scratch his love and you’ll find your fear

the sopranos + communion (bell hooks, 2002)

i’ve been watching the sopranos lately. something i managed to somehow completely avoid throughout all of film school and every man’s recommendation to watch it. i forget exactly what convinces me to finally give it a chance to begin with, but what’s kept me watching is the fact that tony soprano’s mannerisms remind me extremely viscerally of the most recent person i had the misfortune of becoming infatuated with (or, who had the misfortune of becoming the object of my infatuation). i don’t mean either of those things, but it feels necessary to acknowledge my role in creating these scenarios.

it doesn’t make sense when you just look at him, but it makes sense when he speaks. that charming little shimmer in james gadolfino’s eyes, the one that appears to replace the dead look, every so often, when you are least expecting it. other things.

i know this person would find this comparision ridiculous and i also know it would certainly boost his ego. it’s not this man’s fault that my memory of him has morphed into a caricature irrepairably melded with one of tv’s most infamous personalities - we weren’t around each other long enough for my brain to cement him as a whole and real person. i am curious what caricature i’ve possibly become in his memory, if any. what physical details and habitual traits and anectodal quotes might linger. i know i have mine. i don’t expect them to be flattering. this is just how these things work.

i would like to say that it’s not all my fault either - i’ve only been living in new york for a little over a year and this particular brand of east-coast loosely italian american masculinity does not exist at all in texas. i had never been with a man like him before, the newness charmed me. i’ve met a few since, trying to replace him. yes, i can hear myself. yes, i tell him in bed once that he has a sort of blue collar accent. yes, it turns me on when he describes to me in detail how he was fired from his last kitchen job for beating up a fellow cook, how the other guy was coked up and started it but he won, how he punched him in the face again and again saying this isn’t fucking miami. when i ask offhand how many kids he wants and he responds as many as my wife lets me have. when he tells me that he knows his soulmate is out there, that he’s already met her, that he fucked things up and it’s over and it happened four years ago, but to be honest if he ever heard she was getting married that he’d fly to stop the wedding and tell her don’t marry him, marry me. yes, i instigate this conversation and yes, we have sex afterwards. when he finishes inside me he says thank you. yes, i am overtly empathetic and understanding in the moment and yes, i cry walking to the bus stop the next morning in the snow. lord forgive me for my sins.

i read a reddit thread after googling why is tony soprano so attractive to me i don’t understand that says that supposedly almost all women who have watched the series are in love with him in the beginning and gradually fall out as it closes - which may have been the intention.

so while i’m thinking i might have a brilliantly-written character arc to look forward to here, i mostly am hoping that i too fall into this category of almost all women, that somehow watching the series to its completion will rid me of this feeling that i have lost something irreplaceably special. that if only i was a better, stronger, smarter, more confident person i could’ve kept it. this strange and slightly unpleasant but inescapable emotional task i’ve given myself. i have been here before.

but putting my personal sisyphean struggles aside for a moment.

the show is better than i thought it would be. it makes me laugh. the women are multifaceted and complicated and demanding in a way i didn’t expect them to be. it covers some incredibly dynamic topics. it also makes me very sad. what makes me sad about it is the way the men act towards the women in the show, but not in the way you probably think i mean.

not because they’re sexist (they are) and not because they’re racist (they are) and not because they all cheat on their wives (they do) and not because they barely ever have sex with their wives (they don’t) and not because they yell at and are sometimes even physically violent towards them (they are) and definitely not because of the crime (i do not care) or the frequent murders (ditto).

because it is so very clear how desperately they want to connect to the women in their lives, want to be truly known and loved and appreciated, want to be mothered but also to escape their mothers, more than anything want to be equals, and yet also how inescapable the ideals of traditional masculinity are in their world. how it forces them to put up walls between them and the people they care about, how painfully they lash out at their women when they feel their manhood is being criticized because they simply know no other way to react.

how the women just accept this way of being with the men in their lives, because they love them, because they too know no other way to react, no other way to live in companionship with them, how they also lash out at their men in the way they think they are supposed to. everyone is intelligent and everyone is trying their best and everyone is deserving of love and affection, no one in the show is evil (so far, i am still in season 2), everyone is redeemable. it is this that makes me feel so incredibly sad, this role that both genders are forced to play out, this wall of communication and honesty that is never able to be broken.

