Why Do Women Often Avoid Writing About Love?
The patriarchal implications and the quiet rebellion of writing about romantic love.
For many years, I have avoided writing about romantic love. In All About Love: New Visions, Bell Hooks writes about this common phenomenon: how women, for all of our emotional vulnerability and vast ability to love, are not considered the authority on the topic. How our world’s great poets, writing love sonnets and sentimentalities, are largely men.
When I was in the second grade, my classmates and I started a band. After school, I walked down the block to Christina Harvey’s house, and we would spend the afternoon with our necks bent over our secret journals, the kind with a lock on it. We wrote passionate lyrics with our glittery gel pens running out of ink — tales of love that we had never experienced, imaginary heartbreaks, how the melodies went in our heads. Love, heartbreak, it felt like the natural center of everything. Our young lives orbiting it, preparing to thrust us toward a great love — the meaning of it all. If only I could grow up and experience it, then I would have something important to write.
I am 22 now, and I have made it to the center. But I sit down to write, and I turn toward any other topic: illness, death, religion, family, trauma. I have more experience now, so the world has shown me the great lengths a woman must go to to be taken seriously. How any thoughts or reflections on the topic of romantic love will be written off as frivolous in nature – a small girl writing of emotions she has yet to experience in an elementary journal with a childish glitter pen.
My own biases turn their ugly heads every time I ignore a pull toward the romance section in a bookstore or refer to my collection of romantic e-books as my guilty pleasure reads. When, along the way between feeling sure that love was the only important topic at ten and now, was I taught that women could have nothing meaningful to say about romance?
I write now as an attempt to find my way back to the confidence I had in second grade. My assurance that even though I hadn’t even experienced it yet, I would have something important to add to the conversation. I want to write my way back to her, to reclaim the certainty that love is not a lesser subject, but one that demands courage, nuance, and truth.
So this is where I’ll begin: with the promise to write honestly about love, heartbreak, and the rebuilding that follows. To believe that women can, and should, be the authorities on love — not because it defines us, but because we’ve spent our whole lives being told it shouldn’t.