Rose Quartz
DESCRIPTION:
A type of quartz (a crystalline mineral) with a pale pink or rosy hue; smooth and translucent, with a waxy texture
COMPOSITION:
Silicon dioxide (SiO2)
METAPHYSICAL PROPERTIES:
Invokes a deep feeling of universal love and connection; restores trust and harmony in friendships; allows one the power to give and receive love
The Millennial women in my life love Baz Luhrmann’s 2001 film 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, as well as its cartoonish understanding of love and sex. It didn’t matter that literally every man in the movie was setting Nicole Kidman’s character, Satine, up to fail, ignoring her reluctance and her pleas that, really, a roof over her head and career opportunities would help her out a lot more than love. But love—exclamation point love!—was the grandest and most beautiful pursuit, according to the men—and to the little girls watching at home. It was the thing we wanted most: big and red and expressed through song. Even now, I feel my skin about to burst when I hear the film’s ultimate message (a lyric from “Nature Boy,” first recorded by Nat King Cole): “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 experience? Sure, I knew people who rolled their eyes at the corny and overwhelming score, at the baseness of the lesson. “Love is good? Is that all?” And my friends and I rolled our eyes back, because yes, it was all. It is all. It’s everything.
But with some distance from the big emotions of adolescence, I recognize a sadness in the film’s message. The only characters who sing that line are men—lovestruck, idealistic men who are championed for being emotionally open. Satine, the woman who was the object of their desire, dies without ever having achieved her dreams, all the love in the world unable to save her. Now I realize that we were absorbing the text and the subtext: the greatest thing we’re expected to do is love and be loved in return—no matter what else we, as women, might want to accomplish. These are the heights to which we’re expected to aspire. Men who love are enlightened beings, heroes of musicals, takers of action against all odds. But women aren’t celebrated for the act of loving others because we’ve been socially conditioned to believe that women are born to love—and present themselves as objects to be loved in return. If we believe that love is a woman’s default setting, baked into her DNA, then we leave no room for her to feel angry, to hate, to prefer her own companionship to that of a romantic partner, and—god forbid—to choose a life without children. And so we hit the rose quartz ceiling.
If you’ve ever been curious about crystals, you probably have a rose quartz. Unlike diamonds and pearls, which typically belong in the jewelry box and are worn purely for adornment, rose quartz is utilitarian. It’s the starter crystal for any budding witch, ubiquitous in museum shops and magic stores. Even if you’re not interested in witchcraft or metaphysics, it’s an easy stone to dabble with, and is on the same level as reading your horoscope or getting a casual tarot reading. Even people who find these self-divinatory pratices illogical can own a rose quartz and think, What’s the harm? While other stones may promise money or luck or protection from some unseen enemy, rose quartz promises to fulfill the most universal desire—love—which makes it immediately appealing. Love is deemed a necessity more than a luxury, which justifies a pursuit by any means, but it’s also never guaranteed. There is no direct action you can take to obtain or maintain love, nothing that will make love happen. When there’s no other option for bringing love into your life, the rose quartz starts to make sense. If you can’t control it, maybe some unseen, misunderstood energies can.
I bought my rose quartz at House of Intuition in Los Angeles 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, to remember that the whole point of work was to enjoy the life it could provide outside of work. I don’t remember what the little card in the shop said about rose quartz, but on their website, at the time of this writing, 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 found most other places. One website calls it “feminine in tone and one of the stones of the Great Mother.” Another says it imparts “warm, loving, feminine energy.” Yet another 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, they say the stone promotes love, generosity, and compassion and is supposed to aid in childbirth. It’s not hard to figure out who this is meant for. While interpretations of crystals can 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; to remind you of your love for others and your love for yourself. It also “carries a soft feminine energy,” as opposed to the “masculine,” aggressive energy of other stones. Some witchcraft traditions have subbed in “passive and active” energies for “feminine and masculine,” but in a society that places those concepts firmly in a gender binary, we know which is which.
While interpretations of crystals can vary from source to source, the rose quartz is always the stone of unconditional love.
Whether or not you identify as a woman or in any way feminine, to associate the binary of love and hate with any other binary assumes that love is naturally accessible only to some and requires a leap for others. Even the most generous reading of the crystal’s properties, which say we all have both masculine and feminine energies in us, still buys into the existence of a dichotomy. Rose quartz promises love, but it is only in the supposedly “feminine” way—passive, unconditional, existing vaguely in the ether, radiating an energy that inspires people to sing love songs about them. A woman offers herself up to love and reciprocates it; she is a vessel, ready and waiting to be filled, and to return that love to all who expect it from her. All of these descriptions point to the feminine. And it is always the feminine side of any duality that is expected to sacrifice, to give without condition, and to absorb without resistance.
