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Well, I mean, here’s the thing: love is probably the most important thing to get right and it’s probably the thing we get wrong most.

Vocabulary is part of the problem, hooks says, since we can’t even agree on a definition of love. Crisp definitions can be tricky, though, especially about something as big and pervasive and abstract as love.

We must face the confusion and disappointment that much of what we were taught about the nature of love makes no sense when applied to daily life.

Hooks goes with a definition from Peck in The Road Less Traveled: “love is the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” Honestly, I don’t love it. But I don’t have a better one.

We could go to the Bible, which tells us that God is love, but then we’ve just traded one big-definition problem for another. The Bible also describes love in various ways but a description is not a definition.

Learning faulty definitions of love when we are quite young makes it difficult to be loving as we grow older.

The way relationships work in our childhood is where we get our definition of love, practically speaking. That can be quite a mixed bag. I had great parents who did extend themselves to support and nurture me and my growth, spiritual and otherwise. I was loved and I felt loved. But there were also clear limits about which directions were okay to grow in and how much you were allowed to grow. Mostly those limits were imposed by the larger pond in which our little family was a-swimmin’. As hooks points out, childhood experiences can leave us very confused about love. What it is. What it looks like. Etc.

Of course we take all that confusion and the mushy definitions and launch ourselves into the world with all the confidence of youth.

And then we run into trouble.

The heart of justice is truth telling, seeing ourselves and the world the way it is rather than the way we want it to be.

On top of the childhood confusion wrought by our families of origin, we get all sorts of messages from the larger culture. Most of those messages are shitty. For example: in order to be worthy of love, men have to be tough and women have to be soft. We often don’t feel like we are those things we’re supposed to be, so we pretend.

Males learn to lie as a way of obtaining power, and females not only do the same but they also lie to pretend powerlessness.

We get sneaky, all of us. We learn many methods of deception and manipulation because we crave love and need love and will die without love but all those things backfire.

It is impossible to nurture one’s own or another’s spiritual growth when the core of one’s being and identity is shrouded in secrecy and lies. Trusting that another person always intends for your good, having a core foundation of loving practice, cannot exist within a context of deception.

Patriarchal culture and static gender roles do not help with this conundrum, which should be surprising to pretty much nobody.

There’s a lot working against us when it comes to love. Our ingrained beliefs, our habits, our fears, a loud-mouthed culture, pressures within and pressures without!

But ultimately, hooks reminds us, love is a choice we make and we learn how to get better at it by releasing shame and telling the truth.

Fear is the primary force upholding structures of domination. It promotes the desire for separation, the desire not to be known. When we are taught that safety lies always with sameness, then difference, of any kind, will appear as a threat. When we choose to love we choose to move against fear — against alienation and separation. The choice to love is a choice to connection — to find ourselves in the other.

Love is an inherent, deep need but it doesn’t come with automatic skills or instinctive understanding. We gotta learn how to do it well.

The space of our lack is also the space of possibility.

Highlights & notes: 📖 hooks - all about love