I wasn’t built to be single. I could just be saying this because a guy canceled our date last week so he could “swap me out with another girl,” but there are other reasons. I like to cuddle and cling, to surprise someone with a gift so they ignore the dishes I promised to wash. Unfortunately, there aren’t any successful relationships modeled in my family or friend group, so I turned to a work that’s supposed to revolutionize any 20-something’s search for the big L: bell hooks’s’ All About Love: New Visions.

I can usually read a book in a day, but I’ve been struggling for weeks to get through these 272 pages. I expected to breeze through them and emerge from my room with all the necessary metaphors to turn my Hinge luck around. What I actually found, though, was a relentless string of theses I didn’t agree with, primarily because she advocates for a love opposite to the bubblegum rom-com version I’m used to.

Across 13 chapters, each highlighting a fundamental relationship type or tenant of true love, hooks rips my most beloved notions: the idea that you “fall” in love, the idea that parents can simultaneously love and abuse you, and the idea that you can find romantic love before self-love. Line by line, she pokes holes in popularized clichés, explaining how they all either derive from or support oppressive institutions like the patriarchy or capitalism.

If I take hooks’s arguments to be true, it turns out I’m not built for love either. And not just romantic love, but familial love, platonic love, self-love: It’s all a crapshoot. I can’t agree with those terms, but I also can’t leave the book alone because healthy debate is how I get to answers that matter.

Getting through this bestseller is like a tit-for-tat. I don’t believe abuse immediately negates love because I can’t imagine a person who has never wronged another, but I do agree that it’s impossible to accept a love from someone that you wouldn’t give to yourself. My opinions on her credibility waiver more than Donald Trump’s toupée in the wind, but her words have pushed me to interrogate my desires for connection in a way I wouldn’t have done on my own—even with a life coach in tow.

I’m not sure if it’s a process I’ll enjoy, but I’m sure it will lead somewhere more honest—somewhere where I spend just as much time checking in on my friends as I do swiping on Bumble. My biggest takeaway is that love is relentless work, and engaging in this philosophical quid pro quo between the kind of love I want and the kind of love she asserts as true is an entry-level requirement.

(Still figuring out) Love,
Kennedy Hill, brand development editor