Faye's 'Love in Exile' as Third Order Change
An extension of bell hooks for the 21st century.
I read All About Love by bell hooks when I was 20.
I read All About Love again, and properly, at 21, after spending around 12 days in a secure psychiatric facility, three hours away from my family, and an eternity away from the life I had led before.
hooks’ work on love changed me. Then suddenly, so did Shon Faye’s 2025 work, Love in Exile.
Prior to my illness I dismissed the philosophy as a gimmick, a frivolity; something that was less useful to me than the econometrics paper I bombed. I had a third of a degree in philosophy, but that was necessary to study the real subjects of politics and economics. Philosophy was hard and made no sense. The root of existence, knowledge or morality were irrelevant.
When I picked up All About Love in Blackwell’s, I had not bargained for the slow evisceration of my soul, and everything I thought I had known about some of the deepest relationships I had had at that point.
I was in a very different headspace when I bought Faye’s Love in Exile, thank God. Three years into my recovery; though on some level I was similarly fragile.
hooks’ All About Love makes a single, urgent claim: that love is not a feeling but ‘an act of will - namely, both an intention and an action’. For bell hooks, love is an ethical practice rooted in care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect, and trust. In her words, ‘love and abuse cannot coexist’. By the time I re-read hooks at 21, I had mistaken absence for love. I had mistaken endurance for care. I had internalised the emotional logic of patriarchy, which teaches us that love must be earned through suffering - and that those who harm us do so out of feeling too much, rather than too little.
hooks names this for what it is: domination, not devotion. She writes that ‘patriarchy has always exalted the ideal of love as the foundation of family life. Yet it has not allowed us to question whether it is truly love that binds us’. This forced a reckoning with my relationships - romantic, familial, institutional - in which I had been taught to see dependency as intimacy, control as protection, silence as stability.
Crucially, hooks insists that love cannot be private, apolitical, or isolated. ‘Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation’, she writes. ‘Healing is an of communion’, Her insistence that love is a collective and ethical practice, not merely an individual feeling, underpins All About Love and echoes powerfully throughout Love in Exile. Indeed, by page five, hooks receives the first of many references. Her influence is foundational.
Love in Exile is a work of extraordinary clarity and depth, structured across eight chapters that chart a movement from personal rupture to collective reimagining. It begins, as many of us do, with heartbreak - not simply romantic, but existential. In The Brokenheart, Faye captures the disorientation of grief in a world that treats loss as failure. What follows is a forensic account of the emotional conditions of the 21st century. System Failure lays bare the brutalising effects of neoliberal individualism: how our capacity for intimacy is shaped - and often stunted - by systems that reward disconnection.
Each chapter turns the prism slightly. In The Pantomime, Faye examines sex not as transgression, but as performance, shaped by scripts we didn’t write yet often feel compelled to follow. Mother and Blackout explore the emotional voids many of us inherit, and the coping strategies - parenthood, substances, silence - that fail to fill them. Yet the book is not without repair. In Community, friendship is held up not as compensation for failed romance but as a radical and sustaining form of love. In Self, care becomes a discipline not a consumer product. And in Agape, the final chapter, Faye gestures toward something more expansive: a love that is not self-sacrifice, but illumination. A love that moves outward toward others, toward justice, toward the world.
What makes Love in Exile remarkable is its refusal to settle for the binary of isolation or coupledom. It asks us to sit with complexity. To locate meaning not in neat resolution but in the ongoing practice of commitment, even when the object of that commitment is uncertain. It is a text that speaks to this moment with precision and with hope.
This, too, is a form of third-order change. Not simply a shift in behaviour (first-order) or in beliefs and norms (second-order), but a transformation in the frameworks we use to make meaning. Third-order change alters the lens itself: how we define problems, what counts as knowledge, what feels possible. Often brought about by crisis, rupture, or radical introspection, it does not just redirect our path; it reorients how we see the terrain. It reshapes how we understand ourselves, others, and the conditions under which love and solidarity might become possible again.
Both hooks and Faye refuse to offer love as escape. Instead, they offer it as engagement - not with fantasy, but with reality. They remind us that love is not the prize at the end of healing, but the process by which healing becomes possible at all. When the world around us insists that isolation is strength and that detachment is maturity, All About Love and Love in Exile offer a counterclaim: that to be human is to be bound up with others. That freedom is not found in avoidance, but in accountability.
Reading these books in the wake of illness did not simply restore my faith in others. It gave me the language to reimagine what ‘others’ could mean. Not just romantic partners, but friends, communities, co-conspirators in care. People we choose, and people who choose us back. These are not minor texts. They are maps! Maps not to easy salvation, but to an ethics of being alive with one another, in all our frailty and ferocity.
When I first picked up All About Love, I was still raw - blinking against fluorescent lights, trying to rebuild a sense of self from the rubble. When I later opened Love in Exile, I was steadier, but no less in need of something to hold onto - a scaffolding for meaning that didn’t collapse under scrutiny. What these books offered was not certainty, but structure. Not affirmation, but a challenge: to love better, more ethically, more expansively.
Once, I saw philosophy as a plaything. Something to survive, not something to live by. But these books disabused me of that. All About Love and Love in Exile are philosophical works in the truest sense, not abstract riddles, but demands to live differently and more courageously in relation to others. They taught me that love is not beneath politics, or beyond it, but at its core. That care is not weakness, but resistance.
I will return to them both, as a pair, not for comfort, but for reckoning. Books that ask me not who I am, but how I love, and who I dare to become next.