“Hey, you all! Happy Thursday.

Today, we’re diving into the topic of love. Could you see what I did there? It’s the book’s title, and that’s what we will discuss.

Alright, let’s backtrack a bit. Hello, and welcome back to my page. My name is Timothy Dwight, and these are the Dwight pages.

Oh, it’s so good to see all of you. If you’re new to my channel, welcome, and if you’re returning, hey, nice to see you again.

We have a whole studio audience situation over here, so get used to it, but let’s get back to the main point for today.

Where should I start? Let’s keep it accurate because that’s how we roll on my channel. We keep it honest. I’m not feeling my best emotionally today, so we’ll see how this goes. Okay, because I feel like a mess, you know why I started this channel. Maybe it’s not the exact reason, but it’s a facet of who I am.

So we’re just going to have to deal with this. You will only see it if I do this video. We’re here to discuss what matters, right? So here we go. For this series in February, I wanted to focus more on creating heart-centered content. By “heart-centered,” I mean things that hold deep meaning.

For the first video, if you’ve seen it, great; if not, I’ll leave a link in the description. I talked about black queer youth. That’s something meaningful to me because I was once a black queer youth, and to this day, I still see the importance of and continue to support black queer youth.

I am always looking for better ways to advocate and be a champion for them. So, that was my first video, and today, I want to continue in the same vein, allowing you all to get to know me and what I value even more. So yes, today we’re going to discuss, as you can tell from the title and probably the thumbnail of this video, ‘All About Love’ by bell hooks.

I would also like to share a bit of my journey reading this book and discuss some of my love-related experiences. Specifically, I want to compare what bell hooks talks about regarding love and its various aspects, such as showing and receiving love, to my relationship with my now-estranged father.

So, you’ll get to know me better, and I will share more about my personal life. This is a valuable conversation because, during Valentine’s Day, people often associate it with romantic love. While I have romantic love through my partner and various friendships, I want to broaden the discussion to encompass familial love. Valentine’s Day is making me miss my father, and that’s a valid feeling during a time that’s supposed to be about love and celebration.

“Daddy issues,” right? Let’s delve into bell hooks’ ‘All About Love.’ She covers, as you might have guessed, everything about love. Some sections touch on familial love, spiritual love (the connection between you and spirit or you and God), romantic love, love among friends, and more. But for this video, I will focus on the first three chapters.

After our discussion, I hope it inspires you to check out the book yourself and read the remaining chapters because valuable information is abundant here. It has the potential to be genuinely life-changing and affirming.

I found a lot of affirmation for the experiences in my life while reading this book, and it felt perfect. So, I highly recommend picking it up.

The first chapter of this book is entitled “Clarity: Give Love Words.” This entire first chapter delves into the idea that love has often been described as undefinable.

In our media and the world of romantic comedies, love is often portrayed as something intrinsic and natural. It just happens, and there are no words to describe it. It’s often suggested that trying to define love diminishes its magic. However, in this book, bell hooks challenges this notion.

The chapter explores various ways in which love can be sustained. Many narratives in media focus solely on affection or attraction as the essence of love. It’s as if being attracted to someone or feeling drawn to them is all that love is supposed to be.

bell hooks argues that attraction and affection are just one aspect of maintaining a lasting love. Other crucial components, such as care, trust, respect, and commitment, often outweigh mere attraction or affection. This premise sets the stage for the rest of the book.

Now, relating this to my own story, as mentioned earlier, I wanted to connect my understanding of this book with my feelings of sadness surrounding my relationship with my father. While reading this book, I couldn’t help but think about my father, which surprised me because I initially expected my partner to be the focal point. After all, the book is all about love, and I thought it would help improve our relationship.

However, what kept coming up was the sense of something missing in my relationship with my father. It all goes back to how we define love and how the absence of a clear definition can lead to turmoil. bell hooks emphasizes that the definition of love varies from person to person and is shaped by our upbringing and experiences.

I grew up in a generation with different perspectives on love than my father. His upbringing wasn’t centered around love in the same way mine was. This divergence in our definitions of love contributed to our difficulties. bell hooks eloquently explains in this book that the dynamics of love, which makes it possible and sustainable, are not fundamentally different across different types of relationships.

The factors that make a romantic relationship work are not vastly dissimilar from those that make a friendship or a parent-child relationship function. This realization was significant for me, as it echoed what I had already sensed but had never seen articulated in this way.

The second chapter is entitled “Justice: Childhood Love Lessons.” This chapter was quite challenging to engage with.

In this chapter, bell hooks explores childhood and encourages readers to reflect on their childhood experiences. She posits that abuse and love cannot coexist within the same space. If abuse is present, love cannot simultaneously exist, which may initially seem like a reasonable assertion. At first, I thought, “Okay, that makes sense. Abuse and love shouldn’t go hand in hand; they shouldn’t reinforce each other.”

