Communion: The Female Search for Love

hooks argues that friendships are a place for women to know lasting love. Heterosexual women may go a lifetime without feeling real love for their partners, even while staying together. hooks states that some women think that the loneliness they choose to live with in unsuccessful relationships is more tolerable than the loneliness imposed by being alone. In All About Love: New Visions, hooks explored the role of friendship in teaching women to love. She also examined how women tolerate abusive treatment in romantic relationships that they would not tolerate in platonic relationships. In midlife, women find new appreciation for the love in their friendships, allowing them to know love even if it cannot be found in their romantic relationships.

hooks engages in historical analysis, detailing how platonic-romantic friendships began to gain prevalence in the Victorian era. Romantic friendships, hooks explains, contain an “erotic dimension,” adding to the passion of the friendship bond and deepening the connection. People can decide to commit to a friendship, to live with such a friend, and these relationships can change depending on the romantic relationships forged during this time. Some, hooks state, argue that romantic friendships contain an element of repressed longing for true romance and sexual expression, though hooks claims this stems from a homophobic view that does not understand nonsexual, same-sex intimacy. hooks, after leaving her relationship, knew she would never want a loving partnership with only one person, instead seeking “a circle of love with committed bonds that extend beyond one privileged partnership” (207).

Romantic friendships can form between gay men and women and enhance the lives of both parties, challenging the heterosexist belief that the only important bond between a woman and a man can be within marriage. Romantic friendships also challenge heterosexist and patriarchal society by questioning the idea that sex is essential to forming meaningful and lasting intimate bonds. The search for love can often lead to loneliness, as women struggle to find a partner to truly love. To solve this loneliness, women often seek a “Boston Marriage”—a close platonic bond with another woman with whom they live and experience real love. Many choose these relationships in midlife, when they realize they do not want what heterosexual men have to offer.

Love requires the work of self-healing and growth, which men are often unwilling to do, as it requires pain and empathy. Women in romantic friendships do this work willingly and collaboratively. These romantic friendships can coexist with real romantic relationships, as those who cultivate these friendships seek to create “a circle of love, of deep and abiding affections that are inclusive rather than exclusive” (215). Romantic friendships also push back against the patriarchal and heterosexist demands of men that require women to treat them as their primary bonds while neglecting their same-sex friendships.

hooks calls all women to embrace the idea of romantic friendships to develop primary bonds in platonic friendships that are committed and capable of lasting a lifetime, which can ensure that women who never find “a perfect mate” can still know real love (217).

Women who decide to pursue love must be wise, daring, and courageous. hooks states that wisdom is necessary to restore love to its proper place as a “heroic journey” and “risky adventure” (218). hooks seeks to share, along with the other wise and loving women around her, everything she’s learned along the journey of love with young women. hooks argues that society encourages women to remain in a state of arrested development, to stay immature, as a healthy and mature woman is undesirable.

When hooks began research for All About Love, professional young women asked hooks a question about having time for love. hooks connects love to self-esteem again, arguing that women of her generation prioritized success over self-love, damaging their journey towards finding real love and becoming actualized. Even as the feminist movement approaches equality, and women find success in the professional sphere, heterosexual couples still believe that each relationship requires a dominant and submissive party. hooks states that mutuality requires work, time, and commitment, and the most fulfilling partnerships embark on this work together. hooks hopes the younger generations of women will choose to do the work of love, placing it above all else. Building a loving community, not just having a partner, is essential to creating a fulfilled existence.

hooks then examines sexual liberation in the context of feminism, stating that the best sex comes within the context of mutuality of consent and desire. A healthy aspect of self-love is the assertion of sexual agency, as well as knowing how to both give and receive love. Finally, hooks examines the role of spiritual health in pursuing love. Women must attend to their spiritual beings in order to find self-love. Wise women must open their hearts to younger women and speak about their deepest fears, needs, longings, and aspirations as they relate to the journey towards love to create true sisterhood, which hooks calls, “a solidarity through time and age that links generations of females together in strong ties of everlasting love” (231).

hooks sought to reclaim the conversation about love after she felt women were forced to be silent about their longing for love. As she began to write, she pictured women like herself as her primary audience, but as she read other authors’ perspectives about women and love, she realized she needed to address all women, especially younger women, as she hoped her work would reach younger women and encourage them to find and understand love, something hooks did not do until her 30s. The fact that women have faced heartbreak and continue to long for love is evidence of the lasting power and importance of love.

hooks then investigates the passions that awaken and transform women, including sexual passion. hooks wishes there were enough pages to explore all the erotic awakenings of women in midlife, as there are many stories worth telling that have long been dismissed. She then discusses menopause and finding her eroticism after her hysterectomy, as women often find a sexual reawakening and improvement in their sex lives after the cessation of their menstrual periods. Midlife also can bring celibacy to women who seek life affirmation and love outside of romance and sex.

hooks then encourages both men and women to seek love from a place of knowledge, not mystery; everyone must accept knowing is the base of intimacy, an erotic space of understanding of both self-understanding and understanding of the other. Many women find love late in their lives because it takes a long time to cultivate the original work of self-love. Doing this earlier in life allows women to make and receive love sooner. The self will grow and expand when people grow together in committed love when the work of love is carefully undertaken. This requires a turn away from the patriarchal perversion of love that discourages self-love and mutuality.

Along the journey of love, hooks states that women find communion with each other and the wisdom that love provides. To commune together, women call for a return to love. As hooks concludes the text, “Women in love offer to the world our inner gifts, seeking companions to share mutual regard and recognition—a communion of souls that will sustain and abide” (244).