All about Love: Love Song to the Nation Book 1

In Chapter 8, hooks asserts that “there is no better place to learn the art of loving than in community” (129). Recognizing that community exists in many different places, she focuses mainly on the process of seeking community through family and friendships.

In her discussion of family as community, hooks notes the significance of the nuclear family in traditional understandings of love. Despite the general expectation that the nuclear family—the “primary organization for the parenting of children”—is a source of unconditional love and care, hooks also recognizes its capacity to be “a breeding ground for abuses of power” (130). The power struggles inherent to the nuclear family come in the form of a lack of justice for children who are cared for by adults. hooks’s personal anecdotes illustrate the limitations of the nuclear family and its intrinsic ability—given its patriarchal structure—to cause harm on those who exist within it but without power. When hooks, as a child, could not receive from her immediate family the love she needed, she looked elsewhere. With her own family too dysfunctional to provide the healthy parenting she needed, hooks turned to her extended family, and from that experience learned that “the extended family is a good place to learn the power of community” (132). Within her extended family, hooks found she could communicate her needs in ways she could not in her immediate family, which was opportune given that “talking together is one way to make community” (132).

Similarly, friendships offer a place for community. hooks explains that friendship is often “the place in which many of us have our first glimpse of redemptive love and caring community” (134). As in all loving relationships, meaningful friendships require trust and communication; the practice of communicating honestly and with loving purpose in friendships, just as in family, breeds intimacy. In turn, intimacy fosters genuine love. Ultimately, learning to love in friendships “empowers us in ways that enable us to bring this love to other interactions with family or with romantic bonds” (134). Moreover, learning to love in any relationship—be it familial, romantic, or platonic—enables people to meaningfully give and receive love in other facets of life. Finding community is imperative to loving practice, for “the love we make in community stays with us wherever we go” (144).