However, things got a bit rough when she delved into this concept in the context of childhood. She asks us, as readers, to examine our childhoods and recall instances when our parents behaved in ways that didn’t feel loving. She urges us to ponder how we rationalized those actions as children and how our rationalizations, along with the logic we employed to make sense of the violence we experienced, were intertwined with the assertion that it resulted from being loved intensely by the authority figures in our lives.

This request to evaluate our childhood experiences becomes challenging because, for many of us, there were moments when we felt genuinely confused by our parents’ actions. On the one hand, we knew deep down that our parents loved us, often reinforced by words, at least in my case by my mother. So, we had this firm conviction that we were loved. However, it was difficult to reconcile what we knew to be accurate, that we were loved, with what we felt: the absence of love.

This internal conflict marked the beginning of what I believe is a common experience for many people—cognitive dissonance, the gap between what your mind knows and what your body feels. I speak from my own experiences; my mother was an alcoholic for most of my life, and my father was emotionally unavailable. These two individuals raised me, and I know they were doing their best. I also know that they were raised in similar circumstances if not more challenging ones.

I understood that my parents were doing their utmost, but I couldn’t ignore what I was going through. I desperately wanted to extend grace to my parents throughout my childhood, to the point where I developed this cognitive dissonance between feeling abused and believing that I was loved.

I share this to emphasize that when bell hooks discusses this in the chapter, she urges us to reevaluate our childhood experiences, as mentioned earlier. She asks us to contemplate how these experiences have carried over into our adult lives. Many of my early twenties relationships were greatly influenced by my desire, much like in my childhood, to believe something in my mind that didn’t align with what I was feeling in my body.

I spent a long time feeling perplexed about why I behaved this way. Friends advised me to leave certain situations, but despite mounting evidence, my mind couldn’t let go of what I believed to be accurate. Adulthood, in many ways, has been about unlearning and undoing the coping mechanisms and protective mechanisms we built during our childhood that we no longer need.

This book and that chapter opened up a conversation for me in the needed ways. I needed someone to say it, you know? It wasn’t easy to read, and it wasn’t easy to think about, but our brief connection in this video and my sharing of these stories will help prompt you to think about these things as well.

Let’s move on to the final chapter I’d like to discuss in this video, Chapter Three, entitled “Honesty: Be True to Love.”

This chapter was also quite impactful. In it, bell hooks tell us that we’re all liars. She explores how much of our lying originates from our childhood and societal expectations of politeness. She delves into how this desire to be nice can be self-inflicted pain, leading to vicious attacks on the self that go beyond harmless white lies, causing real trauma and damage to our well-being.

hooks discusses how we are taught to lie, using examples like when a parent asks if they look fat, and we can see through their lies as children. We may even be told that sometimes lying is necessary to protect others. However, she emphasizes that this lesson has substantially harmed us, as it can undermine genuine care and protection.

She argues that there is no room for dishonesty in true love. She defines love as the pursuit of expanding one’s or another’s spiritual growth. Within this definition, honesty is intrinsic because it’s impossible to be a positive enabler of someone’s spiritual growth if you’re dishonest.

I’ve been contemplating this a lot today about my father. I’ve spent considerable time lying to him, not being honest about our relationship. Lately, I’ve been more honest, which is why we haven’t spoken for over a year now. Realizing that honesty is the only way to have a healthy relationship is painful. Still, it’s my honesty that prevents us from having any relationship at all.

bell hooks teaches us in this book that no true love is without honesty. If a relationship cannot withstand honesty, true love does not exist between you, even if it’s a parent. That part was challenging to come to terms with and still is.

She also introduces the idea of living a life with a love ethic. Many components make up a love ethic, and she discusses various aspects that constitute such an ethic throughout the book.

The most prominent theme that bell hooks consistently returns to is honesty; honestly, this is a challenging video.

I initially thought about doing something different, something more fun. However, the point this book is trying to convey, and perhaps what the universe, my ancestors, and everyone else is trying to communicate, is that we are all doing the very best we can, and all we have is the truth. That’s it, and that’s good enough.

Unfortunately, my camera died, so bear with me as I continue. So yes, those are the first three chapters. Again, there’s so much more in this book that I highly recommend reading. I’d also like us to reconsider holidays like Valentine’s Day and what should be central to these celebrations.

Valentine’s Day is often marketed towards romantic couples, but let’s transform it into a love holiday. Despite its commercialization, we can use this holiday as an opportunity for service. One aspect of this service can involve looking at our relationships from a non-hierarchical perspective and discovering how we can be better partners to those not necessarily sharing our bed at night.

So, this video has been all about love, and we’ve reached the end. If you’ve reached this point, please leave a heart-eye emoji in the comments. Also, remember to like, share, and subscribe if you enjoyed this video. I’ll see you next week.