bell hooks on work and love

I’ve written on occasion about how I can’t compartmentalize, I can’t wholly separate my personal and professional selves, I can’t divorce what’s important to me politically from what I’m looking for in my connections with other people, and I can’t think of my yearning for love and my desire to do work that I find meaningful as entirely separate things.

Now that I am, for the moment, unemployed, I’m taking time to think about balance, and how the pieces can fit together. So it was extraordinary to me to read these words today in bell hooks’ book Communion: The Female Search for Love, in the chapter called “our right to love.” (The bolded emphases are mine.)

Many single successful women in midlife feel there are few places where we can talk openly about our desire to have loving partnerships without being seen as desperate or, worse, as needing pity. I found again and again that if I talked openly about the importance of love in my life, especially about my desire to have a partner, these feelings were ridiculed or mocked. Surprisingly, colleagues and friends would often suggest I was only joking about love and partnership’s being important to me. Underlying their response was the assumption that women who have chosen to devote a lot of energy to work see this choice as more important than love. They could not accept that a woman could be loving and passionately committed to work. Unable to see the way these two passions enhance and reinforce each other, they wanted to negate my right to love. 

Passionate devotion to work has always heightened my awareness of the importance of love… Significantly, when successful women claim our right to wholeness by privileging love and work in our lives, we challenge sexist thinking that would deny us love as punishment for choosing to value work. I place love before work because I know that without a sound foundation of self-love, I risk undermining my value and the value of all I accomplish through work… 

Women in midlife know from experience that just as choosing the wrong partner undermines self-esteem, choosing a partner who loves us helps us maintain self-esteem when we are continually under attack…

Vicious attacks and betrayal can assault the self-esteem of even the most powerful self-loving woman. And powerful women of all races and classes are always attacked. Self-loving, high-achieving women rely on the care of our loved ones to survive brutal attacks. We need feel no shame to speak the importance of this love…

Powerful, self-actualized women should feel no shame when we speak of our longing for a loving partner, our need to be supported by a circle of loved ones. 

Love is more present to women who know who they are, women who are fully self-actualized. This is the good news that self-loving, powerful women often keep to ourselves as though it were a treasure that will be lost if shared or for fear that we may seem to be bragging about “having it all.” But the truth is, we can have it all but rarely do we have it all at the same time or in the order in which we want it. This absence of order is part of the magic and mystery of life. Rather than closing ourselves off from love, all women, especially those of us in midlife or approaching old age should sing love’s praises. Love frees us to be ourselves and to be open to others’ knowing us without shame or pretense…The female search for love is what life should be all about.

Unless we tell the world our love stories, the myths that we do not want love and cannot get love will continue to act as warnings, keeping other females in check, keeping them away from the truth that genuine love will always lead us to be more fully who we are. Men and women who want to know love will find us, and we will find them.