All About Love

"The search for love continues even in the face of great odds." That sentence appeared in bright paint on construction walls at Yale in the late nineties, surrounded by childlike animals, unsigned. Bell Hooks walked past it during a season when her fifteen-year relationship had just ended and she could not stop crying in public. Some construction company painted over it with white. She tracked down the artist, who gave her snapshots of the mural. She has hung them above her kitchen sink in every place she has lived since.

That image is the whole argument of "All About Love" in miniature. The culture keeps painting over love. Hooks keeps insisting we go find the original and hang it where we can see it while we make coffee.

The book came out in 2000 and has since become the kind of paperback people pass around at twenty-three when something has just ended. A new generation found it through TikTok and bookstagram rather than a college syllabus, which would have amused hooks, who taught at Yale and Oberlin and was once named one of the country's leading public intellectuals by The Atlantic. She published under a name spelled in lowercase because she wanted readers to focus on the substance and not on Gloria Watkins, the woman who legally signed the checks.

Her argument has one moving part. Love is not something that happens to you. It is not a feeling. It is not chemistry. It is a verb. It is the will to extend yourself for the spiritual growth of another person or yourself, and it shows itself in seven specific behaviors: care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, trust, and honest communication. If those behaviors are missing, you are not in love. You are in cathexis, or in habit, or in a power struggle dressed in red light, but you are not loving and you are not loved.