Rose quartz was born of a woman’s tears and a man’s blood. In Greek mythology, goddess Aphrodite and mortal Adonis were lovers, soul mates in love and renewal and beauty. In Ovid’s telling, Aphrodite warns Adonis of hunting for sport, “lest your glory may cost me great sorrow…lest courage should be fatal to us both.” But he ignores her wishes for him to be cautious and attacks a boar. Some versions of the myth say the boar was sent by a jealous Ares, the god of war and Aphrodite’s former lover. Others say Artemis sent the boar. But in every version Adonis chooses his glory and courage over the wishes of his lover.
Whatever happened, by the time Aphrodite arrived, she found her mortal love bleeding out. In Metamorphoses, Ovid writes that the red anemone, or a rose, sprung from the earth where Adonis’s blood fell. Some modern versions of the myth say it was rose quartz that was formed by his blood mixed with Aphrodite’s tears, and the stone is a symbol of their eternal union—forever cut short by either Adonis’s selfishness or Ares’s jealousy. That might seem like a romantic idea on the surface, but in the context of this story, Aphrodite has no agency. Her only action is to weep over her dead lover. All myth is metaphor, and there is no version of this story in which Aphrodite isn’t positioned as the pitiful keeper of love. The rose quartz carries the complicated legacy of this myth: a goddess portrayed more like a powerless woman, and glorified for her tears.
As a cis person, 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.
Other cis women friends of mine say that the only binding quality of womanhood is that it’s assigned from the outside, something that’s put upon you regardless of how you feel about yourself. Sometimes, this feels correct. My body is seen as womanly and invites the according reactions; the catcalls, the long glares, the ease of close faces and nuzzled necks at sleepovers, the expectation of my presence in nail salons, the shock of a bared nipple, the watching of drinks, the eye contact on public transportation that can only mean Is this man bothering you? Are you okay?, the overall awareness of my presence in both positive and negative ways. I am treated as a woman, and that treatment just happens to match what is in my heart.
However, these particular friends have always been perceived as women and have never had to prove their gender. Other women I know, both cis and trans, rage at how quickly that privilege gets taken for granted, the idea that a woman could have something so desperately wanted by others and think of it as a burden. Even as I listed those qualities above, I immediately thought of the woman who has never been comfortable in a circle of girls in a pillowed bedroom, who is deemed too old or too ugly for catcalls, who is not assumed to be a woman at all. There is less and less binding us together all the time. Womanhood is almost everything and almost nothing.
According to much of the Western canon of witchcraft, my womanhood is my power. 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 these abilities represent my femininity and are where I’m supposed to derive my craft. 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 (basically all religions espouse some gender-essentialist idea that “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.
Many cultures understand that man and woman are not the only gender identities. In India and Thailand, there are officially recognized third genders, which encompass, to varying degrees, trans, intersex, and nonbinary identities. There are the “Balkan sworn virgins,” a socially defined trans masculine role in which, as the Washington Post defines it, people assigned female at birth “take an oath of lifelong virginity in exchange for the right to live as men.” First Nations groups in the Americas recognize some people as “two spirited.” But though there are identities that lie in between, or outside, 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, sun and moon, 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.
If femininity doesn’t lie in the woman, where is it? The rose quartz promises that the power of love is inherently feminine, and that this feminine nature lives in everyone, but make no mistake, it is not masculine. The language trips me up. I try to talk of gender roles, of gendered expectations and perception and identity, and get looped back into saying men are from Mars and women are from Venus. So much of our world, no matter who you are, is defined and influenced by the relationships, and roles, of men and women. So no, 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. Gender is like money; it’s not real, but you still have to use it, or it is used on you.
It’s not quite that men and women are punished for acting outside the categories of masculine and feminine—those categories come in many flavors, many combinations we add up and deem correct or deviant. There is a certain kind of femininity that is praiseworthy rather than denigrated in men. It’s the kind that views a pink polo shirt as a power move, but keeps pink lipstick at bay. It commends a certain man’s soft hands and moisturized face, sometimes, as long as there are other things about him that can counter those qualities so he doesn’t tip too far into femininity. But under the right light, some men can grasp at the feminine and stay safe.
