bell hooks on Love: Love Is as Love Does

The Quote

"Love is as love does. 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." The sentence comes from the opening chapter of bell hooks's All About Love: New Visions, one of the most influential works on love in modern philosophy and culture.

Context

hooks begins All About Love with an act of clarification. She observes that the word "love" has been so degraded that it can mean almost anything — a feeling, a mood, a transaction, a duty. To restore its meaning, she turns to a definition from M. Scott Peck's The Road Less Traveled: love is "the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth." She adopts this definition and sharpens it: love is not an involuntary feeling but an act of will — an intention carried out in action, and therefore a choice.

Meaning

The three sentences compress an entire ethics. "Love is as love does" makes action the test of love: we do not know what people feel by their declarations but by their behavior. "Love is an act of will" removes love from the passive register of moods — it is not something that happens to us but something we do. "Will also implies choice" completes the argument: if love is a choice, we are responsible for it. The final sentence, "We do not have to love. We choose to love," is the most radical: it denies the excuse of inevitability. No one is compelled to love; to love is always a free act, and therefore always an achievement.

Philosophical Interpretation

The definition has deep roots in the philosophy of love. It belongs to the tradition that identifies love with the active willing of the beloved's good — the tradition of Aristotle's friendship of virtue, of Christian charity, of Fromm's "art of loving." What hooks adds is a sharp critical edge: if love is action, then the language of love is not enough, and the culture's romanticization of feeling becomes a way of avoiding the work of love. The definition also carries a feminist implication. hooks writes against a culture in which love is sentimentalized and abuse is excused as passion; defining love as action protects the distinction between love and harm. And the definition is democratic: since love is a choice, it is available to everyone — not a talent but a practice.

Legacy

All About Love has become a touchstone of modern love ethics, and its definition — love as the choice to nurture growth — has entered the common language of relationships, therapy, and self-help. The phrase "love is as love does" circulates widely as a test of genuine care. The book's insistence that love is an action rather than a feeling has influenced both the feminist ethics of care and the popular conversation about healthy relationships. hooks's achievement was to make a demanding philosophical thesis feel like a homecoming: love is not the feeling we fall into; it is the work we choose.

The Deeper Lesson

The definition carries a critique of the culture hooks calls the "fantasy of love" — the endless romantic stories in which love is a feeling that overcomes us and therefore excuses us. If love is a feeling, then we cannot be blamed for failing to love: feelings happen, like weather. If love is a choice, everything changes: we are responsible for whether we love, and the work of love is always before us. The definition also dissolves the boundary between self-love and love of others. If love is "as love does," then the way we treat ourselves is love in action or its absence: the way we speak to ourselves in failure, the promises we keep or break with ourselves, the care we take of our own growth. hooks's definition is therefore not merely a theory of romance; it is a whole ethics, an answer to the question of how to live, with love as the central practice.

There is a political edge as well. hooks writes in a culture where harm is routinely committed in the name of love — where abuse is excused as passion, where control is described as care. The definition "love is as love does" is a weapon against this deception: it judges love by its actions, not its declarations. A relationship that harms is not loving, whatever its feelings. This is why the definition has been so widely embraced: it gives people a standard by which to test their own relationships and the relationships offered to them.

The Wisdom for Today

The practical wisdom of the quote is a daily practice. It asks us to translate love from a noun into a verb: not "do I feel love?" but "am I loving?" — in this conversation, this silence, this disagreement, this ordinary Tuesday. It invites us to audit our relationships by their actions: care, respect, honesty, responsibility, commitment. And it extends the audit inward: am I loving toward myself — in my self-talk, my rest, my boundaries, my growth? The definition refuses the excuse of inevitability: "we do not have to love; we choose to love." That sentence is both a burden and a gift. The burden: no one is off the hook. The gift: love is available — not as a mood that strikes us but as a choice we can make, again and again, beginning with ourselves.

Relations

This quote defines love as action and choice, and it is the heart of the argument in All About Love about how to love more deeply . It belongs to the philosophy of love and to the tradition of feminist ethics.

Sources

1. "Love." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/love/
2. "Feminist Ethics." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-ethics/
3. bell hooks. All About Love: New Visions (New York: William Morrow, 2001), chapter 1.