“Love becomes a religion”

“Love becomes a religion” describes how a woman’s socially constrained position can turn love into a form of worship. The beloved is made sovereign and absolute, while the woman seeks to overcome her dependence by freely embracing it; the apparent transcendence of devotion can therefore reproduce the very subordination it promises to redeem.

Dependence and the Absolute

The argument begins by rejecting the idea that women’s self-effacement in love follows a natural law. The difference lies instead in their situations: the man is formed as a subject who acts and pursues ends, while the woman is commonly confined to the relative and denied equivalent scope for action. Taught from childhood to regard men as sovereign and equality with them as unavailable, she may seek to surpass her own limited position by fusing with a man who represents the absolute and the essential.

In this account, devotion becomes a chosen response to dependence. Because a woman is already expected to obey parents, a husband, or a protector, she may prefer to serve a godlike beloved rather than submit to ordinary authority. By treating her own surrender as an expression of freedom, she attempts to transform her status as an inessential object: she exalts the beloved as supreme value and effaces herself before him. This is the sense in which love becomes a religion—not simply powerful affection, but a structure of belief organized around the beloved’s sovereignty and her own self-renunciation.

From Desire to Transfiguration

The pattern has an adolescent prehistory. A girl may first wish to identify with males; after relinquishing that aspiration, she may hope to participate in their virility by being loved by one of them. Her longing can attach less to a particular man’s individuality than to man as the figure of superiority. That ideal is vulnerable to ordinary familiarity: a man’s prestige may falter in a first kiss, in daily contact, or on the wedding night, as the imagined embodiment of masculine essence gives way to a contingent person.

The account also distinguishes physical pleasure from the meaning attached to it. After an encounter, the woman may feel returned to herself as an isolated person, and the lover’s gaze and promises of lasting feeling can then appear to restore value to what otherwise seems momentary. With that promise, sensuality is recast as hope and gift rather than an isolated state; the woman can understand her body not merely as an object but as something transformed through love. The movement from desire to promised permanence helps explain why erotic experience may take on a mystical tone without making sexual feeling and religious belief identical.

The comparison with religious devotion clarifies the imagery. The woman in love and the kneeling saint are presented as sharing a dream of becoming sovereign through self-effacement within another. The comparison explains how devotional language can attach itself to romantic love: the beloved occupies the place of supreme reality, and surrender appears to promise access to a fullness unavailable to the self alone.

The Cost of Worship

The promise contains a contradiction. The woman seeks to save herself through love, but idolatrous devotion can lead her to disavow herself completely. Her dependence does not disappear when she chooses it; it is recast as a source of meaning, leaving her vulnerable to the person on whom that meaning rests. The beloved’s freedom may shape her sense of herself and may also destroy the identity his love seemed to confirm.

Consequently, the desired union can become solitude, conflict, and even hatred. The woman’s gifts may go unaccepted, while the unconditional devotion she has been taught to offer is not matched by an equivalent commitment from the man. The rhetoric that presents love as a woman’s highest fulfillment thus becomes a mystification: it celebrates sacrifice while evading the reciprocal demands that sacrifice ought to entail.

Historical and Ethical Significance

The expression belongs to a broader argument that feminine identity is not an immutable essence but a response to social conditions. The book challenges both the claim that femininity is an eternal nature and the opposite claim that women can simply be considered abstractly as human beings, untouched by their concrete situation. Its existentialist account instead asks how historical relations shape the possibilities through which people understand and pursue freedom.

That historical analysis connects intimate life to male power in law, religion, custom, and the organization of society. Men have created and defended values that make women’s subordination appear natural or divinely sanctioned; myths, traditions, and cultural forms can carry those arrangements into private experience. In the same way, idealizing love as a woman’s destiny turns a social dependence into a personal and apparently sacred choice.

The critique does not treat love itself as inevitably destructive. It locates the danger in a relation where one person’s capacity to act and define ends is unequal to the other’s, so that devotion offers the dependent partner no secure route to selfhood. Love could become a source of life rather than mortal danger when a woman can love from strength, affirm herself, and meet another person without using self-erasure as her only imagined escape from dependence.