Falling in love is possibly the most feminine thing a man can do, by these limited definitions. What is so charming about Ewan McGregor as Christian in Moulin Rouge! is his utter shock at falling in love. He calls himself a romantic from the get-go, but after meeting Satine, he waves his love around like a hundred-dollar bill he found on the street. Can you believe it? Can you believe this was just here, waiting for me? That I am the keeper of anything this beautiful and soft and nurturing? Of course Satine can believe it; maybe she’s been in love before, or has seen men fall for her. It doesn’t make her love any less real, just more measured, placed neatly in the context of everything else she’s seen. All she has to do, right now, as he’s waving his newly found love in her face, is be the recipient, to let him shine his light at her.
Gender is like money; it’s not real, but you still have to use it, or it is used on you.
But she knows what comes next. She sings of having to eat, of money. She lies to get him a job writing a musical at her club so he can start building his career. She does what’s best for him, even if he doesn’t understand, even if he gets angry at her, because she loves him. She has to gently take his love, swing it over her shoulders, and carry it for the rest of her life.
The rose quartz is also the “mothering crystal,” representing the relationship we most associate 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. Fathers can love unconditionally as well, but our gender roles tend to give them the job of the disciplinarian, the person whose favor you have to work to win. The giver of unconditional love has only to provide love, and that love has to be given freely and openly and constantly regardless of what she receives in return.
This is reasonable to expect of parents, regardless of gender. But it’s also easy to use the act of loving unconditionally as an excuse to treat the woman giving it like shit. The expectations loop back into justifying their existence. Kind, soft, giving: that’s just how women are. Any love that comes from a woman is assumed to have the whiff of motherhood in it, whether or not she has or wants children; any person that smacks of the feminine is supposed to be waiting for the smallest opportunity to gush love out of them. Whether you’re arguing from witchy empowerment or benevolent misogyny, the conclusion is the same: love is inherently feminine, not just a woman’s job, but her nature. Why expect anything else of her if this is what she was made for?
Men are, of course, capable of radiating love’s potential and getting no answer, of feeling the sting of unrequited love. But there is often a knot to it. The complaints are made with a hint of entitlement, of expectation that someone should be there to receive their love and be grateful for it, rather than the knowledge that you could spend your whole life ready to accept and return love and die still waiting. When men declare their love, requited or not, it’s an intentional gesture. In heterosexual society, women still rarely get the opportunity for the pronouncement, the getting down on one knee to make a moment of their feelings. But love is the pink polo shirt of a man’s emotional expression. It’s a way to prove one has emotion while still performing the macho posturing of a peacock. It’s the grand gesture of the declaration of love, of the proposal.
The romantic ideal of a man in love is only a man in unrequited—or just-about-to-be-requited—love, putting it on display for the world. Once the love becomes mutual, the roles are flipped. Now it’s the woman who has to provide love, who has to take that display and nurture it into something they can both live on. The masculine lives in the pursuit, and the feminine is in caring for what you have. The rose quartz’s supposed powers may allow a man to get in touch with his feminine nature enough to announce love, but go too far and he becomes feminized, a warped version of the gender roles society creates for us.
I want that challenge. I want to look back at my days of unrequited love and see myself as the hero brave enough to voice my feelings, not the pitiful, pathetic loser assuring myself that if he texted back I’d be so good to him. Sometimes I get a to experience a different gender role—when I present my partner, whose pronouns are they/them/their, with flowers or jewelry for no occasion at all, when they wear lipstick out and I don’t, when I make it clear how much I want them, when they cry and I get to be the solid wall they can lean all their weight into. It thrills me, to escape the rose quartz box, even as I remember that none of these actions have any gendered meaning on their own, that this doesn’t have to be an issue of jumping over a fence into different, bluer pastures. I don’t know that I would have thought these things were opposites if my language didn’t present them as such. I don’t know I would have thought of the word opposite at all.
If feminine love is closely tied to motherly love, then it’s no wonder that women in heterosexual relationships are sometimes treated by their partners as mother figures, which comes with the expectation that their love be freely and unconditionally given. This is supported by studies that show that women tend to do the lion’s share of housework, even if both partners work outside the home.
Women are defined by their ability to love, and their success is often predicated on their relationships with others, including romantic partners and children. A man is lucky to have love, but he isn’t defined by whether he has it or not. Bachelors are seen as interesting, sexy, and even mysterious. They can move through the world alone and unencumbered if they choose to. The same cannot be said for spinsters. A woman without love baffles those around her. This expectation hurts women. According to the 2013 study “Commitment: The Key to Women Staying in Abusive Relationships” from researchers at the University of Alabama, “women who consider a relationship with a man as a vital part of their existence as a woman” are less likely to leave an abusive male partner. To hold the gender role of woman is to put the needs of others, including your husband and kids, before your own. A romantic relationship should not be unconditional, and not all are, but all women must confront the reality that they are seen as caretakers.
