Love as a practice

bell hooks was a teacher and writer who spelled her name in lowercase so the ideas would come before the author, and who in 2000 wrote a book called All About Love that began with a complaint: we use the word constantly and never define it. So she did. Love, she wrote, borrowing from a psychiatrist she admired, is the will to extend yourself for the purpose of nurturing your own or another's growth. A will. An act. Not a feeling that happens to you.

Then she gave love ingredients. Six: care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust. All six, or it isn't love; it's something else wearing the name. She was blunt that a great deal of what passes for love, in families especially, fails the test, and that the failure is why so many people reach adulthood suspicious of the word.

Her other great book, Teaching to Transgress from 1994, was about the classroom, and it argued for what she called engaged pedagogy: teaching that treats the whole person, teacher and student both, and that sees education as a practice of freedom. She thought learning should be joyful and that the teacher should show up as a human being. Most of her students said she did.

It's in the Meaning chamber because hooks made love a thing you do, which makes it a thing you can get better at. That rescues it from luck. A person who's been unlucky in love can still practice care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment and trust, and practice is how any skill grows. Erich Fromm said it on day sixteen; hooks gave it a checklist.