the closest any couple in the show comes to true partnership that i’ve seen so far seems to be the youngest of the mafia men, christopher, and his longterm girlfriend adriana. and still they fight, still they are cruel to one another, still he yells at her and throws things at her, still they misunderstand each other and project their insecurities onto one another. still he doesn’t always see her or give her credit in the way she deserves.

but also they walk through an entire house party in one scene with their arms around each other’s waists, both equally holding each other up, and it is obvious that she has an agency in the way she holds him too. also they blow a kiss to one another when one of them enters the room, a greeting of familiarity and intimacy so subtle that no one else around them notices. also they confide in one another, experience loss together, are brave enough to be vulnerable with one another about their life goals and desires. no other man in the show so far has come even close to expressing that kind of vulnerability with their female life partners. it’s endearing.

but still he slaps her in the face in the middle of a restaurant (at least she slaps him back), still he is oblivious and dismissive of her career goals, of her humiliation to have to introduce herself by saying she works in hospitality, of the ways being in a relationship with him is damaging her and holding her back. still he makes belittling comments about her job, is posessive and oversexualizing about her body and the clothes she wears, still her short-lived b plot of trying to become a music agent fades away until it disappears completely, still the best way he can explain their eventual engagement to his male friends is in terms of she loves me and she’s in her child-rearing years, still she bears the brunt of all his frustration and aggression and inability to healthily process his emotions. all of the women do, they know no other way to love, the men know no other way to be loved.

i have also lately been reading communion: the female search for love (2002) by bell hooks. on my phone for free as an ebook from the brookly public library. while all about love (1999) didn’t quite resonate with me as much as i wanted it to, despite its virality lately, communion has me highlighting quotes on every other page. i am obsessed - the entire concept of the book, of interrogating and examining women’s often-secret-and-intense obsession with achieving fulfilling romantic love in the modern post-feminist world, is incredibly intriguing to me.

and it is also timely, as i near my 25th birthday (in july), as i gather up the totality of my life over the past 5 years since i first entered my 20’s, as i take a close look at how i have spent my time, as i figure out how to try and spend it more intentionally.

as i become alarmed at how much of it has been spent trying and (though i might temporarily succeed) ultimately, failing to achieve a lasting and healthy romantic love. the sheer amount of time i have dedicated in my life to this never-ending pursuit, when i truly add it up, both disturbs and unnerves me. maybe on the outside it doesn’t appear to the world that this is what i have been doing - but inside my heart i know it has been the main goal all along.

as i encounter single man after single man who tells me that it’s his goal to get married and start a family, ideally before 30. not necessarily to find true love, true partnership, true communion, but to have a family. as i confront and accept my own desire to have children, how appealing the fantasy is of creating a family that is all your own and better than the one you were raised in, one where this time you are in control. as i confront my own fears that it won’t happen for me in time, my simultaneous fears that maybe it will. and that i will be unhappy and miserable and broke and regretful.

so what do we even mean by “love” and why does it feel like the end of the world when we are unable to get it the way that we want it? we as in women. do we actually even want real love, or do we actually just want power? do we want revenge? is it possible for women to ever even achieve a true romantic partnership based in equality and respect with any man, within the inescapable patriarchal society we all live in?

why can’t i give up pursuing love or at least forget about it for a fucking second so i can just focus on my career, on building and achieving a power of my own that isn’t based in someone else’s approval and respect and affection for me? why does it feel impossible to find a healthy balance of both? did sex and the city have a point when it said love is dead in new york? what is the point to it all, if i am left in sadness or anger each time, what kind of sick masochism is pushing me forward then?

questions i ask myself insistently, every time a group of women friends and i hang out and i observe that almost every conversation leads us back to romantic anguish. every time i gush about a man, complain about a man, become caught up and filled with hope and frustration and endlessly distracted by a man. of course i hear myself, of course i know i do nothing to dissuage the stereotypes of women, of course i know i am a hypocritical feminist, a hypocritical bisexual, all of these things - how can i not be, how can any woman not be. at least i am honest about it. i know i have a problem that i have not yet figured out how to solve, a problem i am worried is unsolvable entirely.

women talk about love. from girlhood on, we learn that conversations about love are a gendered narrative, a female subject...femaleness in patriarchal culture marks us from the very beginning as unworthy or not as worthy, and it should come as no surprise that we learn to worry most as girls, as women, about whether we are worthy of love.

