All About Love

A few of the ideas that stuck with me.

Giving love words

hooks insists on defining love clearly — not as a feeling but as something you do: the will to extend yourself for your own or another’s growth. Naming it that precisely is uncomfortable, because it forces you to see where love has been missing.

I felt cared for growing up, but that isn’t the same as feeling loved. Care is a dimension of love, yet caring for someone doesn’t mean you’re loving them. A lot of us settle for affection and care because it feels safer and asks less of us than love does.

Childhood love lessons

As a kid I thought love was simply the good feeling of being treated like you matter — which maps onto how I try to treat myself now. hooks is sharp on punishment dressed up as love (“this hurts me more than it hurts you”, “it’s for your own good”), and how that teaches children to doubt what love even is. Love can’t be present if the adults doing the parenting don’t know how to love.

Justice and love

Loving children means treating them as people with rights, not as property. As hooks puts it: “Without justice there can be no love.”