. Cultural ideas about love affect everyone, so anyone can benefit from replacing toxic belief systems with a deeper appreciation and understanding of loving as a practice.
In Communion, hooks recounts her experience teaching workshops for All About Love, encountering many women — notably young, working professionals — who begged the question: “Who has time for love?” and, troublingly: “Who needs love?”
In this, hooks rebuts commonly held belief systems in contemporary Western culture that deem love as a weak, inferior emotion, arguing they have done nothing but undermine the capacity for everyone to know the actualization that comes alongside prioritizing love in one’s life.
The unequivocal takeaway from hooks’ work is that love is at the centre of our lives, and it cannot be neglected. The act of loving is an ever-improving skill that must begin in oneself and will cultivate a fulfilling and actualized existence if it is approached as an important practice that requires effort.