Communion: The Female Search for Love

Dedication

To all of you who dance with me in the circle of love—

To Anthony with whom I whirl and whirl and whirl

Epigraph

There is an eros present at every meeting, and this is also sacred. One only has to listen inwardly to the histories and resonances of the word we use for religious experience. In Sanskrit the word satsang, which translates into English as meeting, means godly gathering. In the English language the word common is linked through the word communicate to communion. . . . To exist in a state of communion is to be aware of the nature of existence.

—SUSAN GRIFFIN

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Preface

The Soul Seeks Communion

One: Aging to Love, Loving to Age

Two: Love’s Proper Place

Three: Looking for Love, Finding Freedom

Four: Finding Balance: Work and Love

Five: Gaining Power, Losing Love

Six: Women Who Fail at Loving

Seven: Choosing and Learning to Love

Eight: Grow Into a Woman’s Body and Love It

Nine: Sisterhood: Love and Solidarity

Ten: Our Right to Love

Eleven: The Search for Men Who Love

Twelve: Finding a Man to Love

Thirteen: For Women Only: Lesbian Love

Fourteen: Lasting Love: Romantic Friendships

Fifteen: Witness to Love: Between Generations

Sixteen: Blissed Out: Loving Communion

About the Author

Praise

Also by bell hooks

Copyright

About the Publisher

Preface

The Soul Seeks Communion

WOMEN talk about love. From girlhood on, we learn that conversations about love are a gendered narrative, a female subject. Our obsessions about love begin not with the first crush or the first fall. They begin with that first recognition that females matter less than males, that no matter how good we are, in the eyes of a patriarchal universe we are never quite good enough. Femaleness in patriarchal culture marks us from the very beginning as unworthy or not as worthy, and it should come as no surprise that we learn to worry most as girls, as women, about whether we are worthy of love.

Raised with competitive, fault-finding mothers and fathers whom we can never really please or in a world where we are the perfect Daddy’s girl who fears losing his approval to the point where we stop eating, stop growing up because we see Daddy losing interest, because we see he does not love women, we are uncertain about love. To keep his love we must cling to girlhood at all costs. All girls continue to be taught when they are young, if not by their parents then by the culture around them, that they must earn the right to be loved—that femaleness is not good enough. This is a female’s first lesson in the school of patriarchal thinking and values. She must earn love. She is not entitled. She must be good to be loved. And good is always defined by someone else, someone on the outside. Writing about her relationship with her dad in the essay Dancing on My Father’s Shoes, Patricia Ruff offers a heartrending account of losing the sense of being worthy of love, of being valued, confessing, My mother told me that he wanted a daughter first and couldn’t have been more delighted when he got me. So I was unprepared when my princess status, quite without warning, was ripped away raggedly, like a sheet of paper torn from a notebook. Something happened that no one explained to me. . . . I had no voice for my feeling and was without words for the anger and pain over his being suddenly beyond reach. Concerned that her younger sister might feel the same pain of being emotionally rejected, Ruff suggested that they confront their father together: We burst into their bedroom, threw ourselves on our stunned father, who remained stone still and speechless as we cried all over him, grabbing him, holding on, not wanting to let go. ‘Daddy, please hold us, tell us you love us, we love you, we need you to love us,’ we begged. Rejection and abandonment by fathers and mothers is the space of lack that usually sets the stage for female desperation to find and know love.

Often girls feel deeply cared about as small children but then find as we develop willpower and independent thought that the world stops affirming us, that we are seen as unlovable. This is the insight Madonna Kolbenschlag shares in Lost in the Land of Oz about the nature of a female’s fate: "In some fundamental way, we have all been deprived of love, of mothering—if not of love, then of the feeling that we have been loved. Knowing we were loved is not enough; we have to feel it." How can any girl sustain the belief that she is loved, truly loved, when all around her she sees that femaleness is despised? Unable to change the fact of femaleness, she strives to make herself over, to become someone worthy of love.

Schooled to believe that we find ourselves in relation with others, females learn early to search for love in a world beyond our own hearts. We learn in childhood that the roots of love lie outside our capabilities, that to know love we must be loved by others. For as females in patriarchal culture, we cannot determine our self-worth. Our value, our worth, and whether or not we can be loved are always determined by someone else. Deprived of the means to generate self-love, we look to others to render us lovable; we long for love and we search.

