We talk about love like it is something that happens to us. We fall into it. We are swept off our feet. We catch feelings, as if love were a cold going around. bell hooks looked at all of that and gently called it a problem.
In her book All About Love she made an argument that sounds obvious once you hear it and changes everything once you believe it. We struggle with love, she said, partly because we have never agreed on what the word even means. We use it for the thing we feel watching a sunset, and the thing we feel about our mother, and the thing we feel after three good dates, and then we are surprised when it keeps slipping through our hands.
Her fix was to make love a verb
hooks borrowed a definition she loved from the psychiatrist M. Scott Peck. Love is the will to extend yourself for the purpose of nurturing your own or another person's growth. Notice what is missing from that. There is no mention of how you feel. Love, in this telling, is something you decide to do and then do.
Love is as love does, she wrote. Love is an act of will. Both an intention and an action. You can feel enormous warmth toward someone and still not be loving them, if none of it ever turns into the actual work of care. And you can be loving someone well on a day you do not feel especially warm at all, because love was never only the feeling. It was the choosing.
This is bracing, because it removes our favorite excuse. If love is a feeling, then when it fades we get to say it is gone and walk away blameless. If love is something we do, then its presence or absence is on us. That is harder. It is also the only version that can actually hold a relationship together.
What loving actually looks like
hooks was specific, which is part of why people trust her. When we are loving, she said, we are openly and honestly expressing care, affection, respect, commitment, and trust. Those are not moods. They are behaviors you can choose today, fail at tomorrow, and choose again. She also insisted that love and harm cannot share a house. Neglect is not love. Control is not love. We may want to call them that, but love is as love does, and those do something else.
For anyone dating, this is a quietly powerful filter. It moves your attention off the intoxicating question of how does this person make me feel, and onto the steadier one of how does this person actually treat me, and how do I actually treat them. Feelings will lie to you in the first few weeks. Behavior, watched patiently, tells the truth.
Choosing love on purpose
The reason this matters before you have even met someone is that it makes love a thing you can prepare for, rather than wait for. You can decide, in advance, that you are looking to do love and not just feel it. You can stop auditioning for the role of the person who gets chosen and start becoming the person who chooses well.
That is the whole spirit behind how we built TwiSoul. We wanted a way of meeting people that rewards intention over impulse, that gives you the room to watch how someone actually shows up rather than how good they are at a first impression. bell hooks would have had little patience for a feed that trains you to judge a human being in half a second. Love is as love does. So is dating, if you let it be.
You do not fall into the kind of love she was describing. You build it, on purpose, with someone who has decided to build it too. The first step is choosing to take it that seriously. The rest is just finding each other.