The Rose Quartz Ceiling: When It Comes to Love, Men Are Praised for What Women Are Simply Expected to Give

When love and femininity are intertwined, only some of us are expected to do the job of loving.

This is Personal Facets, a monthly column by Jaya Saxena exploring emotions, the magical properties and promises of crystals, and the real reasons people seek their powers.

As a rule, it is the women in my life who love Moulin Rouge. Most of us were teenagers when it was released, the perfect age to be taken in by corsets and Paris and Ewan McGregor’s bangs, a cartoonish understanding of love and sex before any of us had experienced either. It didn’t matter that literally every man in it was setting Satine up to fail. It was love! Love! The grandest and most beautiful pursuit, the thing we all wanted. Big and red and singing. Even now, I feel my skin about to burst when I hear the film’s ultimate message: “The greatest thing you’ll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return.”

To not only love but accept love, to swirl and dance in its pink mist—what else could you want out of life? What greater thing could there be to learn? There are people in our lives who roll their eyes at director Baz Luhrmann’s corny and overwhelming score, at the baseness of the lesson. “Love is good”? Is that all? And my friends and I roll our eyes back, because yes, it is all. Everything. The world.

Distanced from the emotional rage of adolescence, though, I recognize a certain sadness in the message. The only people who sing that line in the film are men—lovestruck, idealistic men who are championed for being so emotionally open. But as women, we slowly learn, the greatest thing we are expected to do with our lives is love and be loved in return. No matter what else we might want to do, this is the height to which we’re expected to aspire. Men who love are enlightened beings, heroes of musicals. Women who love are just doing their job, what we were born to do. And so we hit the rose quartz ceiling.

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While some interpretations of crystals vary from source to source, the rose quartz is always the stone of unconditional love. Its pale pink translucence is said to pull at the heart and fill you with light and softness; remind you of your love for others, your love for yourself. It also “carries a soft feminine energy,” as opposed to the “masculine,” aggressive energy of other stones.

These ideas are intertwined, that it is the realm of the feminine to love and be loved. The rose quartz is the stone of motherhood, the ultimate archetype of a love that is supposed to be constant and freely given, no matter if it is ever reciprocated or even acknowledged. Whether or not you identify as a woman or a mother or in any way feminine, to associate the binary of love and hate with any other binary assumes that it’s only naturally accessible to some, requires a leap for others. Even the most generous readings of the crystal’s properties, which say we all have both masculine and feminine energies in us, still buy into there being a dichotomy. It is always the feminine side that is expected to sacrifice, to love without condition.

I bought my rose quartz at House of Intuition in LA, during a weeklong vacation between ending one job and beginning another. I was drained, looking for a stone or two to keep at my new desk and serve as a reminder to not lose myself; to work hard, but keep myself happy. I don’t remember what the little card in the shop said about rose quartz, but on their website, it reads: “Stone of universal love. Strengthens and balances the heart. Brings comfort in time of grief. Encourages forgiveness and invokes self-trust.” I posted my crystals on Instagram after I bought them, saying the rose quartz was to “protect my heart.”

I’m not sure if I would have bought it if its description used the language I’ve been finding most other places. Crystal Vaults calls it “feminine in tone and one of the stones of the Great Mother.” The Healing Chest says it imparts “warm, loving, feminine energy.” Energy Muse calls it one of the most “versatile feminine stones,” which you can use to honor your “divine feminine.” Even when sources don’t explicitly call out the feminine, the stone promotes love, generosity, compassion, and is supposed to aid in childbirth. It’s not hard to figure out who this is meant for.

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Like most cis people, I was never compelled to consider my gender that deeply. I was told I was a woman and that has always seemed right. But if you ask me why I feel like a woman, I have no answer. I just do. Or do I? Is my womanhood the same as yours? It can’t be. My gender is woman, but more specifically, my gender is me.

I have never felt a connection to certain bodily realities of being a cis woman. Menstruation is an annoyance, and thus far pregnancy doesn’t interest me. Yet according to much of the Western canon of witchcraft, these abilities represent my femininity, and are where I’m supposed to derive my power. It is my “moon-time,” my uterus, my hypothetical ability to hold and create life that connects me to the universe in a more powerful way than men. This isn’t unique to witchcraft (Judaism, Christianity, and Hinduism all espouse some form of gender-essentialist “women are sacred . . . in their own way”), and yet for all the sacred power women are said to possess, none of those traditions have landed us in a matriarchy.

In the movie The Love Witch, Elaine, the titular witch who keeps killing her beaus in the pursuit of love, is told by Gahan, the man who leads her coven, that “a woman’s greatest power lies in her sexuality.” He greets her by kneeling and kissing her abdomen, then her chest, then attempting to kiss her mouth as she blankly stares into the distance. As they watch a burlesque routine, he espouses the “celebration of woman as a natural creature. An earthly body, a spiritual essence, and a womb.”