-bell hooks, communion (2002)

in the book, hooks talks about this phenomenon in a way that intrigues me and is different than i have heard before. of course, she says, women find themselves endlessly wrapped up in the pursuit of heterosexual romance - it is how we are taught to be in this world. despite modern feminism giving us the impression that true liberation is being single and having a roster of casual sex partners and being emotionally detached from romance or male romantic companionship entirely. what we really are taught is that male validation matters more than anything else - in whatever way we decide to chase it.

socialized in the false assumption that we will find love in the place where femaleness is deemed unworthy and consistently devalued, we learn early to pretend that love matters more than anything, when in actuality we know that what matters most, even in the wake of feminist movement, is patriarchal approval.

it’s that you're strong enough to take what they dish out or else too weak to do anything about it - that famous margaret atwood quote and all that.

while hooks isn’t a lesbian, she references a lot of lesbian feminist rhetoric from the movement during the time period when she was a young woman, slogans i’ve never heard before with clever snappy phrasing, like scratch his love and you’ll find your fear. or, feminism is the theory, lesbianism is the practice. they make me think.

i wanted to find my own identity and be autonomous at the same time that I wanted to find a mate who would rescue me, who would provide and protect. i was, like generations of women before me, split, torn between two competing identities—the longing to be the liberated, independent, sexually free woman and the desire to settle down and be domesticated.

when presented with these two contradicting ways of ideal being for women in the world, what else are we supposed to do than pursue love in secret, shame ourselves for having romantic desires, convince ourselves we must choose between us or them, romance or equality? think lesser of our friends who have boyfriends when we are single yet simultaneously feel incredibly jealous of them? feel both an intense pull to protect my freedom and individuality yet also an equal pull to be swept up and rescued by traditional heterosexual romance? it is relieving to know that i am not the only woman who does not know how to cope with these dualing realities and desires within myself.

patriarchy, like any colonizing system, does not create the context for men and women to love each other. without knowing one another, we can never experience intimacy.

feminist silence about love reflects a collective sorrow about our powerlessness to free all men from the hold patriarchy has on their minds and hearts. it reflects our shock at male betrayal.

it’s also unfair and unproductive to the larger goal of true feminism to disparage all men on a widespread and unspecified scale (though it may sometimes feel tempting). it feels as if we (women) are the only ones being wronged by the patriarchal system - we are, but so are they.

the time has come to tell the truth. again. there is no love without justice. men and women who cannot be just deny themselves and everyone they choose to be intimate with the freedom to know mutual love.

i watch vanilla sky (2001) for the first time with a man who tells me it’s one of his favorite films and i think to myself: the real saddest girl to ever hold a martini is you. and it is this sadness in him that makes me want him more.

because when men are sad, their misogyny (both unintentional and intentional) can be forgiven. because now they are my child and i am their mother. and who doesn’t want to be in charge. what woman (when she’s really honest with herself) doesn’t crave that power.

but mostly what this is about is me feeling angry at myself. because i intentionally and soberly (worse) hurt someone. several weeks ago now. now, i’m actually feeling pretty at-peace about the whole situation. but for a little bit there i was extremely distraught. when you fuck up you feel fucked up, i read that somewhere.

what i did is lash out in anger and frustration and impatience and an undeniably wounded-ego at this person who i cannot help but feel like i let slip out of my hands.

and what a dangerous, delusional, and narcissistic thought to have - that anyone could ever have that much power. it is not my sole responsibility to keep anything in my hands, let alone a person, who ever gave me the idea that i could. everything is a two way street and i must accept that i am not in control of the world, a difficult idea to wrap my head around, possibly the hardest idea.

