In these fascist times, you may find yourself craving community, but wary of repeating unhealthy patterns in your dating life, friendship circles and activist groups. Thank goodness for Dean Spade’s new book, Love in a Fucked-Up World: How to Build Relationships, Hook Up, and Raise Hell Together.
Spade has been an activist and author for 20-plus years, most notably founding the Sylvia Rivera Law Project for trans advocacy. He approaches the supposedly apolitical genre of self-help with a wry humor, explicitly connecting this book to the questions of his earlier work: How do we build lasting and effective resistance movements? What are the barriers impeding our movements, and how do we overcome them? It’s trite but true: the personal is political.
This being a self-help book, most of the answers he prescribes involve work you do on and with yourself. For example, Spade asks the reader to interrogate the cultural scripts that influence our reactions and behavior. He especially despises “the romance myth,” as seen in fairy tales and rom-coms: all you have to do is find your person and you will live happily ever after. This myth elevates one relationship over all others, diminishing the importance of friends and comrades. Spade exhorts people to seek “abundant support” from a variety of sources, as opposed to merely a few major relationships.
Spade encourages the reader to build emotional awareness, noticing when we are on autopilot. He rightly observes that in this oppressive culture, it’s radical to be present. He suggests that readers pay attention to our common reactions and patterns of behavior, writing them down and preparing for them ahead of time, a strategy adapted from mental health radicals at the Icarus Project.
Spade especially despises “the romance myth,” as seen in fairy tales and rom-coms: all you have to do is find your person and you will live happily ever after.
The book is particularly strong when it talks about dealing with conflict. Instead of fearing and avoiding conflict, Spade posits, what if we expected it as a regular part of building relationships and doing work with other humans? He points out that people often approach conflict from one of two extreme poles: either we minimize the harm and blame the victim, or we seek “punishment, retaliation, revenge, exile,” demonizing the one who has done harm. Canceling people, he astutely implies, stems from capitalism’s “disposability culture”: if one relationship ends, we can easily replace it, like breaking a plastic toy and running to Amazon for another.
What about a middle ground: accountability? As with emotions, it’s radical to face conflict and to try to work through it despite potential discomfort. Spade provides tangible advice to that end, writing adeptly on how to listen and be heard, how to sincerely apologize and forgive, and how to communicate nonviolently.
Much of Spade’s advice on conflict, however, is predicated on trusting people’s good intentions. I love his optimism on human nature, and his reminder to move away from pigeonholing people as either “good” or “bad,” but I wanted more advice on what to do when all parties involved in a conflict don’t necessarily mean well. For example, while Spade warns against gossip or “campaigning” against people, what if the person truly did harm and may harm others who need to be warned? And while we won’t all agree on how we experienced a situation, what if someone is outright gaslighting? Not everyone can be held accountable, especially if they don’t want to be.
Though theoretical, the book is a smooth read, with illustrative anecdotes throughout. Each chapter starts with an overview and ends with a recap, and contains questions and exercises for the reader, a nicely interactive experience. Spade is also skilled at anticipating the reader’s questions and counterarguments (he is a lawyer, after all).
If you’re familiar with traditional self-help, therapy-speak, or 12-step programs, some of Spade’s advice may sound familiar; but that doesn’t make it any less valuable, and it’s refreshing to see conventional self-help nuggets reframed in a radical context.
Sometimes, however, Spade takes this reframing a bit too far. In a book that criticizes “pendulum” thinking, the author does it too: The “romance myth” may be toxic, but coupling off doesn’t necessarily preclude community. I say this as someone who argued in this very newspaper against the privileging of marriage equality over other LGBTQ+ issues. While I agree that we all need wider networks of connection, and we need to take our friends and comrades as seriously as we do our lovers, Spade risks alienating some readers when he prescribes “revolutionary promiscuity.” He may say that one kind of relationship isn’t “politically superior” to another, but he doesn’t seem to believe it.
The book also sometimes hits up against the limits of the self-help genre: as much as Spade exhorts the reader to bring this individual emotional work into our relationships and especially our activist groups, he could provide more models of how to do so.
But the individual work alone is worth the read. For it’s true: if we do this work on ourselves, our relationships with others will benefit and be healthier for it. To connect meaningfully with others, first we need to be grounded in ourselves, to be able to meet those needs for which we so often turn to others. How can we expect others to listen to us, for example, if we don’t hear ourselves? How can we set boundaries with others if we don’t know our own limits? How can we teach others to help care for us if we don’t know what caring best looks like?
Spade wisely reminds readers that “true safety and security” comes not from hierarchies like prisons or the police, but from collaboration and mutual aid. We build this safety with each other, but paradoxically only when we accept that conflict is inevitable, people aren’t perfect, and change is the only reliable constant.
And indeed this new regime, too, will change — and by doing this work on ourselves and bringing it to our activism, hopefully we can do more to move things along in the right direction, strengthening ourselves, our relationships, and our communities as we do so.
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Love In A F*ucked-Up World: How To Build Relationships, Hook Up, And Raise Hell Together
By Dean Spade
Algonquin Books, January 2025
352 pages
