Communion: The Female Search for Love

“Without these new visions to serve as guides and maps, the path to love remains difficult to find and the search for love leaves us unfulfilled and lacking. Women, along with the culture as a whole, need constructive visions of redemptive love. We need to return to love and proclaim its transformative power.”

hooks explains her mission in writing Communion while referring back to the work she completed in All About Love. She wants to redefine love and encourage women to find this redefined love that centers on community building. The use of metaphors such as “guides and maps” reinforces the idea that love is not an inherent trait but a learned practice, one that requires intention and direction. Her call for “redemptive love” also introduces The Redefinition of Love in Feminist Terms, emphasizing that love is not merely a destination but an ongoing process of transformation and renewal.

“I had not chosen this identity; it had been imposed on me by unseen forces. I could not help the fact that I longed for a good book more than I longed to hold hands with Oscar Brewer.”

hooks offers a personal example of the philosophical topics that she discusses in Chapter 2, illustrating that she too experiences the issue she discusses on the page. The specificity of the sentence, naming Oscar Brewer as the boy she does not want to hold hands with instead of simply saying “a boy,” makes the example more powerful to the audience. Her use of contrast—placing the act of reading in opposition to romantic attachment—also challenges traditional gendered expectations of love. By stating that her identity was “imposed,” hooks underscores the way societal norms shape individual desires, reinforcing her argument that self-definition must come from within rather than through patriarchal constructs.

“All my rebellion had been about small matters. And the punishments were fierce. Suddenly there were no guards, no spies, no one to come home and report to. Yet I still had to contend with the overseers in my own mind.”

hooks illustrates the role her own mind plays in the suppression of her rebellion against patriarchy, illustrating the ways that patriarchy influences women both directly and indirectly. While hooks frees herself from her patriarchal childhood home, the influence of that environment still follows her. Her use of metaphor, likening her childhood to a prison system with “guards” and “spies,” highlights the oppressive surveillance that women experience under patriarchy. Even in physical freedom, the “overseers” in her mind illustrate the lasting impact of internalized oppression, reinforcing the idea that liberation requires both external and internal transformation.

“However, when it came to the subject of love, the narrative had changed, but we were still waiting to see if women and men would embrace the new narratives and love each other differently. We were disturbed and frightened by the recognition that women might find it easier to gain equality with men in the workforce and even in the bedroom but that we might still never find love.”

hooks engages in analysis of the concepts of both love and power throughout Communion. Even as love changes, and hooks and other feminists work to redefine love, women still worry that power and equality will never lead to true love. The phrase “the narrative had changed” acknowledges progress in feminist discourse, yet the uncertainty that follows—“but we were still waiting”—reflects the lingering anxieties about whether cultural shifts translate into personal fulfillment. By juxtaposing workplace equality with emotional alienation, hooks critiques the incomplete nature of feminist gains when love remains undervalued.

“There is little literature documenting what really happened when ordinary women already in patriarchal families changed their thinking and endeavored to incorporate feminist values into their family lives. This untold story would expose the failure of feminism to offer concrete guidelines showing ways to convert the family to feminist thinking. Most women had to go it alone. And many of them gave up, surrendered to the status quo, depressed and defeated.”

hooks engages in historical analysis of the feminist movement after women became more prevalent in the workforce. While women were able to obtain work, hooks clearly illustrates that feminism “failed” to change the dynamics of traditional families. hooks critiques this movement, something she engages with throughout much of her body of work.

Her use of the phrase “go it alone” reinforces the feeling of isolation that many women felt when attempting to integrate feminist values into their personal lives. This critique highlights the need for collective action and community support, underscoring her broader argument that love and feminism must be intertwined.

