The world is fucked. We need each other more than ever.

But love is complex. At a time of multiple genocides, ecological crisis, mass incarceration, violent colonialism and rampant capitalism, how do we best love each other through the pain of trauma, grief and injustice? How do we build relationships for effective resistance that centre connection, growth and accountability?

Social movements are vibrant spaces where love and relationships blossom, fuelled by shared values to change the world. They are also rampant with interpersonal conflict — where egos reign, personalities clash and loverships disintegrate.

This is the focus of Dean Spade’s latest book Love in a F*cked Up World: How to build relationships, hook up, and raise hell together (Algoquin Books 2025), which seamlessly blends poly theory and resistance politics to explore how “romance myths” about scarcity and disposability impact our most intimate relationships — not only our romantic ties, but the deep friendships and solidarities required to do effective movement work.

At the heart of this plunge into the practice of love is actually a question of strategy: “How do we build lasting and effective resistance movements?”

I first fell in love with the writing of Dean Spade fourteen years ago in a queer share house. His first book Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics and the Limits of the Law (South End Press, 2011; Duke University Press 2015) was hot property, shared between flatmates and lovers. As a queer sex worker and legal scholar working on decriminalisation, I was compelled by his critique of law reform — how quickly our liberatory movement goals become diluted in campaigns for recognition and inclusion in state mechanisms.

Spade’s second book, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next) (Verso, 2020), published during the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, offered alternatives to liberal reformism and charity. It demonstrated the value and necessity of mutual aid, resource-sharing and survival work in the face of continued crises.

The central target of Spade’s new book is the “romance myth”. That is, the persistent, damaging narrative that romantic relationships trump all others, that romance is eternal, exclusive and possessive, and that one person can meet all of our needs.

If a self-help book seems an unlikely focus for a legal scholar, Spade is quick to show how relationships matter in movement building:

There is a lot at stake in how we relate — the system knows it and always wants to mediate our relationships, isolate us, squander our time, drain our energy and pit us against each other.

Love in a F*cked Up World offers a practical roadmap, with toolkits, worksheets and questionnaires all designed to support individuals to deprogram ourselves, unlearn cultural scripts and notice unconscious habits as part of a more revolutionary project to “bring our best thinking about freedom and justice into alignment with our desires for healing and connection”.

Spade shines in the way he connects the tenderness, pain and splendour of our interpersonal relationships with an uncompromising takedown of the social, regulatory and economic structures that shape them. Notably, he treats romantic love as a social structure, focusing on the regulatory systems (taxation, property, healthcare, housing and immigration) that sustain nuclear families and marital units.

Despite decades of activism to support divorce, non-monogamy, single parenthood, alternative family structures and communities of care, Spade condemns how liberation is sold back to us as a product: “Instead of queers being a threat to the romance myth, we were suddenly offered its particular coercion, sold as ‘freedom’”. In line with authors on polyamory and relationship anarchy, he shows how romance myths incentivise relationship treadmills, following predictable patterns of escalation from sexual exclusivity to merging finances and having children. And yet they also repeatedly lead to undesirable outcomes.

By privileging romantic love, these myths encourage us to underinvest in friendships. They rationalise feelings of jealousy, obsession and insecurity. They buy into hierarchies of desirability based on body fascism, racism and classism. They cultivate a sense of scarcity, competition, and disposability that mirrors capitalist, colonial and carceral politics.

It is this scarcity model, argues Spade, that leads us to respectability politics: where we compete for funding grants, appeal to rich people, or try to change systems from the inside. Instead, he urges us, we ought to be cultivating horizontal networks of care.

In connecting the personal with the political, Spade uses the lens of disposability to take aim at both romance myths and carceral systems. Romance myths, he argues, lead to disposability culture, where people are cut off, exiled and punished for their mistakes. This, in turn, contributes to a fear of rejection and defensiveness, which is not conducive to building relationships with room for growth and change. The same phenomenon, he argues, is evident in prisons, family policing and immigration systems, which are built on processes of dehumanisation and ostracism:

The world we live in was built by making some people less than human. To justify colonialism and slavery, ideologies were created that made whole groups of people exploitable and killable.

All of us can point to times — in break-ups or in conflict — where we or others have acted contrary to our values, from hurt, fear or trauma. As Spade notes, there is a racial and gender politics to who can be vulnerable, who gets to be angry, and who bears the emotional labour in interpersonal conflict. Carceral approaches mean that we miss out on real accountability, involving proportionate responses, prevention, repair, healing and the work of system change: addressing the actual conditions and systems that contributed to the harm.

For those around the world grappling with how to live and to resist in the face of genocide and volatile authoritarian regimes, Spade offers insights into the generative role of grief can play social movements. He rallies against the pathologisation of grief in medical and psychiatric texts, which differentiate it from depression, and frame it as a short-term condition, related to specific incidents or discrete periods of time. In the context of “war, police and border violence, mass shootings, ongoing genocides, housing and food insecurity … it is offensive to be told that grief is a disorder”.

Dominant culture, instils Spade, teaches us to be numb — to fixate on the fantastical, to chase chemical highs, to find escapism through corporate media. It requires amnesia and anaesthesia to dull our pain and render us passive witnesses to injustice, instead of resisters. Instead, he implores us to use our grief to compel us to action. To feel all of the aches, the agony, and the suffering generated by living in such a violent and exploitative world is not to succumb but to fortify and mobilise ourselves.

The book leaves us with the sobering prospect that “Life is not going to get easier in the years to come — the crises we are facing are real and worsening”. But, in anti-authoritarian spirit, the author reminds us that “the way out of them is collective action to destroy racial capitalism, patriarchy and colonialism”.

As Spade urges, we are going to need to break laws to get people the healthcare they need, to prevent them from eviction, to hide them from immigration detention: “We are going to need each other more than ever”.

His solution? Revolutionary promiscuity.

By building robust, abundant and promiscuous support systems, treating conflict as predictable and generative, getting better at giving and receiving feedback, and making space for vulnerability, growth, repair and healing, we can sustain and nourish our social movements. This provocation builds on Spade’s long-term assertion that we need to treat our lovers like friends and our friends like lovers.

After all, this is heart work. We cannot survive this alone. We are interdependent, relational creatures. And as Spade insists, the stakes are high. Love is necessary work: “we can and must bring our most radical, visionary ideas of liberation into our practices of sex, love and romance, and to all the relationships in our lives”.

Soft and fierce, utopian and practical, inscribed with beauty and strength, Love in a F*cked Up World is both an intervention and a guidebook, offering real pathways towards collective, abundant and more radical futures.

Image: a fresco from the Villa of the Mysteries in Pompeii 

This is part of a series of critical essays supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.