Few ideas from bell hooks have traveled as far beyond academic circles as her insistence that love is a verb. The phrase appears in essays, interviews, and social media posts, often reduced to a neat slogan. Yet the sentence carries more weight than a slogan. When hooks says love is a verb, she is asking readers to rethink what love is, how we recognize it, and whether we are actually practicing it.
In her book All About Love: New Visions, hooks builds a careful argument about the difference between loving and falling in love, between feeling affection and living out commitment. For her, love is an act of will, namely both an intention and an action. That definition is demanding. It means love is not something that happens to us. It is something we do.
Why bell hooks Says Love Is a Verb
In everyday speech, love is usually a noun. We say we have love for someone, or that we are in love. The word describes a state, a feeling, or a bond between people. hooks points out that this way of speaking shapes the way we think. If love is a noun, it becomes something we possess or receive, rather than something we perform.
One of her most quoted lines makes the point directly: “The word ‘love’ is most often defined as a noun, yet all the more astute theorists of love acknowledge that we would all love better if we used it as a verb.”
The shift from noun to verb is not just a grammar exercise. When love becomes a verb, it gains a subject and an object. Someone is doing the loving, and someone or something is receiving it. It also gains a tense. Love happens now, or it happened yesterday, or it will happen tomorrow. Love becomes an activity with a direction and a duration.
What Love as an Action Actually Looks Like
hooks does not leave her definition at the level of abstraction. She names the specific ingredients that turn intention into action. In her account, love involves affection, responsibility, respect, and commitment. Each of these is a practice, not a passive state.
Affection, Responsibility, Respect, and Commitment
Affection is the warmth we show through attention and care. Responsibility is the willingness to show up consistently, not only when it is convenient. Respect means honoring the other person as a full human being with their own needs and limits. Commitment is the promise to keep loving over time, even when feelings fluctuate. Together, these four practices form the backbone of hooks’ vision of love.
Love Is an Active Choice, Not a Feeling
One of the most challenging parts of hooks’ argument is her insistence that love is not a feeling. Feelings come and go. They can be intense in the morning and gone by the afternoon. If love depended on feelings alone, it would be unreliable. hooks argues that love is an active choice and a commitment to nurture. We choose to love, and we keep choosing it.
Nurturing as the Core Practice
hooks defines love as the process of nurturing yourself or others. That word, nurturing, is important because it is concrete. Nurturing can look like listening, feeding, protecting, teaching, encouraging, or simply being present. It is the work of helping someone grow. As hooks puts it, love is following through on a commitment to nurture and care for another person, to help them become the best version of themselves.
Love Is as Love Does
hooks also reminds readers that love is judged by its results. “Love is as love does,” she writes. This phrase pushes back against romantic declarations that are never followed by action. A person can say “I love you” every day, but if their behavior is careless, dismissive, or harmful, the words carry little weight. Love is confirmed by what a person does, not by what they say.
How This Idea Changes the Way We Understand Love
This definition has consequences for every kind of relationship. hooks applies it to romantic partnerships, but also to friendship, family, and community. It is the reason she writes about the responsibility to give children love. When we love children, we acknowledge by our every action that they matter. Children do not need to be told they are loved as much as they need to be treated as if they are.
Love Is Not a Place We Fall Into
The common phrase “falling in love” suggests something accidental. We trip, and suddenly we are in love. hooks rejects this framing. If love is a verb, it requires intention. It is something you do, not something you fall into. Falling suggests passivity. Loving requires purpose. This distinction matters because it changes where we place responsibility. If love is something that happens to us, we cannot be blamed for failing at it. If love is something we do, we can.
Love Is a Decision and a Promise
This is why hooks describes love as both a decision and a promise. To love somebody is not just a strong feeling. It is a choice we make, and it is a promise we keep. A promise, by definition, extends into the future. It binds us to act in certain ways even when we do not feel like it. That element of commitment is what separates love from infatuation, and what makes love a practice rather than an accident.
Why bell hooks Wrote All About Love: New Visions
All About Love: New Visions is the book where hooks develops these ideas most fully. In it, she argues that our culture is confused about love, and that we have built our lives around a definition of love that is too weak to sustain us. She offers a different path. By treating love as a verb, she gives readers a way to measure their own relationships. The question is no longer “Do I feel love?” but “Am I loving?”
Readers who come to the book expecting a conventional romance manual are often surprised. hooks writes about love as a force for personal and social transformation. She connects the ability to love with the ability to know ourselves, to heal from past harm, and to build communities grounded in care. The book is not sentimental. It is demanding.
Putting the Idea into Practice
Treating love as a verb changes daily behavior. It means asking different questions in a relationship. Instead of asking “Do I have strong feelings for this person?” we ask “Am I nurturing this person’s growth?” Instead of asking “Am I in love?” we ask “Am I acting with affection, responsibility, respect, and commitment?”
It also applies to the way we treat ourselves. hooks is clear that love includes the process of nurturing yourself. Honest and steady self-care is part of loving well. A person who constantly neglects their own needs may find it hard to sustain care for others. Love, in hooks’ sense, begins at home, not because we are selfish, but because we cannot give what we do not practice.
Frequently Asked Questions
Here are answers to some common questions about bell hooks and her definition of love as a verb.
What does it mean to say love is a verb?
When bell hooks says love is a verb, she means love is something we do, not something that happens to us. It is an act of will, both an intention and an action. Love requires behavior that can be observed, like nurturing, listening, and showing up, rather than a feeling we wait to experience.
What did bell hooks say about love as an action?
hooks argued that love is not a noun or a feeling but a conscious, dynamic, ongoing act. She defined love as an active choice, a commitment to nurture and care for another person. For her, love is confirmed by what we do, which is why she wrote that love is as love does.
What does bell hooks define as love?
bell hooks defines love as the process of nurturing yourself or others. She says it involves affection, responsibility, respect, and commitment. Because love is a verb, it is measured by actions, not by words or emotions. It is a decision and a promise that we keep over time.
How does bell hooks’ definition of love apply to children?
hooks writes that love is our responsibility to give children, and we give it through our actions. When we love children, we acknowledge by everything we do that they are valued. This means love is not a sentimental feeling but the daily practice of care, protection, and respect.