Talking A Latte About Love

Melanin Queen Creative was happy to bring Black women together for Galentine’s weekend to talk about topics from the book "all about love” by bell hooks. The event kicked off with us listening to a self-love sound bath created by MQC’s own Tianna Christine to remind ourselves we are the source of our love and worth.

In the book, bell emphasizes how self-love is an important foundation in establishing love as a practice. She states: 

"Self-love is the foundation of our loving practice. Without it our other efforts to love fail. Giving ourselves love we provide our inner being with the opportunity to have the unconditional love we may have always longed to receive from someone else.”

Following the sound bath, we all journaled on how the intention word we picked speaks to us when it comes to practicing love. Some words we picked included: Give, Confidence, Curiosity, Trust, Love, and Communication.

One woman shared how her word, “Confidence,” spoke to how our feelings for ourselves dictate how other people view and treat us. We have to be confident and love who we are first before welcoming love from anyone else. This speaks to when bell stated:

“We can’t expect to get love from someone else we don’t give ourselves.”

After we all journaled about our intention word, it was time to do our self-card activity #9 Say What’s On A Sticky Note. This activity encourages you to write out affirmations on what you love about yourself. Each of us partnered up to read aloud our affirmations. Some of things we shared that we love about ourselves included:

• Being courageous
• Our smiles
• Ability to impact others in a positive way
• Having a great heart
• Being dope
• Our silliness

After sharing our affirmations, we spoke on the next topic from the book where our first concept of love usually starts. Bell states:

“We learn about love in childhood.”

Some women shared how expressing their feelings was usually a challenge in their upbringing. One woman shared how she was taught no one else was to care about her feelings, which in turn she found herself suppressing her feelings. Another woman shared how she didn’t feel love was poured into her. This led to her being the opposite when it came to raising her children. She made sure to express to her children how much they are loved.

                   “I wanted to break the cycle, not continue the cycle.”

We also spoke on how love can take different forms in our upbringing, especially when it comes to tough love. Tough love is sometimes needed when correcting behavior and can be healthy when done right.

For the final topic, we spoke on the importance of honesty. bell states:

“Choosing to be honest is the first step in the process of love. There is no practitioner of love who deceives. Once the choice has been made to be honest, then the next step on love’s path is communication.”

“You can’t establish boundaries without being honest with yourself first...you have to be open and honest first before someone else can respect and honor your boundaries.”

One woman pointed out how we need to be our agency of choice. This also led us to discuss being mindful of what it means to compromise vs. conceding.

“In compromise, you both can get what you want. It’s a win-win. In concession, one person gets their way and you go along with it.”

It was then time to do our final activity. We all wrote a love letter to ourselves from an honest standpoint on things to always remember when it comes to love: how to show love to ourselves, healthy ways to practice love, ways we want to receive and give love, not to give up on love, etc. MQC will randomly mail these letters throughout the year for each woman to receive.

We thank everyone who came out to this event. A special thanks goes to the Melanin Queens SC group for joining us and sharing a wonderful recap reel, and the Colored Girls Liberation Lab for first encouraging us to read this book. 

About the Book

“all about love” is a New York Times bestseller and enduring classic by renowned scholar and feminist icon, bell hooks. All About Love boldly shares radical new ways to think about love by showing its interconnectedness in our private and public lives. In eleven concise chapters, hooks explains how our everyday notions of what it means to give and receive love often fail us, and how these ideals are established in early childhood.


She explains how self-love (without narcissism) will bring peace and compassion to our personal and professional lives, and asserts the place of love to end struggles between individuals, in communities, and among societies.