William Dyce, “Francesca da Rimini” (1837)
This article appears in the April 2025 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
Love in a F*cked-Up World: How to Build Relationships, Hook Up, and Raise Hell Together
By Dean Spade
Algonquin
By Shon Fay
FSG Originals
I’ve been saying for a while that the world, particularly the West, is in a sort of romantic interregnum. The unchallenged reign of heterosexuality is crumbling—fewer marriages, fewer babies, fewer young people identifying as straight—but no one form has become hegemonic in its place. The gender roles that were still dominant when I was born have been destabilized but not destroyed. Dating sucks, the headlines proclaim, and young people (and the rest of us) are having less sex.
The right is trying to stop the collapse through brute force; witness Donald Trump’s day one executive order that men are men and women should be scared, or the spread of “Don’t say gay” bills. Restoring the (hierarchical) gendered order of things is central to the global far-right project: Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil called the Bible “the toolbox to fix men and women,” and Korea’s now-disgraced Yoon Suk-yeol was referred to as the “incel president.” It’s not working, though—young women continue moving left, the most recent example being the German election, in which the gender gap was key to the rise of the far right. Korean women started the “4B” movement, a pledge of “no marriage, no kids, no sex, no dating,” which some American women threatened to imitate after Donald Trump’s re-election.
Sex strikes aside, though, what does all this political Sturm und Drang do to our love lives? Two sharp, radical writers have trained their gaze on love in new books, and both insist that love is political. “This book dares us to decide that romance is not separate from our politics of liberation and resistance,” writes Dean Spade in Love in a F*cked-Up World: How to Build Relationships, Hook Up, and Raise Hell Together, a self-help book that would make the fascists’ skin crawl. Spade, a movement lawyer, writer, and organizer, has published legal scholarship and a short book on mutual aid, but this, his first on a mainstream press, is a guide to better relationships from the standpoint of organizing. Romantic turmoil, Spade points out, can really put a damper on the trust and solidarity necessary for successful struggle: “If we want to build a world organized around care, connection, and freedom, we must combine our work ‘out there’ with rigorous work in our intimate lives.”
Shon Faye’s Love in Exile is a memoir of sorts, a meditation on love through personal and political experience. Faye, the British author of The Transgender Issue, turns from poignant reflection on her own loves and losses to argue that her sense of being locked out of love is, actually, symptomatic of late capitalist culture. “[T]he architecture of contemporary love, from relationships, to parenthood, to sex, to friendship, to personal well-being and even our deeper need for spiritual nourishment and wholeness, is a highly politicized terrain,” she writes. “This is why I have come to consider this profound feeling of unworthiness as a form of exile: an intentional, punitive banishment that serves political ends.”
Spade seems to be addressing people who are already “political,” even pretty far left, but are new to taking love seriously. He makes an argument for “promiscuous” connection as a way to build support systems that can help us survive materially and emotionally, “so that when things change in any one of our relationships or we can’t get what we need from any particular person or group, we can still find the connections we need.”
Faye seems rather to be writing for readers who already take love seriously, but have to be guided to think politically about it. She speaks to those of us still navigating sex and love with straight men at a time when it is easy to think of straight men as the enemy. This tension is all over her book: how to reconcile fear and desire; how to navigate patriarchal and transphobic power dynamics one-on-one; how to understand one’s wants in the midst of so many competing messages. There is, she notes, “very little honest writing on straight women’s erotic lives in contemporary discourse,” and often little reward for such honesty even in one’s own life. Heterosexuality entered crisis without us ever having really understood it.
There is a history to this era of love, and it goes through economic policy as much as cultural norms.
While Faye goes straight at the specter of heterosexuality, Spade mostly writes around it. He uses the frame of “the romance myth,” which tells us that (monogamous) romantic relationships are the most important ones, that they will complete us and leave no need (or time) for friendships or other camaraderie. Even feminist and queer critiques of the nuclear family were gradually diverted into yearnings for that family for themselves, as in the fight for gay marriage. “Instead of queers being a threat to the romance myth, we were suddenly offered its particular coercion, sold as ‘freedom,’” Spade writes.
The romance myth tells us that real love is easy and cruises toward marriage (and children) as easily as one rides up a mall escalator. Anyone who doesn’t want those things is flawed, according to this logic. But in reality, Spade writes, “[r]elationships do not need to escalate in a set sequence in order to be meaningful. They don’t even need to escalate at all.” This isn’t an argument for all of us to behave more like fuckboys, but rather to treat everyone—even casual flings—with more care, and in keeping with Spade’s long history of prison-abolitionist work, to fight back against the tendency to discard others.
Rather than interpolate everyone into one singular romance myth, Faye notes that such cultural norms actually leave queer and trans people feeling exiled from love entirely. Faye reminds us that she, a millennial, grew up when it was still illegal, in the wake of Thatcher’s Britain, to “speak about queerness in a positive way in British schools.” Those are the kinds of laws today’s Republicans are bringing back.
Paradoxically, this alienation has been good, in some ways. Queer communities have built alternate structures of care that heterosexuals are just now beginning to learn from, valuing friendship and ongoing connection rather than the stop-start of serial monogamy common to straight daters. But heartbreak, she writes, is actually a great unifier: “My energies had been spent making my experiences, desires, and motivations legible to a society intent on rendering me an oddity. The banal universality of heartbreak came as a unique relief.”
