“For years I lived my life suspended, trapped by the past, unable to move into the future.”

In the Preface, hooks provides insight into her personal, lifelong journey with love. Before committing to a life of love and before writing this book, she struggled to know how to give and receive love in her life. This was largely because she had not yet confronted the traumas of her past; only when she accepted her troubling past was she able to love again.

“All the years of my life I thought I was searching for love I found, retrospectively, to be years where I was simply trying to recover what had been lost, to return to the first home, to get back the rapture of first love.”

Before she committed to a life of loving practice, hooks spent years trying to get back what she lost in her youth. She sought to reclaim the unconditional love she had been given as a child. It was only well into adulthood that hooks realized that she could never go back and find that same love again—she could only go forward.

“Profound changes in the way we think and act must take place if we are to create a loving culture.”

In the Introduction, hooks asserts her belief that modern society’s notions of love are damaging and unproductive. In her view, too many people, particularly young people, have become cynical about love and unwilling to believe in its existence and power. hooks believes that major cultural misconceptions about love need to be addressed for modern society to cultivate and maintain a loving culture.