“Love is as love does. Love is an act of will — namely, both an intention and an action.”

What does it mean?

Love is as love does. Love is an act of will, both an intention and an action. It is not a feeling that excuses behaviour. The action is the evidence. If the deeds are absent, the word is not yet true. A rival reading says this moralises love into a duty and loses the unruly feeling people actually mean. She does not call feelings fake. She denies them the right to be the whole definition. A love that only feels, and does not will someone's growth, fails the test.

Did bell hooks really say this?

The library’s label is Well attested. hooks's own English in All About Love. She is drawing on a definition associated with M. Scott Peck and making it hers in a book about love as a practice. The sentence is securely hers in this wording.

Where it comes from

All About Love: New Visions

Approximate date: 2000.

How to use it

Pick one person you say you love and name the action, this week, in a house in Birmingham or on a video call home, that would count as care rather than as a feeling. She thinks the action is the love. The feeling can be real and still, on this test, not be enough.

A mindset reading

All About Love argues that a culture can talk about love constantly and practise domination, neglect, and abuse under the same word. The definition is how she takes the word back. It is not a greeting-card improvement.

Understand the philosophy

The sentence is her English in the 2000 book. Feelings are not dismissed. They are refused the last word. That refusal is the argument, and it is why the sentence is harder than it sounds on a mug.

Related

• “The word 'love' is most often defined as a noun, yet we would all love better if we used it as a verb.”

  Well attested

• “The classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy.”

  Well attested

Related fallacy. Appeal to emotion. Feeling can explain why a question matters. It becomes a fallacy when pity, fear, anger, or pride is offered instead of a reason that the claim is true. A sad case can be real and still not answer the question that was asked.

Practise the nine skills