longing for love

reflections on "communion: the female search for love" by bell hooks

I entered Banyen Books and Sound, my favourite bookstore in Kitsilano with a knowing and a calling. There was a book inside on a shelf that was waiting to become mine. I strolled through the shop for 30 minutes, moving through the aisles, picking up books, and putting them down. I could feel a calling in my heart to go into the Women’s Studies section. Something in the aisle was waiting for me.

As I strolled over, I quickly glanced for what I thought it was that I needed. I didn’t see anything immediately that caught my eye. I felt dejected, about to leave the aisle, when a bright purple book caught my eye just as I was about to head out. I reached down and pulled the book up to my face. It was “Communion: The Female Search for Love” by bell hooks. I’d read bell hooks tons of times before. Her book “All About Love” was foundational in my coming-of-age and helped create the basis of my practice for love. “Communion” was not on my radar.

I flipped to the preface and began to read. I froze. This was exactly what I needed. She writes,

“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.”

It was all that I had just conquered. My self-love practice had grown tremendously in the last few months and I felt like hooks was speaking directly to me. But I still wasn’t convinced. How could this book really be for me? What else could it possibly teach me about self-love?

What sold me on the book was the candid, vulnerable, honest statement hooks made in the preface about the continued confusion women experience about love, regardless of whether they have a self-love practice or not.

Whether we love ourselves deeply or not, most of us as women still experience the fear of rejection, and confusion around what love is, and spend a great deal trying to balance our desire for love and our desire for self-actualization. I learned very quickly as I read on that “Communion” might help me make sense of my desire to know love. And so I brought it home.

I finished the book just 3 days after I purchased it. I was enthralled and couldn’t put it down. hooks was breathing life into so much of my experience as a young woman trying to understand love. I’d spent the last many years trying to understand love, reading books and articles, listening to podcasts, and joining community groups. What emerged from all of this was a deep, passionate self-love practice, one that currently is the strongest it’s ever been. And yet, I felt that love was consistently giving me a run for my money, showing me all the things that I had seemingly missed. I had yet to learn more about myself, my relationship with love, and love in general.

Many passages in the book made me feel very many things. I’d like to share the passages here, accompanied by insights.

“We can all speak of our longing for power. Our longing for love must be kept a secret. To give voice to such longing is to be counted among the weak, the soft.” page 73.

I don’t know about you, but I have always felt incredibly shameful in admitting that I want to find love, get married, have children, and live a beautiful, blissful life. It always felt like admitting that was admitting a defeat of sorts. I always felt much more confident sharing my desire for career expansion and growing as an individual. I feel like I have completely divorced myself from my longing for love, despite it being the number one thing that I think about. In 2023, I had a cancer scare and for the first time in my life, I had to think about what my life would look like if I were to have a life-altering health infringement. Almost immediately, my first thought was, “I don’t want to die yet, I haven’t even met my soulmate yet or gotten married and had babies.” Almost immediately, my second thought was, “You’re so pathetic for thinking this.” As hooks put it, I feel weak and soft for wanting what I want, and so I deny it. I love myself less when I do this and ultimately, I cast parts of myself in the shadows.

“Girl children witnessing a mother’s suffering at the hands of male tyrants — fathers, brothers, and/or husbands — are deeply, traumatically affected. Not only do we want to rescue our mothers but also we want to change our destiny so we will never suffer the way they did or do. Determined to invent my fate, I turned away from acceptable female roles.” page 20.

This was a new light on the internalized misogyny I previously carried for years. I saw many of the women in my family and lineage being treated poorly by the men in my family and lineage. And so, I naturally equated femininity with weakness. I began to resent the very feminine aspects of myself that I saw the women in my life experiencing suffering for. It made me love myself less. I walked around disconnected from the femininity within, leading a more masculine life, thinking that being independent and strong, a career woman was what would make me more loveable and desirable. Again, I cast parts of myself in the shadows.

“I found that I, like many creative women seeking to be successful in a career or vocation, was actually deeply afraid of bonding with a man who would make the kind of demands for closeness that might be all-consuming.” page 92.

I was chatting with my therapist once about how I tended to attract emotionally unavailable men. In return, she asked me if it was because I, myself, was emotionally unavailable. I couldn’t believe it. She was right. Though I thought I was emotionally open, I was incredibly emotionally closed off. I never sat with myself long enough to know how I felt or what I felt, I never knew how to express my feelings, and I always withheld how I truly felt in all my relationships. In essence, I was emotionally unavailable and attracting emotionally unavailable partners. My therapist said to me that when real loving relationships show up, they require vast emotional openness and require a high degree of emotional maturity. If I were to call in emotionally mature relationships, intimacy, and connection, I had to become all that I was seeking first. I had to love all of me, even the parts of me that I didn’t want to.

“Let’s not kid ourselves, we find mutual love only when we know how to love. And the best place to start practicing the art of loving is with the self— that body, mind, heart, and soul that we can most know and change. The one person who will never leave us, whom we will never lose, is ourself. Learning to love our female selves is where our search for love must begin.” page 104.

