Playing on The Woman in Love

me & my moms

Love, as women are normally told, is a place where we can find ourselves, arrive at our true meaning, that is at least, the narrative pushed for many women from a very young age.Growing into adulthood, or, womanhood it has been where a lot of women find themselves disappearing (into the gendered labor of it all, that is.) From childhood, this narrative can be spun around us like a web: to be loved is to be good, and to be good is to be wanted. But as I grew older, I learned that love is where someone can disappear, specifically where women can disappear completely. Not in one grand vanishing move, but in small quiet ways - through pleasing, deferring, softening the edges of our desires to make space for another’s, or, sometimes, all others.

For a long time, I internalized love as something earned through sacrifice or an understanding of something unspoken, but excruciatingly loud. Love, in this way of thinking for myself, was a kind of moral prize, a proof of goodness. That idea of “goodness” came entirely from the ideas of being submissive, never wanting, forever patient, malleable - the capacity to mold yourself into something, or, someone, “lovable”. I did not, for a long time, have the language to question this act of disappearing, of making oneself so small that you might just be lovable - and how ways that women’s interests, especially those in love, are scrutinized - so even the question, the curiosity was pushed down (by myself), it was not until much later that I began to give shape to the contradictions I had been living, among many other women.

Simone de Beauvoir gave me the words I’d been searching for in her essay The Woman in Love, she exposes how love, under patriarchy, becomes a project of self abandonment for women. She writes, “She becomes a thing, she is possessed and consumed.” Love, for her, is not inherently liberating - women are always walking the line of self-annihilation when in love under a patriarchal setting. Beauvoir explains that a woman in love is taught to see herself not as a self, but as a reflection of male desire, she gives up her own transcendence - freedom, autonomy - and ultimately, chooses a life circumscribed by passivity, dependency, and the illusion of mutua devotion.

Beauvoir’s critique - or more precisely, her awareness of subjectivity - gains depth when understood through her philosophical influences. Drawing from Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, Beauvoir examines the social construction of gender and a woman’s status within it. Central to this analysis is the concept of recognition: selfhood or self-consciousness rises through the gaze of the Other, wherein each subject perceives themselves as distinct and autonomous - isolated beings. In the context of gender relations, both subjects are dependent upon one another for recognition and self-definition. However, the woman is positioned as the subordinate within a structure created by men to benefit men, as Beauvoir puts it:

“And she is nothing other than what the man decides; she is thus called “the sex,” meaning that the male sees her essentially as a sexed being; for him she is sex, so she is the absolute. She is determined and differentiated in relation to man, while he is not in relation to her, she is the inessential in font of the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute. She is the Other.” (p 6 - simone intro)

To be the Other, essentially is to be denied one’s subjectivity - one’s freedom. Under patriarchy, women are denied reciprocal recognition - they become the mirror, never the subject. Instead of a mutual exchange, love becomes a performance women attempt in order to gain proximity to importance, though it will never be attained under a patriarchy.

Though this is not only social, but it is deeply psychological. Being socially conditioned from childhood to prioritize giving love or being loved, or, frankly loving themselves - this fantasy is deeply internalized: to be chosen is to be real, to be wanted is to matter. And this desire for love shapes our entire lives, we shape ourselves into an image of what we believe will be loved, entirely existing for the Other (Man), though the Other has no reliance on us within a patriarchy. We are taught to erase all contradictions to this notion though, desires, or ambitions that might threaten the beloved image.

A book that I feel represents this paradox of a woman in love, while simultaneously trying to be entirely her own being is Clarice Lispector’s Apprenticeship or the Book of Pleasures. It is very common in Lispector’s work to be entirely consumed, but in this novel it highlights this paradox completely: the journey of becoming, for a woman in love. Her protagonist, Lori, is a woman suspended between yearning and self-erasure, overwhelmed entirely while the man remains seemingly unmoved, but waiting. In the novel, Lori aches to be consumed by love for the entirety of the novel, even though she fears it might be her undoing - she is trying though, to figure out how to remain herself in love. At one point in the novel she says,

“I am being, said the spider and the stunned its prey with its venom.” (p 59)

To me this means love is a poison in Lispector’s world, the spider (man) is so focused on its own becoming, with no thought about injecting its prey with venom, as it is only natural.

