I’m going to tell you a love story, the first one I ever knew.

My mom met my dad when she was fourteen years old.

She was walking across campus when my father, sixteen, stopped to ask for her number. He wrote it on a slip of paper and called her up. They still have the paper.

They never broke up, never separated, and they still get excited to go to Costco together. You have to see it. So you can imagine that I grew up with some pretty damn high expectations. I thought love would fall out of the sky.

And for the longest time, I wanted it to. I wanted to be walking through high school one minute and into the arms of my soul mate the next.

But all I ever ran into were brick walls with bad breath and wandering hands and girlfriends. It was the first great revolution of my life to begin to see each of those walls as the greatest lessons in life that I could ask for; lessons I was realizing that my parents never got. I was learning more about myself and about the world through heartbreak than through anything else. It was teaching me, forcing me to grow, and molding me into something that I didn’t yet know that I would find beautiful one day.

So love became an education. It became an endeavor. It became the thing that I wanted to know everything about.

THE BOOK ABOUT LOVE THAT HEALS MY HEART

Which is where I landed upon All About Love by bell hooks.

I joke that I come back to this book so often that I should use a different colored pen to underline it each time, one for every guy that I date.

But really, what’s brilliant about it is that it transcends purely romantic love to include all forms of connection and the ways in which we fatally misunderstand them. And like any thorough examiner looking to the the root of our suffering, hooks targets childhood as the source of our largest misunderstandings about love, radiating upward and outward to explain the rest.

Here are some of those misunderstandings that have changed how I understand, receive, and give love.

power & fear overpowering the desire to love

As a twenty year old with more information on the inner-workings of my generation than I would care to possess, I can tell you that fear and anxiety absolutely plague us.

I truly believe that my generation is stunted when it comes to forging authentic connection. We have been hiding behind screens since sixth grade, wearing the internet like a facade of confidence that falls to the floor in a room full of strangers. I walk into classrooms everyday where no one says a word to the person next to them. No one seems eager to talk anymore, let alone love.

I highlight how hooks point to power and fear to explain this lack, for they are the rulers of our lives.

We will do anything to feel in control.

We want to have power, which is to say, we don’t ever want to be caught feeling weak. And as hooks highlights all throughout her book, one of our most toxic misunderstandings about love is that it makes you weak. We turn our backs to the beauty and strength that is found within healthy love because we don’t want to risk actually caring. We take a cynical stance so that we can’t get hurt. Or, so that we can’t get hurt again.

Hooks poignantly explains that even though love often hurts us, it is the only thing that will ever heal us. But we have to let it. If we don’t, if we build a hard shell around ourselves and refuse to be so uncool as to love, we risk spending our lives closed off and hollow; letting fear overpower our natural instinct to care.

That, she argues, is the reason behind the facade of apathy that covers our world, the facade that silences any meaningful conversation about love and how much we all want it. Because we do, all want it.

dissolving the power dynamic

One of the most toxic things I ever picked up in my girlhood was the idea that girls are supposed to play hard to get. If we don’t, boys will lose interest. The women in my life all told me the same thing: if you like him, ignore him.

And this, above all else, wrecked me. It made me blame myself for anything that ever went wrong in a relationship, as if love were a game that I only needed to learn how to be better at pretending not to try at. It was strategy, and we were all learning it.

Hooks completely debunks this.

She subverts every fucked up thing you have ever been told about the dynamics of a relationship.

Focusing on heterosexual couples, she exposes how men and women are taught seek the affection of each other in order to gain status in the world. In a patriarchal society, men feel powerful when they are with a woman and women feel validated by the love of a man.

It breeds a relationship model where we go in knowing the role that we are supposed to play, as if it were an algorithm. Hooks brilliantly reveals that this is bullshit. She explains that real love cannot coexist with a desire for control. As long as one is trying to remain in control and unscathed, they remain emotionally blocked from authentic connection.

In other words, she argues that as long as you are trying to be cool, as long as you are worrying about who is texting first or who will “cave” and say “I love you” before the other, you will never know love. You will only know a game. Love is something else entirely.

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