Women’s Modern History: Romantic Love
Two choices: Settling or Self-Abdication?
“Taught to believe that the mind, not the heart, is the seat of learning, many of us believe that to speak of love with any emotional intensity means we will be perceived as weak and irrational. And it is especially hard to speak of love when what we have to say calls attention to the fact that lovelessness is more common than love, that many of us are not sure what we mean when we talk of love or how to express love.”
-bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions
bells hooks and Roxanne Gay speak poignantly about how pop culture reflects and encourages our cynicism towards romantic love. This cynicism is particularly popular with male artists, which take flavors all over the misogynist spectrum from females-as-the-gateway-to-male-emotion-and-maturity (McCartney “Baby I’m Amazed”, Dylan “Man in Me”) to women-as-sexual-chattel (Kendrick Lamar’s “The Recipe”) to women-are-crazy-for-having-feelings-of-attachment (G-Unit “Wanna Get to Know You”) and of course women-are-fickle-so-cannot-be-trusted (Combs “Beer Never Broke My Heart”). Maddeningly contradictory, all the messages we get from popular music are that romantic love is either transcendental or a complete fucking myth.
As the primary givers and practitioners of loving action, women feel its lack acutely. We are taught from the youngest age to give and please others. We also see women who would assert their independence socially assaulted as negligent lovers or mothers, when the same behavior from a man would merit no such scrutiny and indeed confer him the status symbol of entrepreneur or ambitious.
Feminism challenged gender roles in pay, domestic choresand career aspirations outside the home. But the major thing it attempted to challenge was men’s particular role as the (nearly) exclusive receivers of love. Many men couldn’t handle it, and women got fucking tired of asking. What choice was left to women? To jump on the patriarchal version of ‘love’: if the mutual respect, care, affection, and giving of one human to another were not on the table, we would settle for materialism. Thus the objectification of men began, women’s assault on the thousands of years of objectification of women. Men didn’t seem to mind and we all mired ourselves deeper in the illusion of not wanting love.
When feminism failed to provide true emotional equality, women stained by this hope and bitter from the defeat took up the patriarchal message that love does not matter. Female pop culture took on the same detached tone as men (The 70’s hit “What’s Love Got to Do With It”, “Lady Marmalade”), the defeatist perspective that mutual thriving is not possible so just take care of yourself (“Survivor”), and dreamy manic-pixie-dreamgirl aloofness or stupidity about the consequences of our actions (“Genie in a Bottle, “Criminal”). A more recent flavor is the desire to avoid emotional pain by moving towards masochism (“WAP”). There is also a mysterious guilt we carry about it all, voiced in Joss Stone’s “Got a Right to Be Wrong”.
While I agree that, indeed, Lizzo, “I am my own soulmate”, there is a danger in too much of this solo drive. We deafen our heart’s longing for love, nurturance, and respect. We have settled for less and called it all that the world has to offer.
Rather than acknowledge the profound dearth of love assigned especially to women so that whole genres like romance novels and self help reflect the trauma of loneliness in the female experience of lack and longing for love, music and TV tells us to be an object (music), a damsel (TV), or both.
Disney movies that I grew up with told me that my prince will come, and then my life and the emotional inconsistency of it won’t be my burden to bear any longer. This self-abdication is the message that women STILL receive about love: that it is about sacrifice. Sacrifice for your community, your children, your spouse. And in this sacrifice you will purge yourself of sinful desire for connection (AKA “neediness”). “Untamed’ author Glennon Doyle writes about this sublimation- “I thought that [the relationship] was the thing that had finally saved me from having to be myself”. Because to be our full selves means owning our desire, and looking with a real eye at how much we’re not getting.
The drive for connection is universal. We ALL, men and women, must acknowledge this.
We ALL must work harder to protect our personal boundaries and ASK for what we WANT. But the first step is to be brave enough to say, as every Disney princess does, “I want more”. It’s up to us to honor and live into our deepest longing: for love. If we find the balance between nihilism and self-annihilation, it might just save the human world.