Clarice Lispector’s An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures may be read as a love story, but it feels more like an invitation to turn inward and contemplate what it truly means to love. The novel follows Lóri, a primary school teacher, as she navigates a relationship with Ulisses, a philosophy professor, but Lispector’s stream-of-consciousness style immerses the reader so deeply in Lóri’s internal world that Ulisses often feels less like a fully realized character and more like a catalyst for her self-discovery. At first, Lóri idolizes Ulisses and feels she cannot exist without him, while he keeps a cool distance and is seemingly unmoved by her. Yet as the story unfolds, it becomes clear that the heart of the novel lies not in a romance, but in Lóri’s evolving understanding of solitude, human connection, and the quiet, often painful work of becoming herself. In this way, Lispector’s exploration of love resonates with Simone de Beauvoir’s claim that:

“Love at a distant is nonetheless merely a fantasy, not a real experience. When it is carnally consummate, desire for love becomes passionate love. Inversely, love can arise from making love, the sexually dominated woman exalting the man who first seemed insignificant to her. But it often happens that the woman is unable to transform any of the men she knows into a god. Love holds less place in the feminine life than is often believed. (p. 685 - Simone).

Love is a projection rather than a mutual exchange. Lori’s initial infatuation with Ulisses reflects this fantasy of distant idealized loved, but as she gradually becomes aware of her own subjectivity, she is no longer consumed by the need to exalt a man into a god. Instead, the novel shows that the true apprenticeship is not in love of the other, but in the deep process of becoming aware of one’s self, one’s freedom or subjectivity.

Louise Bourgeois, a French-American artist also painted this tension. Her piece called Femme Maison, also meaning “woman house” or “house woman” was an oil and ink image of a naked female body with a house for a head, showing that women are literally consumed by domesticity, her identity replaced entirely with function.

“In this period in the 1940s, she was raising three small boys, and so she was certainly thinking of how she felt trying to be an artist and also a stay at home mother. She chose architectural imagery to, in effect, suffocate this woman. It’s kind of dire, in a way.” (Wye)

She is both a shelter and a prisoner. This somewhat grotesque, but tender image is of a woman entirely swallowed by her roles.

In Maman, the giant spider Bourgeois created in tribute to her mother - who was also a weaver, though less orbal than a spider - the spider stands 33 feet tall, made of bronze, stainless steel, and marble. It is representative of her mother, or, more generally, the complexities of motherhood: both protector and predator. There is no simple moral to be gained, only the uneasy coexistence of care and necessity. Like Lispector, Bourgeois didn’t offer answers, instead Bourgeois reaches into what resists language: the woman who tends, who aches, who disappears to care, even though her body must remain.

There is a tender truth in these portrayals - instead of romanticizing feminine devotion they instead reveal its horror: the woman in love is not merely devoted, she is dismantled. Her selfhood is shattered and reassembled in the image of the other, or, her only identity she can grapple with is that of service; generosity becoming a demand.

“This is one of the curses weighing of the passionate woman: her generosity is immediately converted into demands. Being alienated in another, she also gives herself to him entirely: but he has to be totally available to receive this gift honorably. She dedicates all her moments to him: he has to be present at every moment; she only wants to live through him: but she wants to live; he has to devote herself to making her live.” (Beauvoir p. 695).

This too, resonates - I used to struggle with the thought that the purity of my devotion might gain another’s, but love is not about proving you can give enough, and do so forever divinely. And even in loving someone entirely, if you are erasing yourself, it will never be enough - as Beauvoir writes, “even if the man is seriously attached to the woman, it still does not mean that she is necessary to him.”

What, then, would necessity look like? Not as a function - a caregiver, a lover, a mirror - but as one’s own Subject? I am looking for the answers to this question in a world that still centers men, and defines women through their usefulness to men.

Still, I want to believe that love can be something else. That it can hold both the I and the we. That it can be an act of mutual recognition, rather than subordination. I want to believe that love exists as something else, that it can hold both the “I” and “we” - that it can be a mutual form of recognition, rather than only subordination. Beavuoir not only identifies this problem, but also locates its social and philosophical roots within a patriarchal society. The woman in love, she explains, often seeks to merge entirely with the man—to dissolve the boundaries of the self in pursuit of unity - but it is all in vain. What results instead is a kind of masochism. “Masochism perpetuates the presence of the self as a hurt, fallen figure; love aims at forgetting of self in favor of the essential subject.” The essential subject is always him.

What does it mean to take responsibility for one’s life? Beauvoir writes, “Even if they are allowed independence, this road is still the one that seems the most attractive to most women; it is agonizing to take responsibility for one’s life endeavor.” The desire to dissolve into someone else, to let go of the burden of choice, is powerful. And more, what is more monstrous: being alone, or being half-wanted?

Everything returns to the central question: Can a woman love and still be her own?

Beauvoir, Lispector, and Bourgeois do not offer easy answers. But they insist the question is worth asking. They insist that women’s experiences of love—with all their ambivalence, their ache, their resistance—are real, complex, and worthy of attention. These women have helped me believe that survival in love is not about guarding the self completely, nor about giving it away. It is about the constant, ethical labor of remaining. Of returning to oneself again and again - the doing, undoing, and doing again, a becoming.