the capacity to love is tied to being able to be awake, to being able to move out of yourself and be with someone else in a manner that is not about your desire to possess them, but to be with them, to be in union and communion.

as a result i cannot help but project and reenact all of my past relationship history and trauma onto this person, even as i see that they have their own. the reality is that i barely know them and yet they become over the period of just a few weeks the embodiment of all of my fantastical romantic and familial desires.

and how unexpectedly enticing and intoxicating it is, the slight promise of an impending traditional monogamous and committed relationship. where a man calls you his girl and drives recklessly and without a seatbelt but also walks around the car to open the door for you and says don’t worry you’re safe with me in the midst of his road rage. where he bets and loses money he doesn’t have but asks if you’ll go to the casino with him and now you’re thinking about kissing his dice. where he’s remarkably self aware of when he’s in the wrong, but only after the fact, only in private. where you become the subject of sexual jealousy and are reminded constantly that you are younger, more innocent, even though there are only two years between you. where you can see him getting off on teaching you about real life. where he doesn’t give you the aux or listen to you as often as you’d like, where actually nothing is as reciprocal as you want it to be, but he shows you beautiful music, but he’s a great storyteller, but he makes you laugh, but he sings to you (and you actually like it this time), but you start thinking maybe you could love him. and so most of the time you’re happy to let him take up more than half the space in the room.

what a blatant manifestation of those deep domestic societal female desires and expectations, those ones you have never before had the guts to actually say out loud. because it is embarassing, because you have been taught not to admit weakness, because we are taught it is a weakness, because it feels like a weakness.

because he has your affection, so you don’t care. because any deeper inequality you might sense is really your own fault, for not being more assertive, more confident. for letting your desire for male approval and romantic validation make you timid. for caring too much what he thinks of you. for not being decisive enough to hang up the phone at 4am when he’s pushing your boundaries and he’s being mean and he knows it, mimicking your voice saying do you still have feelings for me now, without calling him back 10 minutes later to reconcile. not even strong enough to say yes when he asks if you’ve been crying. no - you lie.

nevermind all of the ways that the two of you are also extremely incompatible, by then it’s too late - you’ve been sold on the fantasy.

and so you invite him over at 6 in the morning to have sex with you after arguing over the phone all night, because this is how you have learned you are valuable, learned you are powerful, because this is how you feel good about yourself after conflict, after feeling hurt, you accept his desire to fuck you as an apology - he doesn’t give you another. and when he leaves your room a few hours later after smoking the last of your weed and refusing to kiss you goodbye on the lips the way that you have decided means this is worth it he says, like he always does, you’re the best. but this time he adds on sometimes. and do you feel satisfied now? fuck no. it is the last time you ever see him and you wish more than anything that you hadn’t called him back, if only so that you weren’t left with this feeling of powerlessness. next time you won’t - whoever else that next time is with. and maybe you needed to learn this lesson the hard way.

i went to an all-female stand up comedy show a few weeks ago and one (fantastic) comedian told a joke i can’t get out of my head. it was something like, the first time she sleeps with a man it’s just to try it out, the second time it’s just to try it out again, and the third time it’s so they won’t leave her.

so what i really want to say when i say the hurtful intentional sober thing is i miss you, please come back. and if not that then at least give me some clarity, tell me this was worth something, tell me i am worth something, because you’ve become my most recent god and i won’t believe it unless it’s coming from your mouth.

what we were was emotionally needy, desperate for the recognition that would prove our worth, our value, our right to be alive on the planet… as females in a patriarchal culture, we were not slaves of love; most of us were and are slaves of longing.

what i actually do is demand that he return an item of my clothing that he still has in his posession and which he has ignored all of my attempts to retrieve. along with a lengthy string of insults calling back to various vulnerable things he’s previously told me. think maybe that anger and cruelty are languages he understands better than the earnestness i’ve already tried. so i attack his sexual prowess because i know at least it is a thing i can touch - men are so fragile in this way, maybe only in this way. it works just the way i fear it might. i am never getting my clothes back.

