All About Love - bell hooks
I'm writing this review on September 21st which is about 2 months after I finished this book, so this will be short and sweet since I can’t remember much. While reading this book, I dog-eared a plethora of pages but the “Community” chapter is where most of my notes live. Community is where our roots are, it’s where or who you return home to when we need that grounding force. In this chapter, Hooks examines how society places romantic relationships on a rather shaky pedestal. She states that “To love well is the task in all meaningful relationships, not just romantic bonds,” and furthermore proclaims that “there is no special love exclusively reserved for romantic partners.”. She challenges the reader to actually hold the same standards they do for friends for their partners. Imagine you confront your friend about something they said or did that upset you.
They say, “You’re overreacting, don’t be so dramatic.” Depending on the schematics of your friendship you may cut ties with that person or try to work it out. If they continue to disrespect you by invalidating your feelings/experience, more than likely you will drop that person. Imagine the same thing happens in your relationship and your partner says the same thing as your friend. Would you react the same way?
I truly believe that for some people, they can’t handle being alone with themselves so they find comfort in a relationship. They look for validation, approval, and love from others rather than giving it to themselves, which Hooks encourages us to do.
“One of the best guides to how to be self-loving is to give ourselves the love we are often dreaming about receiving from others.”
As I previously said, some people just don’t want to be alone because they feel lonely. Now, I know you just read that last sentence like something off the menu but read it again and really process it. To be alone is a physical state. When in a room full of people you aren’t alone but you can feel lonely. Focusing on the sentence I just mentioned, one can feel lonely {don’t get me wrong I’m not trying to tell you how to feel} but you have to ask yourself why? Also, you should realize that there are different forms of love, romantic love isn’t the only love that exists. I’m not downplaying anyone’s feelings or experiences, granted I’ve went through some of these things myself, but you have to get to a point where you can identify the root and challenge your anxieties and fears with the facts.
As I said, there’s different forms of love but as far as definitions go Hooks gravitates to Erich Fromm’s definition, who was a German social psychologist, which is as follows:
“The will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth. Love is as love does. Love is an act of will – namely, both and intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.”
Furthermore, she addresses the common faulty aspects of love that we’ve learned as children. We’ve been taught that love is a feeling, “the butterflies in our stomachs” but she tells us that when we are drawn to people we invest our emotions in them. This is also known as “cathexis”, which Scott Peck, an American psychiatrist, warns us to not “confuse cathecting with loving”.
Bell Hooks passed away in December of 2021 but she left us with something so precious, which is an insight to her life and advice for generations to come. Make notes, highlight sentences, circle words, talk about it with your friends and family. I know I only focused one one chapter of this book but I strongly encourage any and everyone to read this.