One of the most prevalent themes in "Their Eyes Were Watching God" is Jamie's undivided quest for love and independence. Jamie's goal throughout the novel is to find spiritual enlightenment and reach "the horizon." She went through several relationships and wishful thinking to get there, through her nanny grandmother and her three husbands. However, her third husband, Tea Cake, plays a less prominent role in the novel but an important role in Jamie's quest to realize her dream of love, independence, and security within herself. Early in the book, Hurston foreshadows the question of Jamie's quest. for love. She lay on her back under the pear tree, bathed in the alto song of the visiting bees, the gold of the sun and the panting breath of the breeze and the inaudible voice of it all came to her. She was a bee laden with dust which burrowed into the sanctuary of a flower; the thousand sister chalices arch to meet the loving embrace and ecstatic thrill of the tree from root to smallest branch and creaming in each flower and foaming with delight. So it was a wedding! (page 11). Hurston foreshadows the central question of his novel; Jamie's quest to reach his horizon. The unification of the bee and the flower is the fulfillment and reflection of the love that Jamie desires through his romantic relationships throughout the novel. In Jamie's quest for love, she meets her first husband Logan, in which she is tricked into the illusion. of love by his nanny. “Cause you told me I had to love it, and, and no, maybe if someone told me how, Ah could do it” (p. 23). Jamie realizes that the nanny described love as money and respect, but Janie wanted both emotional and physical love that Logan couldn't provide. Jamie begins meeting a man named Joe Starks who is a vital change in his loveless marriage. “Every day after that they managed to meet in the scrub oaks across the road and talk about when he would be a great ruler of things and she would reap the benefits. Janie withdrew for a long time because he did not represent the sunrise, pollen and flowering trees, but he spoke of a distant horizon” (p. 29). Janie's eyes, Joe might be the horizon she's looking for.