Communion: The Female Search for Love

hooks states that aging is something she often talks about with other women, and aging has become less upsetting to women as they no longer assume they will immediately become unhappy, complaining “sexless zombies” after 30 or 40, which were prevailing stereotypes about women as they approached midlife (1). The cultural view of approaching midlife and love’s role in the midlife period have shifted.

hooks admits aging for women still has its difficulties, such as empty-nest syndrome, the deaths of parents or spouses, and the potential death of adult children. These issues are discussed creatively by women in community with one another, experiencing the issues together. hooks grew up surrounded by female relatives, all of whom regarded aging as liberating and exciting, even viewing menopause as a “rite of passage from slavery to freedom” (3). Moving to a stage in which women are physically unable to bear children brings freedom from the fear of sexual coercion and its detrimental ramifications. Midlife, according to hooks’s mother and her friends, offers an opportunity for women to stop dedicating their lives to the care of others and instead focus on themselves.

Menopause, hooks writes, is not the only meaningful event or experience of a woman’s midlife. When hooks began interviewing women to write Communion, the women in the midlife period wondered if love was no longer as important as it had been in youth. When women are girls, they feel powerful, but as they mature, they feel a power loss. Womanhood within patriarchy robs women of their power and agency, causing the fear of being unlovable and abandoned, feelings that can grow as women age. Now, hooks asserts, midlife can offer women freedom and the possibility of finding real love in a world that does not yet accept female liberation.

Older generations of women are cynical about love, hooks asserts, because they felt pressured to remain in marriages that made them miserable. hooks recalls her mother’s relationship with her father, who was a cruel womanizer. Her mother stayed in the marriage, and when hooks entered high school, she encouraged her mother to leave. Her mother did not think anyone else would want her. hooks was shocked that her mother, whom hooks thought was an amazing person, felt unwanted in the world. Her mother explained that men often don’t want older women with children, and this lesson of patriarchy was impactful for young hooks.

hooks was born in the 1950s in a culture that believed women should marry for life, but by the 1960s, the legitimacy of conventional ideals was questioned. The feminist movement taught hooks that love does not only form between men and women. Still, hooks was obsessed with her Barbie and Ken dolls, and following the examples of her long-married grandparents and parents, she sought fulfillment through the heterosexist models of love around her.

Women in midlife are taught that if they haven’t found love, it’s unlikely they ever will. Women who prioritize education or career risk failing to find love before the societally imposed deadline of their 30s or 40s. hooks found herself in an unsatisfying relationship with a man for 10 years, and as she approached midlife, she decided to leave the relationship, opening herself up to the possibility of finding real love. Finding love in midlife is as important for women as finding love in adolescence, as they know the meaning of love that comes with experience. Heartache and pain give women the chance to learn from their past suffering and open themselves up to love with the knowledge that true love begins with self-love. While feminist critiques of the past make it difficult for powerful women to speak about love and its importance, feminists must return to love and proclaim its transformative power, finding new visions of love outside the traditional patriarchal modes.

hooks’s mother never spoke about love. Love was a fantasy that could lead women astray, while marriage was a safe place for women to settle. hooks resolved to never marry after seeing her mother’s suffering. Her mother always bowed to her father’s will, per the typical patriarchal power structure upheld by their communities, Christian scripture, and society and culture. However, hooks’s grandparents’ marriage was less traditional; though they were married for decades, they slept in separate bedrooms, and her grandmother, Baba, was more powerful in the relationship than her grandfather, Daddy Gus. Like her mother, however, her grandmother did not speak about love, though their marriage gave hooks different insight into relationship structures. hooks’s father did not approve of their marriage, as he believed men should rule over women. hooks’s mother did endless domestic and emotional labor in the household with no recognition from hooks’s father or financial independence, a pattern common in traditional, heterosexual marriages during this era. hooks’s explicit refusal to fall into these patterns and instead become a writer and eschew marriage made her family regard her as a sinner against God, or “one of the lost” (19).

As a “lost” girl, hooks felt like an outcast, as she preferred books to boys. Her parents shamed, humiliated, and punished her for her literary interests. However, when her father went to work, her mother encouraged hooks to read. Reading showed hooks that love and marriage were not mutually exclusive; romance and love, in stories like Cinderella and Little Women, can heal wounds. Like other girls, she viewed love as “hope for salvation” (22). When she expressed tentative interest in a boy, her father warned her that natural order meant that she should fear men. hooks finally stood up to him and left to attend Stanford University after her father forbade her to leave their Kentucky home. Her mother took her to the bus stop alone.

