Last Valentine’s Day, I started to read All About Love by Gloria Jean Watkins better known as ‘bell hooks’. My first response was to write the Indy article Loving Yourself When No One Else is Around and advocate for “remembering love in a time of social isolation, self-care, and wellness days.”I didn’t realise that this book would become my manifesto, spurring a year-long (and continual) process of radically rethinking what love means to me. In this year, I have consumed as much material as I can in the field of love, reading books such as Attached by Amir Levine and Rachel S. F. Heller, Love in Color by Bolu Babalola, and Patricia Collins’ Black Feminist Thought. By intentionally immersing myself in love discourse, I have gained a lot of clarity on love as it relates to me, a Black woman at Harvard.
As a child, I internalised the norms of dominant society, and as a result, I didn’t love myself or believe I was capable of being loved. Instead, I chose to lie to myself and contort my reality to fit the antagonistic ideologies of whatever environment I found myself in. To gain approval from others, I attempted to mould myself into an object of desire, constantly warping my identity to fit the role of what I believed to be a loveable friend, a loveable sister, a loveable daughter, and a loveable partner. My efforts were destined to fail as these competing identities often conflicted with each other, and I could never perfectly conform to the mythical figure that was guaranteed to access love from all. I didn’t realise it at the time, but in order to foster the intimacy and genuine connection I craved, I needed to build relationships on foundations of reality and trust, in the words of hooks “to know love we have to tell the truth to ourselves and to others”. As a young Black immigrant woman growing up in Northern England, and now living and studying at the predominately white elite institution that is Harvard College, this meant engaging in radical self-acceptance and embracing my insecurities and fears of not being desirable. I had to trust that people would love me even if I did not participate in the politics of respectability which I had tolerated in the hopes of asserting my belonging amongst those who could be loved. I had to trust I would be loved despite the preconstructed ideologies of my Black femininity which unfairly deemed me masculine, ugly, and undesirable. I needed to live consciously and, to use hooks again, “engage in critical reflection about the world we live in” as a form of resistance in order to affirm my being.
On this journey of self-acceptance, the truth about love has slowly been disseminated to me. I no longer conflate appeasement or conformity with love. Instead I strongly assert myself and my desire for love just as hooks defines it:
“The will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth. Love is as love does. Love is an act of will— namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.”
Last semester I sat and chatted with a close friend about our various experiences attempting to act out love. We discussed our identities as Black female undergraduate students at Harvard, and how neither of us fit into the desirability politics of the spaces we have existed in our whole lives. We spoke all night about the dire state of our romantic lives and the abuse or mistreatment we had endured in our endeavours to love and be loved in return. By the end of the conversation we were in agreement: we both knew we desired, were deserving, and wanted to experience romantic love but it so far had evaded us. I am all too aware that our experience is not in any way unique. Stories of violence, neglect, and general disregard of Black women on Harvard’s campus are too prevalent and impossible to forget. The oppressive ‘cult of true womanhood’ as depicted by Barbara Welter excludes Black women like my friend and I. Our being is shrouded by racist, classist, and sexist stereotypes which stigmatise the act of loving a Black woman. Particularly when it comes to romantic love, at Harvard Black women are often not considered. We are good friends, good classmates, good teammates but not often weighed as potentially good partners. If you are queer, fat, dark, disabled, or your identity as a Black woman happens to be compounded with any other marginalising identity, you may find that love is especially scarce.
At times I feel particularly downhearted as I reconcile with the fact that I still have not experienced romantic connection here. I can’t help but mourn the many loves that never were and grieve from the constant rejections I feel I have been bombarded with. It is extremely difficult in the face of compounding failures to not become highly self-critical, to not compare myself to my peers who cannot relate to my string of unrequited loves. I am cognisant of the “racially and sexually polarising aesthetic hierarchies” (Morgan, 2006) which limit my opportunities. I am somewhat comforted by the loving friendships I contribute to, and the strides in self-acceptance I have made. Still it is hard to keep believing in the purity of love when it becomes apparent one’s personal attributes may be immovable boundaries in forming a loving connection. Yet like hooks, I dream of “finding a lover who would give me the gift of being loved as I am” (hooks, 2000). I know that it simply wouldn’t be love if I was not consciously respected in my entirety. I know I should be patient till I find this person, but it is disheartening that I have spent my whole young adult life thus far searching for romance, hoping to be appreciated, wanting to be desired and have almost wholly been unsuccessful. This is extremely painful to admit. My heart is being broken not by someone I once loved who has ceased to love me in return. Instead I see the cracks forming in my longterm adoration of love itself. To believe in love as a Black woman is to continuously hope, and to experience love is freedom. But what happens when choosing love is a never ending quest? What happens to the Black woman who is exhausted from believing they deserve love to its fullest but not receiving it?
It is counterproductive to become wary of loving – by definition love will never hurt us, but loving is a dangerous endeavour. As a Black woman in a space that doesn’t always value me, every outward attempt at love makes me especially vulnerable to physical and emotional subjugation. I remain a relentless lover of love, quick to open up and expose my truth in exchange for deep emotional connection. Time and time again I have put my heart on the line only to be rejected. In every dismissal I have to remind myself not to let the pain of lovelessness harden my heart. I refuse to put up arbitrary boundaries and instead commit to remaining vulnerable – vulnerable to pain but also vulnerable to love. Rather than becoming jaded by scars of love amiss I am choosing to trust the transformative power of love, in every and all of its wonderful configurations. True love exists and will occur in its own time as a witness of my existence. I anticipate it eagerly and in the meantime continue my practice of ‘loving [myself] when no one is around’. I have to trust I will be empowered to leave my solitary vocation when someone sees who I am and who I can be, and chooses to love and be loved by me.
Achele Agada ’23 (oagada@college.harvard.edu) is accepting confessions of love.