What bell hooks Teaches Us: Lessons from ‘All About Love’ and ‘The Will to Change’
When bell hooks wrote about love, she did something extraordinary and refreshing: she treated love as a practice, not a feeling. She challenged us to look honestly at the ways we learned love - often through pain, silence, avoidance, or survival - and to unlearn what harms us. Her work remains some of the clearest guidance we have on how to build emotionally healthy, accountable, nurturing relationships.
Below are the most powerful lessons from All About Love and The Will to Change, and how they show up in the relationships we’re trying to build today.
1. Love Is an Action, Not an Emotion
One of bell hooks’ most fundamental teachings is that love is what we do, not what we feel. She writes that love is “a combination of care, commitment, trust, knowledge, responsibility, and respect.”
This definition is simple but radical. It means:
We don’t get to claim love while harming someone.
We don’t get to claim love while rejecting accountability.
We don’t get to claim love without consistency.
Healthy relationships thrive when partners practice love as a series of intentional behaviors, not emotional highs. This also means that the intention must be continuously renewed.
2. Honesty Is a Requirement for Love
Hooks is direct: “To be loving we must be truthful.”
Truth is a form of emotional safety. In many relationships, dishonesty isn’t only about lying: it’s about withholding, avoiding conflict, or hiding parts of ourselves to maintain peace. This creates a relationship where one or both partners can’t fully show up.
Healthy love requires:
Honesty about feelings
Honesty about needs
Honesty about limits and boundaries
Honesty about mistakes
Honesty is what allows love to stay grounded instead of fragile.
3. Love Cannot Exist Without Justice
This is one of bell hooks’ most powerful ideas: love and injustice cannot coexist. Harm, inequality, emotional domination, or control erode the foundation of connection.
In The Will to Change, she writes about how many men are socialized into emotional disconnection - rewarded for dominance but discouraged from vulnerability. When that goes unexamined, injustice enters the relationship:
emotional labor falls entirely on women
conflict resolution becomes one-sided
accountability becomes optional
intimacy becomes shallow
Healthy relationships require emotional equity, where both partners participate in care, repair, and responsibility.
4. Healing Our Childhood Wounds Is Part of Loving Others
Hooks reminds us that many of us learned love through dysfunction (silence, punishment, inconsistency, or fear). She argues that we cannot give or receive healthy love until we confront how we were taught to love.
This shows up in modern relationships as:
fear of abandonment
difficulty trusting
people-pleasing
shutting down during conflict
staying in relationships that replicate childhood pain
Healing doesn’t require perfection: healing requires awareness, curiosity, and willingness to break inherited patterns.
5. Accountability Is an Expression of Love
Hooks emphasizes that repair is not just saying “sorry”, it’s changing behavior. Accountability is a loving act because it communicates:
“I care about the impact of my actions.”
“I’m willing to grow.”
“You can trust me with your vulnerability.”
Relationships that lack accountability tend to collapse into resentment, distance, or repeated cycles of harm.
6. Healthy Love Requires Community, Not Isolation
Hooks repeatedly stresses that no one partner can meet every emotional need. To put that pressure on one single person is to create unrealistic expectations, which can create a recipe for potential resentment.
Healthy relationships require friendships, community support, and connection beyond the couple. This challenges the modern idea that “your partner should be your everything.” Hooks reminds us that love thrives in networks of care, not in emotional isolation.
7. Loving Men Requires Understanding Their Socialization (from The Will to Change)
Hooks is compassionate but honest about how patriarchy harms men too. She argues that boys are taught early to disconnect from emotion in order to appear “strong.” This often leads to:
emotional shutdown
difficulty expressing needs
fear of vulnerability
defensiveness
confusion about intimacy
Understanding this doesn’t excuse harmful behavior, but it helps couples replace blame with clarity. Healthy relationships require men to develop emotional literacy and also requires women to set boundaries that demand emotional partnership, not emotional avoidance.
8. Love Is a Choice We Make Daily
Hooks repeatedly says that love is a “daily practice.” Healthy couples don’t avoid conflict, they repair. They don’t operate on autopilot, they choose intentional care. They don’t rely on passion alone, they nurture connection through habits.
This perspective helps us understand why relationships fail when love is treated as a passive feeling rather than an active practice.
