What’s Love Got To Do With It
Who, what, and how do you love? Where do you show love in your life, and how do you need to receive it? Are the actions you take aligned with the love you want, for yourself or for others?
Dean Spade's new book, Love in a F*cked-Up World, centers on tending to our love for each other and our communities in order to build social change movements. The premise of the book is that our relationships with one another form the foundations of our movements, and without understanding how trust is built and broken, or how our patterns of giving and receiving love from childhood might not serve our adult needs, we jeopardize our ability to act within our movements. It's a self-help book, but it extends beyond the self. If you've read a relationship oriented self-help book before (think, Polysecure), or one of the many books operating in psychological diagnostic models and the relational dynamics (think, I Hate You— Don't Leave Me), much of the practical analysis may sound familiar.
But Spade's book is a gateway to other ways of thinking about our relationships and our communities, and a good entry point if you are new to frameworks that rethink the entire basis of society as we know it (think, Family Abolition). At the core of Love in a F*cked-Up World is the idea that if we want to witness change and participate in its creation, we need to think not only about our individual actions, but also about how we show up in relationships; how those relationships build or destroy the communities and groups we participate in; and how these groups operate as a constellation of relationships that already are the world we are building. This view of love is not idyllic or utopian—it's realistic, and ultimately pragmatic. Love—our drive to feel it and offer it, as well as its effects—is treated as inevitable, but not necessarily in the forms that we anticipate.
To my mind, the most powerful love is not the kind of love we're taught to seek and offer—the kind portrayed as "romance," or sacrificial love, undying throughout space and time. I promise this isn't another screed about the commercialization of Valentine's Day or a woe-is-us rant about how our natural ability to love and be loved would be retained if only Target could keep on a tighter schedule for stocking shelves with pink and red candies, or brand moguls refrained from tapping our insecurities to induce us toward consuming products as though they offered real human affection. What I mean is, the types of love we have been instructed to participate in, to offer to ourselves and to others, are steeped in frameworks that prioritize and reinforce the status quo. But I know you want to be, and are, stronger than that. And rightfully want more.
The predictable backlash to Valentine's Day events, whether in the form of singles parties or Galentine's celebrations or refusal to participate altogether, is only one very incomplete way of resisting these narratives. It doesn't destroy them, it doesn't subvert them, it doesn't refashion them into something useful. In part, these efforts are incomplete because they take for granted the categories and kinds of love that already exist: they play in their sandbox and steal away with little bits to build a fragile castle at the edges, rather than climbing out, dusting off, and finding something new to play with. When the kinds of "romantic" or familial love we have been taught to receive as "normal" or good-enough stay central, we are sacrificing our own potential to create change in and through love.
What if, instead of trying to rehabilitate forms of love we've already heard about, we tried breaking ground on totally new forms of love. What would a truly revolutionary love look like? I'm far from the first person to ask this question, and even the phrase "revolutionary love" is all but copyrighted at this point. But the question isn't one I'm planning to give you a packaged answer to, it's just one to meditate on: what is the kind of love you hope to be able to offer to yourself and others, how do current narratives of love fall short, and what new imaginings could we all have if we each took one step toward the kind of love we actually want?
The actions you take to express your love for community have revolutionary potential.
Put differently, what if love is direction action — every word you say or action you take is one step toward the kind of revolution you want to see, in the world and in yourself? How would you behave if you knew that those acts had the potential to dismantle oppression, or build toward the world you want to live in? It’s empowering to know that each of those acts already is love — no matter whether you receive care in return, or what history brought you to that moment, or whether it creates the impact you hope for, taking those steps and engaging in direction action that confronts the world as it is and refuses to comply with what doesn’t align.
One could construe love as the most fundamental necessary evil in existence — without it, we probably wouldn't experience relational pain or grief or loss, but we also would lack senses of care and connection. In that sense, there is no perfect love, only a process of finding out how we want to feel it, give it, receive it. And from there, that love can add up to all kinds of messy and beautiful things in our communities if we let it. This is your invitation into that practice and process of discovery: don't settle for what you know already exists, but rather let your first act of this new kind of love be letting yourself search for something more.
In support of your learning, I'm giving away one copy of Dean Spade's book, Love in a F*cked-Up World. You can head over to Instagram to learn more about it, and to enter. If you're wanting more 1:1 support figuring out how you want to show up in community, you can always sign up for a session where we can brainstorm together.
