Activist and Author Dean Spade Discusses Love, Romance Myth, and Fear of Change in His New Book, 'Love in a F*cked-Up World'

I've actually been writing this book for about 10 years … I have spent about 25 years in social movements trying to end police, prisons, wars, and borders, and trying to cultivate queer and trans liberation based on economic and racial justice. In that work, it's been very clear to me that our movements are only as strong as our relationships. Our groups fall apart when we don't know how to deal with conflict, when we don't know how to notice we're having emotional reactions that might be based on cultural norms and scripts or our own histories rather than what's actually happening in the moment. I've seen how people tend to act outside their values when it comes to sex and love and romance. Over the years, doing my own work to show up in movements and relationships the way I wanted to and then also supporting lots of other organizers, I've really seen the urgency of this. I've used a lot of different healing tools — self-help books, classes, and different kinds of therapy. A lot of it is really de-politicized and de-politicizing, it really individualizes the problem, and makes it seem like it's just you that's having the problem, instead of it being actually part of cultural patterns. I wanted to create something that got into how to address the dynamics between each other and in ourselves, but comes from a place of social movement values: feminism, anti-capitalism, anti-racism, anti-colonialism, and disability justice. Where we can see that these patterns aren't just ours. They're not a personal problem. They're part of a cultural war.

In a lot of ways, this book is a love letter to friendship. It's about how we really need what I call "promiscuous support systems." We all need lots of people to have our backs, to talk through problems with, to get help when we're sick or in crisis, to collaborate on different kinds of projects that really delight us, to be intellectual partners. Instead, we live in a society that tells us one relationship is important and you should ditch your friends for your date. A lot of people get very isolated in their romantic relationships, and a lot of people — in general in our culture — don't have enough friends or don't have any friends. There's a lot of research about there being a loneliness epidemic and people not having the support systems they need. So I interrogate the romance myth in this book by asking how we can move from expecting all of our needs being met by one person to instead having the support we all need for everything we need.

It's very typical in our culture to avoid conflict and to think good relationships will not have conflict in them. As a result, most people don't give each other the direct feedback they need. They either stuff all their difficult feelings and then blow up, or they disappear, or they talk about others behind their back, which creates discord and disorganization in the community. Whereas people who are able to actually give each other direct feedback often deepen our relationships. It means that we're investing in the relationship, that we want to be understood. We can have positive experiences of having someone listen to us or tell us that something we're doing is hurting them and get to meaningfully apologize and be forgiven. Those kinds of things can really build trust between people, as opposed to having distrusting relationships where I'm afraid to ever tell you what I really think or how your behaviors are affecting me. 

I think living in a conflict-avoidant society makes sense because we live in the most imprisoning society in the history of the world. A society that says, if anybody does anything wrong, we'll throw them away. And so people are afraid to give or receive feedback and are pretty defensive because it seems like it will be the end of the world. That really isolates us and means people in their friendships or with their families or with their roommates, when they have conflict, they don't know how to resolve it, and they end up with a bridge that's burned. And so we're trying to imagine a world in which we could actually encounter difficult things or have different emotional needs at different times, or want different things, and then actually move through that and feel more connected and more trusting and more able to let other people be different than us.

One thing I think is interesting to notice is that the U.S. legal system tries to make our view of our romantic and sexual relationships be about permanence through the legal structure of marriage. There is an idea that we should find somebody who should be our "happily ever after" — that's in our romance myth, and then it's all the way down into law. I believe part of that is the nature of the nation state wants us to believe that it is permanent. No country has ever been permanent — they all come and go. It wants us to tie ourselves to that fantasy of permanence, a fantasy that we won't die. It's very deep and it becomes almost like a survival-based fantasy — the idea that if I could just find someone who loved me and get married, I would be happily ever after, I would always be okay, which, of course, is obviously nonsense. People in relationships break up all the time. 

I think [the idea of permanence] is actually tied to the settler white supremacist governance that we live under in this version of the nation state. Ours is really a rejection of everything we know about the natural world, which is constant impermanence and change. It's a rejection of everything we know also about relating and also about ourselves and being a person — not only that it is our nature to die, but also to change our whole entire life. Our minds, our thoughts, and our views change and they should. So I think this grasping for permanence and security through the external is also a basis for policing and the prison system, like a sense that safety comes from something rigid outside me and is a structure I can call upon. As opposed to what this book is about — that safety actually comes from collective community practices and internal emotional practices of learning how to care for ourselves and learning how to say yes and no to people, and how to relate with people in a way where we can hold on to what's true for us. 

When you look at the Trump presidency and the rising white supremacist, patriarchal fascist formations that are taking over here and all over the world, there's a fantasy of a kind of power that can live forever, a kind of supremacy won through military might. Even people who have nothing to gain from it still want that fantasy. I think that it's related to these deep emotional structures that are implanted in our psyches through this disordered society which tells us we need to find permanent security, as opposed to [telling us] we get to be part of ongoing change through life cycles that other human societies have occurring, instead of this rigid permanence.

I think we can see our communities are facing a lot of crises. The ecological crisis — the fires in L.A., the hurricanes, the droughts, the floods — they're going to keep coming. And we're also facing crisis from ramped-up immigration enforcement, criminalization of our communities — even here in Seattle with the increasing criminalization of poor people under the current mayor, decreased speech of unhoused people, the attacks on queer and trans communities, the attacks on health care systems that are going to disproportionately affect elderly people and people with disabilities. We need to lean on each other to know that we have someone who will visit us in the hospital, people who will bring each other medication, people who will hide each other from ICE and the police, people who will visit the elders, who will do disaster prep together — it's on us. These systems are failing and there's a lot that's unraveling in this time that we're living in. 

We really need to be able to build strong relationships, including with people who we don't know well, and people who are not like us, so that we can have each other's backs and also fight back against the weapons manufacturers and the polluters and everybody else who is endangering our lives. So our ability to create those connections and build groups that can weather storms together — including conflict between us and worsening political conditions — is everything. Our survival is going to be based on those relational capacities. 

Right now, we've got a lot to learn in that realm because we've been shaped by a society that wants us to be disempowered, to be isolated, to turn against one another, to be distrusting and untrustworthy, and that's really making it hard for us to get together in the ways we need to to fight back and take care of each other. I think a lot of people are aware of this right now and want to build those skills with others and want to work together in their communities. That's a good thing because that's exactly what we need to do. We need hundreds of millions of people organized to care for each other and fight back. And right now, that's not what it looks like.