While contemporary feminist movement critiqued the devaluation of the female that begins in girlhood, it did not change it. Today’s girls grow up in a world where they will learn from many quarters that women are the equals of men, but there is still no real place for feminist thinking and practice in girlhood. Girls today struggle against sexist defining roles in the same ways that girls did before the contemporary feminist movement. While strands of feminism here and there support that struggle, more often than not, girls feel besieged by the mixed messages that come from being born into a world where women’s liberation has been given a small place even as girls remained trapped in the arms of patriarchy. A measure of that entrapment is the widespread fear among all girls, irrespective of race or class, that they will not be loved.

Within patriarchal culture, the girl who does not feel loved in her family of origin is given another chance to prove her worth when she is encouraged to seek love from males. Schoolgirl crushes, mad obsessions, compulsive longings for male attention and approval indicate that she is rightly pursuing her gendered destiny, on the road to becoming the female who can be nothing without a man. Whether she is heterosexual or homosexual, the extent to which she yearns for patriarchal approval will determine whether she is worthy to be loved. This is the emotional uncertainty that haunts the lives of all females in patriarchal culture.

From the start, then, females are confused about the nature of love. Socialized in the false assumption that we will find love in the place where femaleness is deemed unworthy and consistently devalued, we learn early to pretend that love matters more than anything, when in actuality we know that what matters most, even in the wake of feminist movement, is patriarchal approval. From birth on, most females live in fear that we will be abandoned, that if we step outside the approved circle, we will not be loved.

Given our early obsessions with seducing and pleasing others to affirm our worth, we lose ourselves in the search to be accepted, included, desired. Our talk about love has heretofore primarily been a talk about desire. For the most part, the feminist movement did not change female obsession with love, nor did it offer us new ways to think about love. It told us that we were better off if we stopped thinking about love, if we could live our lives as though love did not matter, because if we did not do so we were in danger of becoming a member of a truly despised female category: the woman who loves too much. The irony, of course, is that most of us were not loving too much; we were not loving at all. What we were was emotionally needy, desperate for the recognition (whether from male or female partners) that would prove our worth, our value, our right to be alive on the planet, and we were willing to do anything to get it. As females in a patriarchal culture, we were not slaves of love; most of us were and are slaves of longing—yearning for a master who will set us free and claim us because we cannot claim ourselves.

Feminism offered us the promise that a culture would be created where we could be free and know love. But that promise has not been fulfilled. Many females are still confused, wondering about the place of love in our lives. Many of us have been afraid to acknowledge that love matters, for fear we will be despised and shamed by women who have come to power within patriarchy by closing off emotions, by becoming like the patriarchal men we once critiqued as cold and hard-hearted. Power feminism is just another scam in which women get to play patriarchs and pretend that the power we seek and gain liberates us. Because we did not create a grand body of work that would have taught girls and women new and visionary ways to think about love, we witness the rise of a generation of females in our late twenties and early thirties who see any longing for love as weakness, who focus our sights solely on gaining power.

Patriarchy has always seen love as women’s work, degraded and devalued labor. And it has not cared when women failed to learn how to love, for patriarchal men have been the most willing to substitute care for love, submission for respect. We did not need a feminist movement to let us know that females are more likely to be concerned with relationships, connection, and community than are males. Patriarchy trains us for this role. We do need a feminist movement to remind us again and again that love cannot exist in a context of domination, that the love we seek cannot be found as long as we are bound and not free.

In my first book on the subject, All About Love: New Visions, I was careful to state again and again that women are not inherently more loving than men but that we are encouraged to learn how to love. That encouragement has been the catalyst for women to seek love, to look hard and long at the practice of love. And to confront our fears of not being loving, of not being loved enough. The women in our culture who have the most to teach everyone about the nature of love are the generation of females who learned through feminist struggle and feminist-based therapy that self-love was the key to finding and knowing love.

We, women who love, are among a generation of women who moved beyond the patriarchal paradigms to find ourselves. The journey to true selfhood demanded of us the invention of a new world, one in which we courageously dared to rebirth the girl within and welcome her into life, into a world where she is born valued, loved, and eternally worthy. Loving that girl within has healed the woundedness that often led us to search for love in all the wrong places. Midlife for many of us has been the fabulous moment of pause where we begin to contemplate the true meaning of love in our lives. We begin to see clearly how much love matters, not the old patriarchal versions of love but a deeper understanding of love as a transformational force demanding of each individual accountability and responsibility for nurturing our spiritual growth.