The key part of this passage is the piece on mutual love. Many of us feel that we must hide parts of ourselves to find real, lasting love, whether that’s platonic or romantic love. We feel that if we take up too much space, are too much, or if we reveal who we really are, we’ll find less love. hooks tells us that it’s actually the contrary. When we fully embrace all parts of ourselves, that’s when we create a flow of real love in our loves. We cannot find mutual love if we do not love ourselves. I struggled with this idea for years and continue to struggle with it. I often find myself paralyzed at the intersection of wanting to share more of myself with the world and thinking that it might prevent me from experiencing real love. I always think that being more of myself will make me unlovable. But hooks tells us that’s not true. When we love ourselves, all of ourselves, that’s when we create and nurture relationships of real love in our lives.

“We have enormous freedom in a world that is not yet fully accepting of our freedom.” page 7.

While women have been encouraged to embark on a self-love journey, and while we’ve been encouraged to experience the liberation that comes with self-love, the truth is that there is very little room for our freedom in this world. The world still looks at a self-loving woman and tries to shut her down. Self-loving women still get ridiculed, called selfish, called bitches, and get cast as “man-hating”. I remember celebrating my Master’s degree online, saying that while my grandmother had 2 children by age 23, I had two degrees and that it wasn’t to say her life was any less than mine but to point out the vastness in life circumstances between the generations. Immediately, men took to the internet, calling me selfish, an outcast, suggesting I was a lesbian, and that I would end up a lonely, sexless, barren woman. It really was that extreme!

“Self-love is always risky for women within patriarchy. Females are rewarded more when we experience ourselves and act as though we are flawed, insecure, or especially dependent and needy.” “So it is especially confusing to women when we choose to be self-loving only to find ourselves resented.” “Often, especially for adult women, the choice to be self-loving requires tremendous sacrifice. This is especially true if prior to doing the work of self-love everyone in their lives were accustomed to devaluing and/or subordinating them.” pages 134, 135 & 141.

I was speaking with my bhua (dad’s sister) on the phone recently and I was telling her about how so many relationships in my life had begun to vanish as my self-love practice had strengthened. She told me that truth-tellers have very few family and friends, simply because not everyone likes a truth-teller. Many people resent truth-tellers. How this relates to self-love is exceptionally nuanced. Self-love at its core is truth-telling. When you love yourself, you accept yourself and you see the truth about yourself. When you become intimately connected with your truth, it becomes that much easier to be a truth-telling, truth-seeking person. When you can look into the mirror of self-truth, you can look into any other mirror and see it clearly. You can and will be resented for this. How you deepen your practice of self-love despite the resentment is to remain committed to loving yourself even in the face of mass rejection.

“Women are often more interested in being loved than in the act of loving.” page 88.

TRUTH. I’ve spent my entire life searching and gleaning for love, trying to extract attention and care from my loved ones. Seldom had I ever really looked at how I give love or whether I give love at all. It’s not to say that I have been unloving or selfish, but that my primary mode of being has always been taking, rather than giving. But do I know how to love? Do I know how to give love? Do I know what it means to love without the expectation of love back?

In quoting Geneen Roth, hooks writes “"Our fantasy of what will happen when we turn a final corner and find the love, respect, visibility, and abundance that’s eluded us for a lifetime… is the adult version of the childhood longing to be seen and loved. When as children we understand that we are going to get that love, we make up stories, create a fantasy life, try to be someone else. And when we believe that love will be waiting around the corner if only we could transform ourselves into different people, we spend our lives trying to turn that corner." This is self-hatred in action. Female self-love begins with self-acceptance.” page 107.

Note to self: Stop waiting to turn the corner. Stop living your life like an audition for the rest of your life. And stop trying to transform yourself into a palatable, digestible, hypothetical version of yourself. Love is not waiting around the corner. Love is within you.

“It seems to me that if women are going to change the world, they first have to change themselves and rise above that competitiveness, which we have been taught, and learn to be truly sisterly to each other.” page 128.

We think we know how to be sisterly, to be in solidarity with one another, but the truth is that we are riddled with competitiveness, jealousy, and envy of one another. And really, this sentiment exists because there is a lack of love within. If we were to truly love ourselves, as we are for who we are, we wouldn’t feel the need to compete with others. We would see ourselves as a whole. I truly believe that at the root of hatred and competitiveness among women is a lack of self-love.

Perhaps the crux of “Communion” is the following passage:

“Self-love can sustain us, but to thrive in community, which is how we live, we need to receive love from others. Contrary to popular opinion, powerful, achieving women desire love as much as we desire to be loving, because we know that love will enhance all areas of our lives, especially work.” page 153.

Self-love is the foundation of a loving life, not a replacement for it. New age thinking has convinced women everywhere that we must find everything that we need within, that we must learn to live independently on our own without any external source of love. This is simply not true. To experience love, one must see love, feel love, and give and receive love. Nothing summarizes this more than this passage from hooks’ chapter “our right to love”:

“Love is the foundation on which we build the house of our dreams. It’s a house with many rooms. Relationships are part of the house, but they are not everything and never could be. The key is balance. To live a balanced life, no group of women should feel they need to deny the importance of love. Self-loving, powerful, successful women know that true love abounds in our lives.” page 157.

Note to self: To want to love, to admit that you want love, is to love yourself. In the kingdom of self-love, you always find opportunities to love yourself more, not less. Do not deny your longing for love.

If you’re a woman in search of love — and I mean love as an all-encompassing, embodiment of life — then perhaps “Communion” by bell hooks is the book for you. Notably, hooks writes that most women arrive at a true understanding of love in their middle age, but she believes that the more girls and women of all ages and experiences equip themselves with love, the shorter our trials and tribulations with love might be.

“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.” page xvii.