Why do activist groups fall apart because of interpersonal relationships blowing up, when the people involved are committed to the same collective ideals? Why do those who embody emancipatory political principles seem to act against those principles in their personal lives? In his new book, Love in a F*cked-Up World: How to Build Relationships, Hook Up, and Raise Hell Together, activist and writer Dean Spade offers practical tools for building strong relationships and breaking free of the “romance myth” that the right relationship will fit all of our needs that society teaches us.
Love in a F*cked-Up World is self-help for queers and activists who are rightfully skeptical of mainstream self-help advice. Spade has previously written works such as Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law and Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity in this Crisis (and the Next). In his new book, Spade challenges us to think more deeply and build practical skills for understanding the patterns of conflict we develop with friends, lovers and comrades. By recognizing and working through our interpersonal tensions, we can bring ourselves to a better place to commit ourselves to the long-term dedicated work of building a better world. Spade doesn’t dwell on personal storytelling or anecdotes. In this book, he offers straightforward lessons and advice distilled from his experiences. I sat down with Spade over video call ahead of the book’s release to chat about Love in a F*cked-Up World and the lessons Spade has learned from his many years of queer dating and activism.
As you mention in the book’s introduction, Love in a F*cked-Up World is different from a lot of your past writing. What made you want to write a book about relationships and activism for this moment?
For 25 years, I’ve been in queer and trans liberation work, work related to police and prison abolition, border abolition, anti-war work and Palestine solidarity work. It’s just been so clear to me that our projects and groups often fall apart because of the gaps in our relational skills. People have strong emotional reactions to each other and don’t know how to handle it.
The strength of our movements is just the strength of our relationships. When we can’t treat each other well, can’t welcome new people, can’t hang in with disagreements, can’t forgive each other and when we need everyone else to hate the person who we just broke up with … all of those things really impede our work.
I’ve been writing this book for about nine years. So many people have told me stories about really important groups that went under because of a breakup [of a romantic or platonic relationship]. The book is full of tools that I’ve found helpful that I hope will help other people not blow up when things get hard.
Things are so dire. With the ecological crisis, rising right-wing governments all over the world, the level of anti-trans, anti-reproductive-health, racist policymaking and immigration enforcement, we really need to come together, resist and take care of each other. It’s a matter of life and death …
You write about what you call “the romance myth” being the dominant way this society teaches us about how we ought to have relationships. What problems does this myth create for those of us trying to build a more collective and caring world?
The romance myth tells us that the love relationship is the most important relationship, and you should kind of put it above all else. People ditch their friends and their projects because of this. They move to faraway places. They go into isolation with their partner. That’s a very typical dynamic in sexual relationships and romantic relationships. So people end up on love island with another person and that takes them out of their communities. That’s really bad for collectivity.
The romance myth encourages jealousy and competition around dating and sex. It puts us at odds with other people in our social or political circles, and people act unethical under the influence of the romance myth.
You write about how our fears of abandonment and engulfment create these repeated cycles of relationship conflict. We fall in love and break up without identifying the core traumas that are underlying our actions. How do you see those fears impacting resistance groups that you’ve been a part of or that you’ve seen?
The dance of having one person fearing envelopment and one person fearing abandonment is so common; it’s happening in almost every relationship. If we can notice that [these patterns are] really common, we can neutralize how severely we feel the need to act them out. One of my hopes is that we get out of individualizing this stuff. It’s really easy to stigmatize and judge somebody else who’s playing out these patterns. People gossip, telling each other “that was a bad date” or “that was a bad person” or whatever. And this can happen inside groups doing support in our community.
Even if we’re not in a romantic relationship, we may be having those dynamics. I may want you to have lunch with me more often, or I want us to meet or talk on the phone more often and you might feel crowded by that. Even just knowing if somebody’s behaviour is activating that fear in us may allow us to [ask ourselves questions like], “How would I like to act right now?” “Can I get support from someone else about that?”
What advice do you have for people new to activism who are falling in love with social movements and also with people they meet in them?
We should treat the people around us like we’ll know them for the rest of our lives. I think it’s easy for people to meet a lot of new people, or join a movement group and judge other people harshly, or run through people quickly. But how would you act if you knew that you’ll know this person for the rest of your life and your life might depend on them at some point? What I’ve found in social movements being there for 25 years is that people I met when I was 20 are still in my movements, still in my community, whether or not I found them kind of annoying back then. So how can I be loving toward people, even if I disagree with them? Even if they are annoying to me?
You write about surveys in the U.S. and Canada showing that people now rate love as their number-one goal in life over financial success or a satisfying career. This is in contrast to previous decades, like the 1930s, where love was ranked fifth. What possibilities and also challenges do you see with love being a central priority for many people today?
I think that is indicative of how isolated most people are. People do not have enough friendships and enough kinds of community relationships. What does it mean to have more relationships in which we can actually tell people about our good news and our bad news, or have someone who we know will visit us if we were sick? That might mean working harder to have some in-person relationships, not just online relationships. I think that the romance myth becomes more dangerous and the hope for getting it all met becomes more dangerous if you have less people in your life who you could tell if it wasn’t working out.
Are there ways that activists have to approach romance happening between people carrying out political work together that is different from how people approach romance in general?
What I’m hoping is that people who have feminist, anti-capitalist, anti-racist values will let those values inform how we think about romance. I want us to be pro-sex and pro-romance. Everyone should have lots of compelling, delightful, fun, hot relationships. But how can we be ethical according to the other beliefs we have while we’re in those relationships? How can we not treat other people like commodities? How can we be direct communicators? How can we not treat people as disposable? How can we avoid revenge?
As somebody who’s a prison and police abolitionist, I don’t believe in punishment as a framework for human thriving. So I need to look out for punishment mindsets coming into my consciousness. Society shows us a lot of that when it comes to sex and romance and breakups and heartbreak. This book is asking how can people who have those values, but who may feel alienated by the typical sex romance self-help literature, which tends to be pretty like racist and transphobic, have a way to talk about sex and romance and love and working on ourselves in community that is based on our radical values?
What do you think that love has to teach activists?
Love is so abstract and the word is so overused in our society. When we talk about sexual and romantic love, that kind of crush energy, I think it’s a very alive part of us. I’ve seen people kind of come back to life because they had a crush. We live in a pretty deadening, numbing society that can tell us to numb out and check out because things are so harsh and painful. Most of us have a lot of habits around that with entertainment.
Being able to tune into that passionate energy that can surround sex and love and desire. We can cultivate [that] feeling about plants and animals, about our own gender expression, about literature and find ways to tune into that kind of crush energy and remember times when the world is just beautiful. When things are sparkling and it’s also kind of an emotional roller coaster. It’s a little wild and maybe it’s a little unhinged and just appreciating that for what it is. I think we need to call on that sometimes when we’re feeling beaten down or numbed out or overwhelmed. We can see around a corner into some of the magic of what it is to just be alive and be in a body and appreciate other people’s beauty.