Yet heartbreak has different meanings: It is easy to feel that, as Faye writes, one is a “failed woman” if unpartnered, dumped, or cheerily sleeping around. To move past these myths is something we can work on in our personal lives, but with the entire force of the U.S. state currently trying to materially reinforce them—Sean Duffy, Trump’s transportation secretary, wants to prioritize grants and loans to “communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average”—it seems more like magical thinking to advise readers to focus on emotional work.
Love is political, in other words, but it’s material, too.
The right is trying to stop the collapse of heterosexuality by brute force.
THE “BURGEONING BELIEF IN THE TRANSCENDENT, quasi-spiritual nature of romantic love,” Faye writes, “coincided with a slow decline of religious belief and the dissolution of certain types of rural community bonds during the industrial revolution.” Love became the new religion, and the individual or the family (as Margaret Thatcher famously proclaimed) became the units worth counting.
For women in the U.S., Western Europe, and the middle classes across the world, recent decades have brought us new economic freedoms that allow us more romantic choice, to a degree. I have outearned every man I’ve been with save one, and that has allowed me to leave a bad relationship more than once (including, in two cases, telling my partner he had to go, because I was the one paying the bills). Yet many of us are still stuck in cities where the rent is too damn high, and that shapes our relationship choices. Peter Kenway of the London think tank New Policy Institute foresaw a possible “Jane Austen-style marriage market, as millennials without an inheritance try to partner up with millennials who stand to inherit a house.”
There is a history to this era of love, then, and it goes through economic policy as much as cultural norms. Tax structures privilege married couples, and falling wages (and higher housing costs) mean that both members of that couple probably have to bring in income. These are recent developments, part of the neoliberal restructuring of everything, which should remind us that our lives and loves are shaped by capitalist demands, and could be shaped differently.
So much romantic advice ignores this history in order to personalize our problems and tell us that, at some level, they come from the kind of person we are. Not a person racialized and gendered by systems of power, but rather someone with an attachment style or a diagnosis or a particular astrological sign. While I’m the last person to tell anyone to avoid psychotherapy, I am leery of a self-help culture that, as Spade notes, flattens out complex ideas into personality types that you can discover by taking a quiz. (Yes, I have a lot of Virgo placements.) Childhood trauma or romantic wounds can certainly shape the ways we respond to one another, but so do the roles we are pushed into by a society once again enamored of crude stereotypes and sweeping political attacks on human rights (like abortion) and benefits (like Medicaid).
We navigate in our personal lives a kind of dialectic between the individual and the social. Can I solely explain my last fight with a lover by reference to patriarchy, or was it what Faye wryly calls “something as obvious as daddy issues”? Like her, I find the latter clichéd, but probably at least a little bit accurate; like her, I struggle to trust men because, well, look at the ones in charge. I relate almost too painfully to her description of “a relationship where the other person did seem willing to try and love me, rather than the idea of me,” and where she “found his love painfully confrontational, which in turn made me engage in deliberate acts of sabotage.” I imagine I’m not the only one.
So what do we do with all of this knowledge? We do have some freedom in our personal lives to decide how we will treat people, to attempt to at least bring our values to bear on our day-to-day interactions and the investments we make in relationships. Spade offers the idea that our “identities are a result of repeated practice rather than natural categories,” which called to mind abolitionist geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s words on rehearsal—that rather than perfect, “practice makes different.” We practice politically, through our organizing, trying things and learning from failure, and we do so as well interpersonally.
We can, as Spade writes, get better at conflict, a skill so few of us learn at home or at school. “We need skills for being with each other in distress, just as much as we need skills for being with each other in delight,” he writes. As we attempt to get ourselves out of the corners that Trump and his allies want to paint us into, we need to value accountability, precisely because impunity has been the rule for the powerful for so long.
In his acknowledgments, Spade notes that “any idea can be made simple,” a statement I agree with, to a point. There are moments in his book, though, where the arguments are too simplified. Our ideas of romance and relationships are certainly the products of “cultural scripts,” but in failing to connect those scripts to the structures of real power that produce them, I worry that the book makes it seem too easy to make change. Still, he offers much to chew on, particularly for younger queer readers trying to navigate their own pain amid political repression.
There are no easy answers to relationship questions. We must do the hard work of figuring out what we want in community with others; those promiscuous networks of care might include friends and lovers, life partners, and even that co-worker you don’t like so much but who always shows up to the union meeting. The point is not to replace the heteronormative romance myth with any particular structure—neither gay marriage nor the 20-person polycule is going to defeat the far right for us. Instead, we might, as Spade writes, imagine what it would be like to “treat our friends in the most caring ways we treat our lovers, and our lovers in the best ways we treat our friends.”
Love, at its best, is not simply a way to get one’s “needs met,” as the popular discourse often has it. It is not, as Faye writes, “a resource to be extracted from others.” It is a risk and a challenge, particularly when done outside of the parameters that the right is busily shoring up all around us. But that is precisely what makes it worth doing, even—particularly—as the world is on fire all around us. We cannot live risk-free on this fragile planet, in these explosive political times. We need other people to walk with us through the flames, and to help us make a world in which it is not so damned hard to care about one another.
