All About Love by bell hooks

All About Love is a book by bell hooks. I don't remember when I was introduced to it, but I do remember how. It must have been a year ago when I was in conversation with someone on the internet on the topic of love. They told me that they believed this was a sort of seminal text on love, and that it encapsulated much of what they believed. I said I'd read it. It languished on my reading list but after a while I finally gave it a shot.

I got through about three quarters of it before giving up. There were parts I really liked; I remember reading some of the earlier chapters, talking about it with my partner, thinking it captured something really important. Then… I don't remember much. It kind of just washed over me. But then around the mid-way point, there were a few lines that really caught me off guard and rubbed me the wrong way. That lead me to think a bit more critically about it.

Rather suddenly, I stopped enjoying it. I kept reading, though, until it stopped being something I wasn't enjoying and turned into something I found actively annoying. And then it hit me: All About Love is a self-help book.

I've read a lot of self-help literature. Maybe five years ago I got really sick of it and swore it off entirely. In my experience, wisdom isn't typically very complicated or deep. It's just that it often takes a long time to fully internalize it. Self-help as a genre serves the function of imparting wisdom. As such, most self help novels have very little in the way of substance. The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, the self-help book of choice of a younger version of myself, is a great example of this. The entire book can be boiled down to seven concise bullet points. How does it manage to fill 381 pages? Mostly, with repetitive anecdotes.

All About Love is also very anecdote-heavy. In a sense, that makes it a very personal, intimate book. That also means it entails psychoanalyzing her previous partners. But it's not just anecdotes. It also includes social critique—I think this was the main thing I was interested in when I started reading it. Much of this critique is framed in terms of heterosexual and cissexual dichotomy. hooks goes to lengths at times to clarify "this is also the case for homosexual relationships", or that she's seen this in "both heterosexual and homosexual relationships", but heterosexuality is nonetheless presupposed in most of if not all her observations. It was around chapter 9, concerning mutuality in relationships (more specifically, how heterosexual relationships lack mutuality and it would be cool if they didn't) that I got bored and stopped reading.

For the record, the thing that got me to start thinking critically about it was chapter seven, concerning greed:

Nowadays we live in a world where poor teenagers are willing to maim and murder for a pair of tennis shoes or a designer coat; this is not a consequence of poverty (74)

Also relevant:

Our prisons are full of people whose crimes were motivated by greed, usually the lust for money (78)

I think a generous reading of this is that capitalism fuels a social lovelessness that serves as a conduit to crime, but I think what caught me off guard was that both of these lines feel very reactionary. And while I concede they're probably relevant to a broader conversation about love, I don't think either of these things are best understood through an individualist lens. It feels like… something I'd hear from Malcolm Gladwell. So that's where it started to click.

And as a bit of bonus njms.ca-reader exclusive content, distilling All About Love into its core wisdom:

1. M. Scott Peck defines love as "the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth". This is a good definition and you should embrace it rather than whatever corrupted notion of love you came up with as a child.
2. "There can be no love without justice" (26). Children are often treated unjustly by the people they're supposed to love and this can pervert their understanding of love
3. Honesty is good, lying complicates the process of love
4. Love is a lot of work and so it takes commitment
5. Spirituality is good for you and helps you love
6. Love is a practice or ethic you have to live by
7. When you're greedy, you are without love.
8. Community helps to foster love
9. girls are good at sex and boys are bad at it Love requires an equal footing; power imbalance has a corrupting influence on love

And that's kind of where I called it. I do think all of this is reasonably good advice, but I don't know if reading All About Love will help you internalize it. Maybe, if you're the kind of person who responds well to self-help literature. Otherwise, I think these things just take will and time to understand.