We bear witness to the truth that no female can find freedom without first finding her way to love. Our search for love has led us to understand fully the meaning of communion. In The Eros of Everyday Life, Susan Griffin writes, The wish for communion exists in the body. It is not for strategic reasons alone that gathering together has been at the heart of every movement for social change. . . . These meetings were in themselves the realizations of a desire that is at the core of human imaginings, the desire to locate ourselves in community, to make our survival a shared effort, to experience a palpable reverence in our connections with each other and the earth that sustains us. The communion in love our souls seek is the most heroic and divine quest any human can take.

That females are born into a patriarchal world, which first invites us to make the journey to love and then places barriers in our way, is one of life’s ongoing tragedies. The time has come for female elders to rescue girls and young women, to offer them a vision of love that will sustain them on their journey. To seek love as a quest for the true self liberates. All females who dare to follow our hearts to find such love are entering a cultural revolution that restores our souls and allows us to see clearly the value and meaning of love in our lives. While romantic love is a crucial part of this journey, it is no longer deemed all that matters; rather, it is an aspect of our overall work to create loving bonds, circles of love that nurture and sustain collective female well-being.

Communion: The Female Search for Love shares our struggle to know true love and our triumphs. Gathering together wisdom gleaned from women who have come to know love in midlife, women who often wandered lost in a desert of the heart through most of our teen years and on into our late twenties, Communion lets us hear the knowledge of women over thirty and beyond who as seekers on love’s path discovered along the way new visions, healing insights, and remembered rapture.

This book is testimony, a celebration of the joy women find when we restore the search for love to its rightful, heroic place at the center of our lives. We long to be loved and we long to be free. Communion tells us how we fulfill that longing. Sharing the pain, the struggle, the work women do to overcome our fear of abandonment and of loss, the ways we push past the wounded passion to open our hearts, Communion urges us to come again and again to the place where we can know joy, to come and celebrate, to join the circle of love.

One

Aging to Love, Loving to Age

EVERY day I talk to women about love and aging. It’s an over-forty thing to do. The exciting news is this: Everyone agrees that aging is more fun than it has ever been before. It has its joys and delights. It also has its problems. What’s new for many women is that the problems don’t always get us down. And if they do, we don’t stay down—we pick ourselves up and start over. This is part of the magic, the power and pleasure of midlife. Even though trashing feminism has become as commonplace as chatting about the weather, we all owe feminism, the women’s liberation movement, women’s lib—whatever you call it. It helped change how women see aging. Many of us feel better about aging because the old scripts that told us life ends at thirty or forty, that we turn into sexless zombies who bitch bitch bitch all the time and make everyone around us miserable were thrown away. So it does not matter that feminist movement has its faults—it helped everyone let these scripts go. And I do mean everyone.

We have changed our ways of thinking about aging and we have changed our ways of thinking about love. When the world started changing for women because of feminist movement and a lot became more equal than it ever had been, for a time it was only women who had been allowed a taste of power—class privilege or education or extra-special-hard-to-ignore-gifts—who most got it and got with it. These women were among the feminist avant-garde. Often they had exceptional advantages or were overachievers. While feminism helped these women soar, it often failed to change in any way the lives of masses of ordinary women. Many advantages gained by women’s lib did not trickle down, but the stuff around aging did. By challenging sexist ways of thinking about the body, feminism offered new standards of beauty, telling us plump bodies were luscious and big bellies sublime, that hair hanging under our arms and covering our legs was alluring. It created new possibilities of self-actualization in both our work lives and our intimate lives.

As women have changed our minds about aging, no longer seeing it as negative, we have begun to think differently about the meaning of love in midlife. Beth Benatovich’s collection of interviews What We Know So Far: Wisdom Among Women, offers powerful testimony affirming this fact. With prophetic insight, writer Erica Jong declares, I believe that this is a moment of history in which we are engaged in a kind of spiritual revolution—the kind of revolution that creates pathfinders. . . . Older women are again being accorded their ancient role as prophetesses and advisors. . . . That’s the great transformation that’s happening again in our time. In looking to things other than the body beautiful for inspiration, we’re being forced to redefine the second half of our lives, to become pathfinders. Difficulties still abound for aging women. What’s most changed is the constructive way women of all ages, classes, and ethnicities cope with these difficulties. Open, honest conversations about the myriad ways empty-nest syndrome, the death of parents or a spouse, and/or the deeply tragic death of a child all create psychological havoc in our lives have helped. Our talk of this suffering would be stale and commonplace, were it not for all the creative ways women are attending to the issue of aging both in midlife and