One of the abilities of the rose quartz, according to The Book of Stones by Naisha Ahsian and Robert Simmons, is the ability to heal the heart from past traumas. It can “dissolve one’s boundaries of isolation and mistrust,” inspire humbleness and humility, and help the user see themselves as one and the same with whoever they are loving. This is love at its best. When your guard is down and the other person sees you and loves you with exactly the same intensity, when whatever work and attention you’ve put into building this relationship has paid off, then you can roll around in it, still giddy that you’re here at all. But I want to know why it’s a woman’s job to undo her own boundaries. I want to know why her boundaries are thought to be a threat to love instead of a boon to it. I want to know why Satine had to die for Christian to believe she may have been acting out of love the whole time, just not the kind of love he thought he deserved.
The pink color in rose quartz comes from the inclusion of various other elements in a clear quartz—titanium, phosphate, and manganese add anything from a soft pink to a deep rosy color. Some have rutile needles running through them, pink lines cutting through clear stone. It may sound obvious, but the only thing that makes it rose quartz is its color, no matter its internal structure. It’s defined solely by its appearance.
Pink used to be a color for baby boys, a bit of trivia trotted out whenever gender reveal parties go awry. According to Pink and Blue: Telling the Girls from the Boys in America by Jo B. Paoletti, before the nineteenth century, babies weren’t expected to wear gendered clothing at all. White gowns were considered the most convenient and easiest to clean for all children until the age of six. When pastels showed up in the mid-nineteenth century, the baby’s coloring, not gender, determined who wore what. By the 1920s, stores like Filene’s were suggesting pink for boys and blue for girls, pink being a soft, diluted version of red, the color of Mars, of war, of blood, and blue being the color of the Virgin Mary, of peace and clear skies. But by the 1940s, the colors switched places as clothing manufacturers marketed pink as a color for women and blue as one for men (possibly influenced by the colors of military uniforms). Now, the progressive thing to do is dress them all in yellows and greens, “neutral” colors, though blue has snuck in there too. A baby girl in blue is just a baby. But a baby boy in pink, in frills, in sequins, is cause for confusion.
There are other feminine associations that used to be reserved for men. Greek, Roman, and even Victorian men doused themselves in rose scents. “The rose in times past was a symbol of power, and so of the traditional idea of man,” Geza Schoen, a German perfumer, told the New York Times’s Rachel Syme in 2016. Though roses have long been associated with Aphrodite and the Virgin Mary, fifteenth-century England’s Wars of the Roses was fought between men, carrying white and red roses as the heraldic badges of the House of York and the House of Lancaster. The height of a heel, the grandeur of a wig, the quality of powdered blush were all ways men could one-up each other in court. Things become feminine over time, through association, when the person wearing them is deemed feminine—and less powerful—in their behaviors.
The books and the mystics speak of the rose quartz as if it were always feminine, that its love comes tied with softness and passivity and breasts and puckered lips and motherhood, all valuable and all on one side of an immovable dividing line. But squint and it could have been the stone of men, of Adonis, of boys marching into battle with passion in their hearts, fortified by their childhood pinks. A blue chalcedony could have been the stone of soft, feminine love while rose quartz could have represented the love that leads to acts of bravery, risk, and commitment.
I don’t want love to sound like a burden. Being in love, providing love, and receiving love are my favorite things I’ve ever done. It does not feel like showing up to work or tending a prized orchid to keep love alive. It feels so natural, so inviting, that the ideas of obligation or duty rarely occur to me. Isn’t it a joy to be able to express a want or need, and for your partner to say it would be their honor to fulfill it? While any relationship is important to analyze, love is not just work and building and attention. It is magic. Maybe those are the boundaries the rose quartz can help tear down—it can remind you that love should not feel like a job, and when it does, something is wrong.
But that doesn’t mean it’s unconditional. I asked my partner if there were conditions to their love for me. They said I’d have to force their hand by doing something unthinkably horrible, like murdering their parents. I love them so much sometimes I can’t see the boundaries between us. Some days I have to force myself to think of anything but how much I would give, and it feels amazing. But I do know there are actions they could take, however wildly improbable, that would make loving them impossible. Maybe I would still feel something like love for them, but I would stop loving. 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.
The most feminine thing about me, in identity and in culture, is that 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 just wish it weren’t an expectation of the pinker side of the scale.
