All About Love: New Visions in Ultimate Popsugar Reading Challenge

Feb 05, 2009 Rachel rated it really liked it

Shelves: reread_sometime_in_this_life

I’ve reread this book several times and while some parts don’t hold up there is one chapter I keep coming back to. We’ll get to that. There are some parts that did not age well (I’m thinking particularly of the mention of Nicole Simpson and Monica Lewinsky). There are some places where she mentions there’s lots of research to back up what she’s saying but fails to cite it.
But mostly where hooks brings me back in is Chapter 8: Loving Community. Here hooks discusses the many varieties of a family I’ve reread this book several times and while some parts don’t hold up there is one chapter I keep coming back to. We’ll get to that. There are some parts that did not age well (I’m thinking particularly of the mention of Nicole Simpson and Monica Lewinsky). There are some places where she mentions there’s lots of research to back up what she’s saying but fails to cite it.
But mostly where hooks brings me back in is Chapter 8: Loving Community. Here hooks discusses the many varieties of a family; particularly those that involve friends and extended family. She notes how a small, nuclear family could be used to house secrets and dysfunction in a way that might be challenged within a larger family with many different personalities. Sure, that may be another generalization but this one spoke to me. I have always been grateful, and more so as I get older, to my chosen family. Those people who show up and care not because they have to but because they want to. And this is what hooks speaks about in loving community, ‘Since we choose our friends, many of us, from childhood on into our adulthood, have looked to friends for the care, respect, knowledge m, and all-around nurturance of our growth that we did not find in the family.’ We have been taught to put romantic relationships front and center even when these relationships tear us down, even when ‘I found myself accepting behavior (verbal and physical abuse) that I would not have tolerated in a friendship.’

“Trust is the heartbeat of genuine love.” This chapter revealed to me some depressing cultural truths that are just as relevant now as they were when this book was published in 2000. “All too often women believe it is a sign of commitment, an expression of love, to endure unkindness or cruelty, to forgive and forget. In actuality, when we live rightly we know that the healthy, loving response to cruelty and abuse is putting ourselves out of harm’s way.” I would add that this statement does not just pertain to women but that many people find themselves repeating abusive relationship patterns and don’t know how to leave. We’re taught we need to fix everything.
This chapter also speaks about solitude, not only ‘seek[ing] community to escape the fear of being alone’ but learning how to be still and comfortable in being alone.
For the times where the generalizations in this book frustrated me a tad or I wanted to see the research hooks claimed, it also provided me a new way to think about love, new vocabulary to be able to speak about it, and a want to tilt my actions towards a genuine love I know that I, and others, are capable of. ...more

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