Communion: The Female Search for Love

“We wanted to be girls forever. As girls we felt we had power. We were strong and fierce and sure of ourselves…Giving up power has been what aging has traditionally felt like for most women.”

Age plays a key role in hooks’s investigation of women’s journey towards love. She illustrates how aging for women has traditionally meant losing their power and their romantic options. However, she goes on to establish that aging is a beautiful and meaningful experience for women and offers new and exciting opportunities to find love. Her use of past tense in “we felt we had power” highlights the social conditioning that strips women of agency as they grow older, reinforcing the idea that the loss of power is an external imposition rather than a natural progression. By reclaiming love as an evolving process, hooks challenges the societal narrative that romantic fulfillment and self-worth diminish with age.

“Without these new visions to serve as guides and maps, the path to love remains difficult to find and the search for love leaves us unfulfilled and lacking. Women, along with the culture as a whole, need constructive visions of redemptive love. We need to return to love and proclaim its transformative power.”

hooks explains her mission in writing Communion while referring back to the work she completed in All About Love. She wants to redefine love and encourage women to find this redefined love that centers on community building. The use of metaphors such as “guides and maps” reinforces the idea that love is not an inherent trait but a learned practice, one that requires intention and direction. Her call for “redemptive love” also introduces The Redefinition of Love in Feminist Terms, emphasizing that love is not merely a destination but an ongoing process of transformation and renewal.