To be valued instrumentally reinforces the need to prove self-worth, to center the self around impressing others rather than spontaneous expression. Within patriarchal culture this kind of male attention is simultaneously crucial and devaluing. Thinking about this double bind, it is perhaps more accurate to call women’s preoccupation with men a profound, debilitating anxiety, rather than vacuous and petty desire. Women are socialized to seek men out for validation, capital, safety within society, and safety from other men, and to devalue other sources of love and safety. Relationships based on these needs are often contradictory, as people contend with romantic narratives that imbue absolute meaning in partnership without being given tools to respect the humanity of their partner. bell hooks’ iconoclastic All About Love: New Visions tells us that patriarchal relationships thrive off disconnection, allowing enough space between people for imagined potential closeness without it ever being emotionally realized.

Romance is not love, it is emotional investment in narrative. It is the fantasy of having desires met, attempting to deny hard truths of uncertainty and impermanence. To ‘romanticize’ is often defined as idealizing, losing touch with reality. I have Venus in Pisces conjunct my Descendant which purportedly gives me eternal rose-tinted glasses. According to this astrological placement, my integral need in relationships is to ‘merge’ with the other, to touch them at the core and feel what they feel. In retrospect, this ‘merging’ has sometimes operated as an escape from what I am feeling, plunging right into another person without seeing where I begin and they end, finding it hard to discern my own needs or even selfhood. Even so, the polar opposite narrative of two detached individuals agreeing to a rational and secure transaction of needs seems equally as fantastical.

“Here’s to strong women. May we know them. May we be them. May we raise them”