At Stanford, hooks continued to feel like an outcast in search of love. She struggled to find connections with others and to understand the two sides of herself: the side moored in the traditional values of her upbringing and the side that sought choice and freedom. This bisection, coupled with her decision to rebel against her upbringing, helped her become the woman she sought to be while also leading her to experience mental health struggles. She felt “caught between the image of [her]self as crazy, hysterical, and a freak that had been imposed on [her] in the patriarchal family and the image of [her]self as a bohemian woman writer that [she] had fashioned largely in the realm of fantasy” (30). She rebelled, but she never pushed it far, especially when it came to sexual expression; her rebellions were about “small matters” (30). The feminist movement gave her the freedom and framework to pursue her longings, though it did not change her yearning for love.

Though hooks did not find love during this period of her life, she found freedom, which changed her thoughts about where love belongs in women’s lives. hooks asserts that it is essential to unite the search for love and the quest for freedom, and learning to be free is the first step in coming to know love.

hooks’s search for love led her to feminist thinking, which helped her to find freedom and release the past. Feminism became important to hooks after she took a women’s studies class at Stanford with writer Tillie Olsen, who encouraged her students to dare to exist and challenge the constructs of patriarchal society. Discussion about feminist issues and love began during this time, as hooks and other like-minded students began to interrogate the systems of power that inform heterosexual relationships. hooks and others had empathy for men, as patriarchy also negatively impacts men by forcing them into hyper-masculine roles. However, when men remained resistant to feminist thought, women sought loving relationships with other women, finding ways to create lives outside of male attention or validation.

Radical feminism of this period encouraged hooks and others to forget and move past love, especially in terms of relationships with men. When hooks embraced this ideology, she also fell in love with a man who seemed to share her thoughts and feelings about women’s liberation. However, during sexual interactions, the man expected hooks to value his sexual pleasure above hers. Many lesbian feminists challenged the idea that women in heterosexual relationships could experience sexual autonomy and freedom, which hooks experienced in this relationship. In theory, he agreed with her right to opt out of sexual intercourse with him, but in practice, he found the idea objectionable. They decided to have an open relationship, popular in feminist relationships at the time, but hooks found that men were less likely to have sex with a woman with a male primary partner, while women were willing to have sex with a man with a female primary partner. The women who had sex with hooks’s male partner encouraged him to leave her, asserting that other women were willing to please him sexually, though hooks acknowledges these women lacked the feminist ideals she worked to cultivate.

The 1960s and 1970s created new space for different narratives of love, assuring mutuality in heteronormative relationships, but these patterns of thinking did not include the right to love and be loved; hooks needed to find a way to change the idea of women’s liberation to include the female right to love and be loved.

hooks left her relationship with the man, whom she had been with since she was 19. After 15 years together, hooks left the relationship to pursue real love, as the relationship lacked mutuality and equality after their college years in a progressive environment. In the 1980s, as many women went to work instead of staying home, hooks argues the feminist movement began to lose power. Women had some modicum of financial freedom, though in heterosexual partnerships, they often earned less than their male partners. At home, the bulk of the domestic duties still fell to them in what feminist thinkers call “the second shift” (48). Women work the first shift at their jobs, then come home and work as caregivers, cooks, and housekeepers. Only women who earned significant incomes were free of this second shift. The money women earned, however, was often spent for the household, taking away their limited economic freedom. Women felt betrayed by feminism for pushing them into the professional world and still shackling them with the work of running the home.

Men found it easier to include women in the workplace than to give more freedom at home. hooks found her relationship emotionally unfulfilling, as her partner was emotionally closed off. hooks cites Robin Norwood’s book Women Who Love Too Much as a damaging text, as it blames women for being too emotionally needy and encourages them to act as emotionally withholding as men. hooks tried some of the strategies in her relationship, but she found them ineffective in making her happy. Though some women believed Norwood’s book helped them avoid codependency, hooks believes the text silenced women’s concerns about love and gave them no insight into how to form lasting intimate bonds with men. hooks and other feminists searched desperately for strategies to form healthy relationships with men within patriarchal systems. Despite this search, hooks still left her relationship because she feared ending up like her mother—in a relationship without real love. Shere Hite’s Women and Love explores how women feel about love following the release of Norwood’s text, and unlike Norwood, Hite argues that women did not love too much but were instead cynical about love and repressed.

hooks asserts that by the end of the 1980s, many men and women felt feminism had accomplished its goals of creating equality, but hooks asserts that feminism had not addressed women’s longing for love, which was not discussed. Women gained power, but they still lacked love or the space to discuss it.