“Not only were masses of women entering the workforce, but also they were embracing a newfound psychological independence. This became the foundation for women to demand more from love.”

hooks establishes the connection between women working and women seeking love. Work and love are both important to women’s self-actualization and independence, and hooks illustrates how work allowed women to seek “more” from the love they experience. Her phrase “psychological independence” signals a shift beyond material gains, framing feminist liberation as a mental and emotional transformation. The phrase “demand more” reinforces the idea that love, like equality, is something to be actively pursued and not passively accepted under patriarchal terms.

“What if the real discovery that feminists could not speak was the fact that men did not care if we were their equals everywhere, including the battlefield, as long they remained our superiors—the ones in charge, the ones on top—in the bedroom?”

hooks transitions from discussing her own relationship, which lacked sexual equality, to a philosophical discussion of sexual ethic more broadly. Her use of rhetorical questioning emphasizes the concern of feminists about the issue of sexual liberation, which she continues to explore in greater depth. By framing her argument as an unspoken truth—“the real discovery that feminists could not speak”—hooks highlights the persistent taboos surrounding sexual power dynamics. The imagery of men remaining “on top” in the bedroom serves as both a literal and metaphorical critique of patriarchy’s grip on intimacy, reinforcing her assertion that love cannot flourish in hierarchical structures.

“But we have not created a culture of gender equality that encourages women and men to search for love with the same zeal and passion that inspires our quest for success and power. Until that world comes into being, women may gain greater and greater power yet find themselves equal participants in promoting a culture of lovelessness, where everyone loses and love cannot be found.”

Power and love appear again as important concepts in hooks’s philosophical investigation. While women can gain greater power, until the culture shifts to prioritize love alongside success and power, everyone will suffer. Moreover, her phrase “culture of lovelessness” serves as a critique of modern feminism’s prioritization of professional success over emotional fulfillment. The repetition of “everyone loses” underscores the universality of this problem, positioning love not as a personal failing but as a structural issue that demands collective reimagining.

“An overemphasis on female capacity for caregiving has led many people to make nurturing synonymous with love. In fact, the ability to nurture, to give care, is only one aspect of love.”

hooks continues her redefinition of love, illustrating that caregiving is a piece of love, but true love requires more nuance. Just because women learn how to caregive does not mean they learn how to love; learning to love is a longer process. Further, by juxtaposing “nurturing” with “love,” hooks highlights the reductive ways in which women’s emotional labor is perceived. This false equivalence not only undermines women’s autonomy but also allows patriarchal systems to demand love from women without requiring emotional reciprocity from men.

“Antipatriarchal thinking, which assumes that both women and men are equally capable of learning how to love, of giving and receiving love, is the only foundation on which to construct sustained, meaningful, mutual love.”

By structuring the sentence around the phrase “the only foundation,” hooks makes an uncompromising assertion: Without dismantling patriarchy, real love is unattainable. The parallelism of “giving and receiving” reinforces the necessity of mutuality. Through this, hooks challenges both men and women to unlearn the gendered scripts that have conditioned them to see love as a site of control rather than connection.

“Learning to love our female selves is where our search for love must begin. We begin this journey to love by examining the ideas and beliefs we have held about the nature of intimacy and true love. Rather than embracing faulty thinking that encourages us to believe that females are inherently loving, we make the choice to become loving. Choosing love, we affirm our agency, our commitment to personal growth, our emotional openness.”

Self-love, hooks illustrates, is the first step towards becoming loving. hooks carefully illustrates that love is not just a concept, but a practice that must be worked towards with emotional vulnerability and a practice that encourages growth. Her use of “choice” reframes love as an intentional act rather than an innate quality, directly challenging the patriarchal notion that women are naturally loving and thus responsible for maintaining relationships. The repetition of “our” and “we” fosters a sense of collective empowerment, emphasizing that love is a shared journey rather than an individual burden.

“Females easily endorse a mind-body split that lets us cultivate the false assumption that we can hate our bodies and still be loving. And not only do we embrace this faulty logic, but also the culture lets us get away with thinking that we can hate our bodies and still be seen as the group most capable of teaching others about love.”

