bell hooks opens All About Love: New Visions with a question that most of us avoid: what does love actually mean? In a culture that treats love as a mystery, a mood, or a lucky accident, hooks offers a definition that is both simple and demanding. Love, she writes, is a combination of six ingredients: care, commitment, trust, responsibility, respect, and knowledge. These six pillars of love are not reserved for romance. They apply to love of any kind, including platonic, familial, romantic, one-night-only, and even begrudging love. Understanding them changes how we give love and how we recognize it when it is offered to us.
What bell hooks Means by Love
In her work, especially in All About Love: New Visions, bell hooks defines love as far more than a feeling. She argues that love is not just a feeling but an active practice that can transform individuals and society. That single shift in definition changes everything. If love is a practice, then it can be learned, repeated, improved, and offered deliberately. If love is only a feeling, then it remains at the mercy of mood and circumstance. hooks challenges common myths about love throughout the book, clearing away the stories that keep people from building the real thing. For hooks, the six components of love give us a way to recognize love when it appears and to build it when it is missing. They turn love from something we hope for into something we can do.
The Six Pillars of Love
The six components that bell hooks names are care, commitment, trust, responsibility, respect, and knowledge. The exact order varies slightly in different tellings, but the list itself stays consistent. Each ingredient depends on the others. Love becomes distorted when one of them is missing. And when they are all present, according to hooks, we can work on developing these qualities in ourselves and in our relationships. The six pillars are not a rigid formula; they are a map for the work that love requires.
Care
Care is the most visible face of love. When someone cares for another person, that attention shows up in actions: in listening, in showing up, in tending to what the other person needs. hooks lists care as one of the foundational ingredients of love because love cannot remain abstract. It must land somewhere real. Care is what makes love tangible to the people around us. Without care, the other components of love have nothing to hold onto and love becomes an idea rather than an experience.
Commitment
Commitment gives love a future. Feelings arrive and fade, but commitment is a choice that continues. In hooks’ definition, commitment is one of the six ingredients because it turns good intentions into something dependable. A loving relationship can tolerate difficulty when both people are committed to the work of love. Commitment keeps people present when emotions are complicated, inconvenient, or unclear. Without commitment, trust and responsibility have no steady ground to stand on, and love never gets the time it needs to grow.
Trust
Trust is what allows people to be vulnerable with one another. hooks includes trust as one of the six components of love because love cannot grow in a space where people are constantly guarding themselves. Trust is built slowly and kept carefully. It connects directly to care and commitment: people come to trust those who are consistently caring and who stay even when staying is hard. When trust is broken, the other pillars of love weaken. When trust is present, it creates the safety that makes deep love possible.
Responsibility
Responsibility means responding to the needs of the people we love. In hooks’ framework, responsibility is not a burden but a natural part of love. When we take responsibility for how we treat others, love stops being accidental and becomes intentional. Responsibility also means acknowledging that our actions affect the people we love, and that we cannot separate our freedom from that impact. Along with respect and knowledge, responsibility helps love stay honest and grounded instead of drifting into habit or obligation.
Respect
Respect is the ingredient that prevents love from becoming control. hooks places respect at the center of her definition of love because genuine love honors the other person’s full humanity. It does not try to reshape someone into a convenient image. Respect works alongside knowledge: we can only truly respect another person when we take the time to know who they actually are. A love that lacks respect is not love at all, no matter how strongly it is felt.
Knowledge
Knowledge in love means knowing another person deeply, not just knowing about them. hooks includes knowledge as one of the six pillars because love without knowledge is often projection. We love an idea of someone rather than the person in front of us. True knowledge takes time, attention, and humility. It is the ingredient that makes care precise and respect real. When we know someone, we can offer the love they actually need rather than the love we wish they needed.
Love as Practice, Not Feeling
The central argument of All About Love is that love is an active practice. hooks defines love as a combination of care, commitment, trust, responsibility, respect, and knowledge, and then insists that we treat those ingredients as skills to develop. When we see love this way, we stop waiting to fall into love and start choosing to build it. The book also explains how love can be a powerful force for personal growth and social change. Practicing love changes the person who gives it as much as the person who receives it. The six components are not a checklist for perfection. They are a direction to keep choosing again and again.
The Six Pillars Apply to Every Kind of Love
One of the strengths of hooks’ definition is that it refuses to limit love to romance. The six ingredients apply to love of any kind: platonic, familial, romantic, one-night-only, and maybe even begrudging love. All About Love offers 13 chapters of bell hooks’ thoughts about different forms of love, including parental, romantic, patriotic, spiritual, and more. Whether the love is between parents and children, between lifelong friends, or between people who share a single meaningful moment, the same six components describe what makes that love real. Love is not defined by the type of relationship, but by how it is practiced within that relationship.
Self-Love and the Six Pillars
hooks applies the same standard to the relationship we have with ourselves. Self-love, she makes clear, is not a slogan. In All About Love, she writes: “It is no easy task to be self-loving. Simple axioms that make self-love sound easy only make matters worse.” The wounded heart learns self-love by first overcoming low self-esteem. In that work, hooks points to the importance of Nathaniel Branden’s lengthy work Six Pillars of Self-Esteem, which highlights practices that build a healthy sense of self. hooks also outlines five practices of healthy self-esteem: self-awareness, self-acceptance, self-responsibility, self-assertion, and purposeful living. These practices give the six pillars of love a place to begin: with the self.
Building Love in Daily Life
The six pillars of love are not abstract ideals. They become real in daily choices. bell hooks teaches that when we see love as a combination of trust, commitment, care, respect, knowledge, and responsibility, we can work on developing these qualities in ourselves. That work begins in small moments: a conversation where we listen, a promise we keep, a boundary we honor. Over time, those moments build the kind of love that can transform individuals and society. That is the promise of All About Love, and it is why these six components remain an essential framework for anyone who wants to love better. The pillars hold up a structure that we build one act at a time.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the six pillars of love bell hooks defines?
bell hooks defines love as a combination of six components: care, commitment, trust, responsibility, respect, and knowledge. She presents this definition in All About Love: New Visions and returns to it across her writing. The six components work together, and hooks argues that love is not just a feeling but an active practice that can transform individuals and society. Each pillar strengthens the others.
Does bell hooks say love is a feeling?
No. In All About Love, bell hooks argues that love is not just a feeling but an active practice. She defines love as a combination of care, commitment, trust, responsibility, respect, and knowledge, and she challenges common myths about love that keep people from doing the work of real love. Feelings may accompany love, but they do not define it. Love is something we choose and practice daily.
What forms of love does All About Love cover?
All About Love offers 13 chapters of bell hooks’ thoughts about different forms of love, including parental, romantic, patriotic, spiritual, and more. In every form, hooks applies the same six ingredients of love: care, commitment, trust, responsibility, respect, and knowledge. The book also examines power structures within relationships and questions the standards that love socialization teaches us to accept without reflection.
How does self-love relate to the six pillars of love?
bell hooks writes that it is no easy task to be self-loving, and she warns that simple axioms make self-love sound easier than it is. The wounded heart learns self-love by first overcoming low self-esteem. hooks highlights five practices of healthy self-esteem: self-awareness, self-acceptance, self-responsibility, self-assertion, and purposeful living. These practices are the foundation for offering the six pillars of love to others as well.