This is Part 1 of a series I hope to write about different topics as I read through a couple of books. Indulge me as the posts will be longer than usual.
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.
bell hooks - Communion: The Female Search for Love.
This video has something (but not everything) to do with what I am writing in this section and I’d like people to watch it.
Marriage at this point is a government institution governed by law. People can scream “it is ordained of god” and about love and all those other commonly said things which are literally social, cultural and religious rituals. Marriage by the very definition of the word, the government where you live has to recognise it otherwise it is something else. People need to accept that.
(To me) Marriage is more about social capital and the socialisation of aspects of it than it is about love especially. This has been an ongoing thought of which I do not have succinct conclusions. This is based off of how we mostly focus on the length people stay married without talking about the quality of the relationship, the higher status given to those who have gone through the process of getting their relationship registered by government, the benefits that come from being married (two income households, tax benefits etc) and the age of romanticism that has continued to fail us. Somehow it is seen as if people who are legally wed are more responsible. It is also why people can be absolutely miserable in marriages but would rather be there than be single due to that capital.
Marriage was more important than love. Love could lead you astray. Marriage was the safe place - a place where women could bury dreams and pretend, create a make-believe world and remain there forever
bell hooks - Communion: The Female Search for Love.
Generally speaking married people don't give marriage good PR - let's be real. (I'm not talking about people who contentify their relationships for money). Yet many people still desire marriage, not companionship. Not only because they see themselves as special snowflakes who will beat the odds but also the social capital that comes with it.
“To return to love, to get the love we always wanted but never had, to have the love we want but are not prepared to give, we seek romantic relationships. We believe these relationships, more than any other, will rescue and redeem us. True love does have the power to redeem but only if we are ready for redemption. Love saves us only if we want to be saved.”
bell hooks - All About Love: New Visions
I believe we also need to divorce love from romanticism. Romanticism is why we want to believe that coincidences are proof of love, it is why we attach significance to random, unimportant, capitalistic things deemed by society to mean love.
We definitely overestimate how good we are. I am the villain in your story of us and you are a villain in mine, isn’t that how it goes? We also often overestimate our ability and capability to be loving. Accepting our roles in relationships that went awry isn’t easy because of how good we think/believe we are. And when I read what bell hooks wrote about this - I felt affirmed because I have been having these thoughts for a while.
The same patriarchal conditioning that teaches females to believe we are innately nurturing also teaches us that we will instinctively know how to give and receive love. We fail at love as much as men do because we simply do not know what we are doing (page 87).
Since most of us have been raised to think care is the primary, if not the sole, ingredient of love, we are easily able to convince ourselves that we are “in love” (page 95).
Positioned to be primary caregivers, women are often arrogant when it comes to matters of the heart. Believing the mystification of our sexist social conditioning, which encourages us to assume we know how to love - as though desire and action were one and the same - we may suffer countless relational failures before we begin to think critically about the nature of love (page 95).
Our cultural idealization of women as caregivers is so powerful. It’s really one of the few positive traits assigned women by patriarchy. Therefore, it’s not surprising that women are reluctant and at times downright unwilling to interrogate notions that we are inherently more loving (page 101).
bell hooks - Communion: The Female Search for Love.
We can agree that there is a misconception that, women especially, innately know how to love better(?), that we know more about love. With information available - there is a conflation of self awareness and emotional intelligence with vulnerability and openness to love (give and receive love). Doing the work we call it and as Ms. hooks says “making a relationship work is not the same as creating love”. Reading all about love does not make you better at loving - practicing what she talks about does. Theory versus praxis. Knowing betters versus doing better. Possessing the verbiage to explain how to do and be better in relationships does not mean we will translate it to our day to day actions in said relationship. If we aren’t working from a similar mean of what love is and means to us, how then are we saying “I love you” to people?
“To truly love we must learn to mix various ingredients - care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust, as well as honest and open communication.”
bell hooks - All About Love: New Visions
Listen, I am not trying to suggest that women don’t know how to love, I agree with bell hooks when she says that because of the interest women have in love due to conditioning leads them to want to do it better. My concern is the belief/assumption that we naturally know how to love and what that comes with. I think it is one of the reasons women believe that their love can fix/change people. It is also why we often feel overly slighted, based on the belief that we loved well. Care isn’t love for example and many misconstrue it to be. Are you having open and honest communication with those you love? If not - then what happens? So many questions.
I appreciate that bell hooks writes about wanting love “Self-love can sustain us but to thrive in community, which is how we live, we need to receive love from others”. And she challenges us to know love, to learn how to do it well, to not lose ourselves and to love without fear. To explore new ways of being - and based on how things are going - we must move from theory to practice.
Thank you for being here and reading. I look forward to interrogating my thoughts and feeling my feelings with you.
Words
Words can only take you so far
We're too afraid to admit who we are
But does it get easier?
Change
Accepting things will never be the same
Learning things about myself along the way
But does it get easier?
Does it get easier?