The concept of self-love becomes more complex as hooks introduces the idea of body image and its relation to the cultivation of self-love. Women cannot practice self-love while being at war with their bodies, and part of the societal change hooks seeks to encourage is the decentering of thinness from beauty standards. By pointing out the irony of women being expected to teach love while struggling with self-hatred, hooks exposes the hypocrisy of a culture that demands emotional labor from women without nurturing their well-being.

“Until women break through denial and recognize that we have the power to positively change our perceptions of the female body, we will always be missing out on love. If someone loves us but we are trapped by self-hatred, their love will never reach us.”

The metaphor of being “trapped” by self-hatred vividly conveys the idea that external love cannot compensate for internalized self-rejection. Her assertion that love “will never reach us” reinforces the necessity of self-acceptance, positioning self-love as a prerequisite for any meaningful relationship. This quote highlights The Role of Self-Love as Foundational to Other Forms of Love.

“Females are rewarded more when we experience ourselves and act as though we are flawed, insecure, or especially dependent and needy. A woman who does not learn how first to fulfill her psychological needs for acceptance will always operate from a space of lack.”

By framing women’s insecurity as a socially conditioned expectation rather than a personal failing, hooks exposes how patriarchal systems manipulate women into seeking validation through subservience. Her use of the phrase “space of lack” highlights the emotional depletion that results from relying on external approval rather than self-fulfillment. This quote highlights The Impact of Societal Expectations on Women’s Love Lives.

“Yet powerful women, especially intellectual women, have always been stereotyped as emotionally lacking. Our critical wit and wisdom are often seen as fueled by inner ruthlessness, by a lack of empathy for others, and not by keen insights honed by intellectual brilliance and deep, compassionate understanding of how our culture works.”

hooks utilizes the collective term “we” to describe herself and her fellow women, which connects her directly to her audience. This connection aims to help establish hooks as an empathetic and reliable narrator. The contrast between “critical wit and wisdom” and “inner ruthlessness” underscores how women’s intellectual strength is often misinterpreted as emotional deficiency. By explicitly stating that women’s insights stem from “compassionate understanding,” hooks reframes female intelligence as deeply empathetic rather than detached or cruel.

“Most men are still clinging to the rewards and forms of power patriarchy extends to them for not being loving. Since patriarchy wounds men in the place where they could be self-loving by imposing on them an identity that denies their wholeness, in order to know love, men must challenge patriarchy. And there are men who are rising to the challenge. These are the men women want to find.”

Patriarchy rises to prominence again in hooks’s narrative, as she establishes that while some men seek the benefits of patriarchy consciously, some men push back against patriarchy. Though men are not hooks’s primary audience, she calls them to seek love, anyway. By stating that patriarchy “wounds men,” hooks disrupts the assumption that men are merely beneficiaries of oppression, instead framing them as casualties of a system that limits their emotional depth. The phrase “denies their wholeness” suggests that men’s emotional repression is an act of self-betrayal, reinforcing the broader argument that love and justice must be intertwined.

“The existence of new men who are antisexist in thought and behavior has intensified women’s disappointment with patriarchal men. Now that some males have changed, all women have to confront the reality that sexist, masculinist behavior once believed to be innate not only is learned but also can be unlearned.”

Men pushing back against patriarchy is a double-edged sword, as it means that men are capable of change, so those who cling to patriarchy do so consciously. hooks presents this reality in a slightly hopeful way, as it does mean that change is possible for the men willing to undertake the work. Her juxtaposition of “learned” and “unlearned” emphasizes the constructed nature of patriarchal masculinity, challenging the notion that gender roles are predetermined. The phrase “intensified women’s disappointment” suggests that the awareness of feminist men has made patriarchal men’s refusal to change even more glaring, reinforcing hooks’s belief that love requires both awareness and effort.