Elaine’s friend Barbara continues, arguing, “We strive for male/female polarity and to regain our primal power as goddesses.” Women’s power, she says, is softer, subtler, all nature and warmth. She encourages Elaine and the other women at the table to use their “femininity” (makeup, heels, dance, cooking) to enact power over men; to be a “mother and a lover” to ensnare them: “Then, when his heart is open to love, you may do with him what you will.”

Some witchcraft traditions have subbed in “passive and active” energies for “feminine and masculine,” but in a society that already places those firmly in a gender binary, we know which is which. Women are to use their emotions, subtle influence, rather than force to get what they want. But what is that? What do we want? In The Love Witch, Elaine and the other women do not seek dominion over their coven, or any other realm. Instead, they seek love, commitment, devotion. And when Elaine is punished for it (after her love potions kill one too many), she’s defiant in the face of a man who’d tell her her love is too much. “Men make us work so hard for your love,” she says. “If you would just love us for ourselves, but you won’t.” If men were incapable of love, she thought, she’d use magic to make them capable. “I decided to find my own power. That means that I take what I need from men and not the other way around.” If you tell women love is the most they can aspire to, they’ll find a way to get it.

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Most cultures have a sense that male and female, as gender identities, are not all there is. But though there are identities that lie in between, or outside, of these categories, they are often still spoken of with language that insists masculinity and femininity are somehow fixed. One and the other, opposites swirling together, both equal and necessary in one person, but still separate. While there are endless gender identities, there are limited-gender roles: man and woman, mother and father, passive and active. A two-dimensional spectrum, a sliding scale between pink and blue, any “third gender” understood as a varying shade of purple between two endpoints.

You do not have to be feminine to embrace the energy of a rose quartz, but femininity is a role those perceived as women (whether they are or not) are expected to play. Part of the role of femininity is embracing all that is love. Wanting love, giving love, accepting love. Loving and being loved in return. And, as with most things, what is praiseworthy in men is simply a requirement for women.

In the film Adaptation, as twin brothers Charlie and Donald lay hiding in a Florida swamp, Charlie admits how jealous he’s always been of Donald’s confidence. He recounts a story from high school, watching Donald flirt with a girl named Sarah, and watching Sarah make fun of him the moment he turned away. Donald admits he knew, and Charlie asks how he could have remained so happy if he knew this girl thought he was pathetic. “I loved Sarah, Charles,” says Donald. “It was mine, that love. I owned it. Even Sarah didn’t have the right to take it away. I can love whoever I want.”

On the surface, this is a sweet moment. A man feeling love and requiring nothing of a woman but to be the object of his faraway affections. When I first saw it, I thought the scene was a representation of the pure beauty of love, how it could just be. But now I’ve soured to it. Unrequited love is love without action, which I’m not sure is even love in the first place. It’s obsession. It’s infatuation. Mostly, it’s easy. Donald can think he loves Sarah because he never has to do anything. He never has to choose love. As he says, his love is something he owns, not something he gives.

To feel love is something we expect, in varying degrees, of everyone—though a woman experiencing unrequited love is more often depicted as desperate and pathetic rather than a sweet, hopeless romantic. If unrequited love is a feeling, unconditional love is its twin action. And to love as an action is still a woman’s job.

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The rose quartz is the “mothering crystal,” and mothering is the role most closely associated with unconditional love. A mother’s unconditional love is seen as necessary—how else could she raise a child who cries and rebels and yells at her and takes her for granted and eventually leaves? To be a good mother, the supposed higher calling of any woman, is to love no matter what. The giver of unconditional love has to do the work of love, and it has to be given freely and openly and constantly regardless of what she receives in return.

This is reasonable to expect of parents, both mothers and fathers. But it’s also easy to use the act of “unconditional love” as an excuse to treat the woman giving it like shit. Kind, soft, giving: That’s just how women are. Whether you’re arguing from witchy empowerment or benevolent misogyny, the conclusion is the same. Love is feminine—not just a woman’s job, but her nature. Why expect anything else of her if this is what she was made for?

I asked my partner if there were conditions to their love for me. “Yeah, like, if you murdered my parents, I’d probably stop loving you,” they said. I love them. I can’t, and don’t want to, imagine a life for myself in which we do not love each other. But I do know there are actions that would make loving them impossible. Maybe I would still feel something like love for them, but I would stop loving as an action. There are conditions to my love. There are things that would make me abandon it, not because I wanted to, but because I had to.

Because the only person I want to have unconditional love for is myself. I think that’s what drew me to the rose quartz in the first place. My secret is that I am feminine, in identity and in culture, and I love love. But I can’t tell anymore if I give love because I want to or because I have to—because I’m expected and conditioned to, as a woman. Would I love so powerfully if it weren’t the “feminine” thing to do? Would I have lost myself in its rosy down if it wasn’t expected of me? I still think the greatest thing you’ll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return. I wish it weren’t only required of those on the pinker side of the scale.