When bell hooks wrote All About Love: New Visions, she had a larger goal than writing another relationship book. She wanted to change how we understand the most overused word in our vocabulary. Her central argument, repeated throughout the book, is that love is not a feeling. Love is an action. This idea, often summarized as love as action bell hooks, has become a touchstone for readers trying to build healthier relationships with themselves and with others.
bell hooks’ Definition of Love
Hooks does not leave love undefined. She offers a working definition that readers can actually use. “Love is as love does,” she writes. “Love is an act of will, namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.”
Every part of that definition matters. Love is an act of will, which means it requires deliberate effort. It is both an intention and an action, which means thinking about love is not enough. Something has to happen in the world. And because will implies choice, love cannot be forced on anyone and cannot be claimed by accident.
Love Is an Action, Never Simply a Feeling
One of the most quoted lines from her work on this subject is blunt: “Love is an action. Never simply a feeling.” Hooks argues that love is defined by actions, choices, and behaviors rather than just emotions. Feelings are real, but they are also unreliable. They rise and fall, shift with circumstances, and disappear under stress. If love were only a feeling, it would dissolve the first time life got hard.
Hooks gives us a way out of that instability. When we define love by what we do, love becomes something we can depend on. We can choose to act with care even when we do not feel warm. We can keep a commitment even when excitement fades. That is not pretending. It is the practice of love.
A Participatory Emotion
In another well-known passage, hooks writes: “Love is an action, a participatory emotion.” The word participatory carries the weight of the whole idea. To participate means to take part. Love requires our presence, our effort, and our willingness to be changed by the people we love.
Hooks applies this to both directions of care. Whether we are engaged in a process of self-love or of loving others, she argues, we must move beyond the familiar territory of sentiment. Self-love is not a mood. It is a practice of actions: setting boundaries, meeting your own needs, speaking to yourself with compassion. Love for others works the same way. It shows up in listening, in showing up, and in the ordinary repeated choices that build trust.
The participatory nature of love also means love is learned through practice. We do not become loving by reading about love. We become loving by doing loving things, noticing what helps, and doing more of it. This is true whether the love is directed inward or outward.
The Question Behind the Quote
Once we accept that love is an action, a second question appears: what action? Hooks does not leave us with an empty slogan. Her work points toward an answer, and readers have developed a common interpretation. Love as an action means choosing another person’s or group’s well-being and happiness before your own.
This interpretation fits the rest of her teaching. If love is “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s,” then love always involves movement beyond the self. It is not about losing yourself. It is about widening what you care about until another person’s good is part of your own good.
Starting with Action Rather Than Feeling
Hooks also offers a practical method for anyone who wants to put her ideas into practice. “To begin by always thinking of love as an action rather than a feeling” is, for her, a doorway into a more honest use of the word. Once you start thinking this way, the word love changes meaning. It becomes a call to behavior instead of a label for emotion.
This method produces immediate questions. When someone says “I love you,” the follow-up becomes “What will you do?” When we say we love our work, the follow-up becomes “How will we care for it?” The filter applies to romance, friendship, family, and the way we treat ourselves.
This is not about dismissing feelings. Hooks does not say emotions are irrelevant. She says they are not enough. Feelings can point us toward love, but they cannot carry love forward. Action carries it forward.
Radical Love and Social Transformation
The full argument in All About Love: New Visions goes beyond personal relationships. Hooks urges us to transform society with radical love. She refuses to keep love inside the private sphere. If love is an action, then a society shaped by love would be a society shaped by action: attention to the vulnerable, care for the suffering, and a refusal to accept cruelty as normal.
The word radical is important. Radical love is not polite affection. It is love that questions the way things are. It refuses to accept that some people deserve suffering while others deserve comfort. For hooks, a society organized around love would organize its attention and its care around human well-being rather than around indifference.
This is why her teaching resonates beyond the self-help shelf. Hooks connects the way we love one another to the way we build communities. The habits we practice at home, listening, patience, accountability, are the same habits a just society needs. Personal love and collective love are not separate projects. They are one project.
Where to Apply Love as Action
The usefulness of hooks’ teaching is that it does not stay on the page. It gives everyone a simple standard for measuring their own behavior. Instead of asking whether love is present, we can ask whether love is being practiced. These are the places where the teaching changes ordinary life:
- Romantic relationships: Love is not the feeling that brought you together. It is the behavior that keeps you together. Focus on how you treat your partner on ordinary days, not just on milestones.
- Friendship: Friendship is sustained by action. A friend who loves you listens, keeps promises, and shows up when it is inconvenient.
- Self-love: Hooks treats self-love as a process of action. You love yourself by choosing your own well-being, setting limits, and treating yourself with respect.
- Community: Radical love extends to strangers. Choosing a group’s well-being before your own is the basis of solidarity and service.
Choosing Love Every Day
The hardest sentence in hooks’ definition may be the shortest: “We do not have to love. We choose to love.” It removes the excuse that love is something that happens to us. We cannot blame love for our choices. We cannot say love made us act badly. Love is the choice, and the action that follows the choice.
The choice is not made once and finished. It is made hourly, in small decisions that most people will never see. Hooks does not pretend this is easy. What she offers is the conviction that it is possible. If love is an action, then anyone can begin. You do not need to wait for the right feeling. You can choose love today, and then prove the choice with what you do next.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is bell hooks’ definition of love?
In All About Love: New Visions, bell hooks writes that love is an act of will, namely both an intention and an action. Will implies choice, and she is clear that we do not have to love, we choose to love. Love is as love does, which means love is measured by actions, choices, and behaviors rather than by feelings alone.
Why did bell hooks say love is an action?
Hooks said love is an action to separate love from the unstable emotions we often confuse with it. Feelings can change quickly, but actions can be chosen and repeated. Defining love as an action gives us a reliable way to measure whether love is actually present in a relationship or in the way we treat ourselves.
What does “love is as love does” mean?
The phrase means love is judged by what it produces. If someone claims to love you but their actions harm you, the claim is empty. Hooks connects this to love as “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s.” Love proves itself in the nurturing actions it performs.
How do I practice love as a daily action?
Start by asking what a loving action would look like in the situation in front of you. Listen fully, keep your promises, and choose another person’s well-being alongside your own. For self-love, practice boundaries and respectful self-talk. Use hooks’ filter whenever the word love appears: is this an action, or just a feeling?
Does bell hooks connect love to social change?
Yes. In All About Love: New Visions, hooks urges readers to transform society with radical love. She argues that the habits of love we practice in personal life, attention, care, and accountability, are the same habits needed to build a just and compassionate society.