“It is exciting that, more than ever before, women find women who are willing to embark on love’s journey—who are willing to do the work of love. When this work is done, June Jordan proclaims, ‘we will know exactly where is the love: that it is here, between us, and growing stronger and growing stronger.’”

hooks finds the idea of women finding actual love with other women exciting, because it adheres to her goal of encouraging women to build loving communion with each other. Lesbian love is an example of this communion building, though hooks acknowledges that lesbian love also requires the same work as other types of love. Her repetition of “growing stronger and growing stronger” reinforces the idea that love is dynamic and constantly evolving. By quoting Jordan, hooks aligns herself with a lineage of Black feminist thinkers, situating her ideas within a broader tradition of communal love and resistance. This quote also highlights The Redefinition of Love in Feminist Terms.

“Ideally, when females and males have feminist consciousness that enables them to break with patriarchal thinking about romance and the notion that there should be a dominant party and a submissive party, then they can honor the bonds of love that they hold with one another and with anyone else.”

Patriarchy encourages the belief that one person in a relationship must dominate the other, and hooks presses against this idea by explaining that true love cannot exist in the context of domination. She encourages feminist thought for both men and women, to craft heterosexual communion in an egalitarian state. Her use of “break with” rather than “reject” implies that dismantling patriarchal relationship structures requires an active, conscious shift rather than mere opposition. The phrase “honor the bonds of love” frames love as a sacred commitment, reinforcing the necessity of mutual respect and equality.

“Wise older women who love offer to younger generations our lived experience gleaned from heartache, suffering, mistakes—all the plain old everyday experiences that helped us, yes, at times forced us, to become more aware of the pitfalls we need to beware, avoid, and eliminate if we are to love and be loved.”

hooks describes her central mission in writing Communion by illustrating the importance of women in their midlives and beyond sharing their knowledge with younger women, to guide them on the path of love, to make the journey less arduous. Community knowledge sharing is an important piece of community building, even if the information seems like “plain old everyday” mundanity.

“Mutuality, like love itself, must come through work. Wise women know that the happiest, most fulfilling committed partnerships (legalized via marriage or not) are those in which mutuality is the core value, in which the spiritual growth and development of each individual matters.”

Mutuality is a term that hooks carefully explores throughout Communion, especially in the context of relationships. Instead of using the term “equality,” hooks attempts to create a more precise understanding of the type of relationship she describes, a relationships in which everything is shared in love. By stating that “mutuality, like love itself, must come through work,” hooks emphasizes that neither mutuality nor love is automatic or effortless. The reference to “spiritual growth and development” connects love to a broader sense of purpose, reinforcing her argument that love must be transformative rather than transactional.

“True love is generous and ever replenishing. Wise women who love are not afraid to open our hearts to younger women so that they can speak to and with us about their deepest fears, needs, longings, and aspirations. Breaking down false boundaries created by sexist thinking that separates us, we lay the groundwork for true sisterhood to emerge, a solidarity through time and age that links generations of females together in strong ties of everlasting love.”

Love is not a finite resource, and older women ought to share their love and wisdom with younger generations to craft communion among women, communion rooted in love. In Communion, hooks does exactly that, sharing her personal experiences and academic perspective on love. Her description of love as “ever replenishing” counters the patriarchal idea that love is scarce or conditional. The phrase “false boundaries created by sexist thinking” directly challenges the notion that women are inherently in competition with one another, instead emphasizing the importance of intergenerational solidarity.

“My hope was that every insight I shared about the female search for love, about the value of love in our lives, would allay some of their fears and help make it possible for them to open their hearts, to love without fear.”

hooks explicitly states her goal in writing Communion, and this sentence serves as a mission statement. She wants to create a work, based in love, that encourages the development of love in female communities everywhere. Her use of “to love without fear” is particularly significant, as it encapsulates one of her key arguments: that fear, particularly fear of vulnerability or rejection, is one of the primary barriers to love. By positioning her book as a guide to overcoming this fear, she reinforces her role as both a thinker and a mentor.