what i don’t say is you hurt me, what i don’t say is i am still waiting for an apology, what i don’t say is i really tried to do this gracefully but i cannot stand the indefinite waiting any longer i need it now. what i don’t do is what i’ve done before - beg. what i don’t say is just give me one more conversation, what i don’t say is i’m worth it i swear, what i don’t say is please. don’t marry her, marry me.

no, instead i behave in exactly the same destructive way i see men and women speak to each other on the sopranos. and does it get me what i want? of course not. do i even want what i want because i actually want it or just because i can’t have it? i do not know.

so in the end the pressure of waiting to cross that vague future bridge when or if i ever come to it becomes too difficult for me, and so i resort to burning the bridge down myself. because at least then i am in control, at least then the enemy is a familiar one - myself.

but how frustrating that it is impossible to ever really know how to get through to someone else, to force someone to give you the peace of mind that you want. nevermind that i have refused to give other people that same peace of mind, nevermind that i of all people should understand that it’s not always so personal, that closure is a thing a person can only get on their own time in their own way.

it is clear to me now that a large part of why i was so drawn to him was that we shared the same disease. that one where you get indefinitely paused in time, stuck replaying the same sequence of events over and over again, caught in a loop where all you can think of is all the things you could’ve possibly done differently, if only you were able to go back to that one moment. that one where it feels impossible to be fully present, to put your all into your real life here and now, because half of your soul is frozen living in that alternate split reality - that one where you did everything right and you were braver and smarter and now you are happy.

i think at first, when i meet him, that i’ve finally kicked it. that being stuck for so long was worth it because now my prison has melted, that i have somehow figured out how to bring my soul into the present and start living in reality. that it might be my job now to melt his prison too.

but here i am freezing again. less than i have in the past, definitely, but still. it was the first time i had allowed myself to feel that kind of hope in a long time and i didn’t know how to deal with the intoxication. something in my past has taught me that being vulnerable, being honest, being confident in my wants isn’t a safe strategy to use around anyone who’s attention i have a desire to keep. and so i am not honest with myself or with him until it is too late - no guarantee that it would’ve ever worked out anyway, but i definitely didn’t do myself any favors by lying. it’s not a coincidence that this is the exact phrasing he uses when he first tells me he ruined things with the person he believes to be his soulmate. why did i reenact that?

because while at first i think he is what freed me - now i can see all i was doing was swapping drugs. i play dumb like a champ but i see most of the conflict coming, i play my part, i like a challenge, some sick part of me craves almost-certain failure. it’s easy to play the victim, it’s easy to play the villain, they are roles i am familiar with. but if i’m honest with myself i don’t think true communion is something i’ve ever been looking for at all. it is the great and terrifying unknown. i don’t think i am even capable of it, yet.

so now i am left with another name to add to the list of people i don’t want to run into on the subway. all i have to say is you live and you learn and i don’t think i’ll ever repeat the same set of mistakes i made here again.

and i know that my feelings are all less about him and more about me because what i cannot stop thinking about the most is an incredibly brief comment he made to me months ago, when he hardly knew me at all. when we are watching a movie together for the first time and i am doing such a good job of playfully predicting what’s going to happen next that he laughs and says to me: you should write.

before he has any idea that i went to film school, any inkling at all what my personal hopes and dreams are. the way his attention and respect feels special because it is fleeting and selective and i have briefly managed to capture it.

the way a week later over the phone he is teasing me for having a weak goodbye and i am protesting and he takes it back and tells me earnestly: you’re not weak, you’re strong. stronger than me. the way it feels in the moment like he really wants me to believe it.

i am thinking about what this says about me, that this is what i cling to, these brief tiny moments when it feels like a man believes in me more than i believe in myself.

and it makes me think that what i truly desire is the confidence to believe these things before they are told to me. because maybe then these sentiments of support wouldn’t feel so powerful, maybe then i wouldn’t feel so desperate to keep them, feel so much grief when they are lost.

i think the truth is that finding ourselves brings more excitement and well-being than anything romance has to offer, and somewhere we know that.

something to work on. in the meantime i think i’ll forgive myself. and finish watching the sopranos. it’s already starting to work.