Why is it that we find the courage to boldly confront mainstream societal norms and structures, yet are so often unable to treat romantic partners with care and generosity? Why do we lose our principles when we become insecure, disappointed, or jealous? Why do we act our worst in sexual and romantic relationships? And why do we prioritize romantic connection above other types of relationships, like friendship?*
Dean Spade is an organizer, speaker, author, and professor at Seattle University's School of Law, where he teaches courses on policing, imprisonment, gender, race, and social movements. He is the author of Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During this Crisis (and the next) and Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics and the Limits of Law. His latest book is Love in a F*cked-Up World: How to Build Relationships, Hook Up, and Raise Hell Together.
*page 3, Love in a F*cked-Up World
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
For those who appreciate self-help books, there are lots of good takeaways and tools, and for others, who may feel resistance, as you write: Yikes, I’m reading a self-help book! Because there's resistance within activist communities to self-help books because they are so often written by the straight community, by people who don't even consider their lives and lifestyles. So, there are many different ways of reading this book. For people who are “normies”, as you call them, people who have more conventional relationships, they can get something out of it too. I know a lot of activists who could learn a lot from this in terms of their mental health, building strong, healthy relationships to empower them to do that important activism work as well.
DEAN SPADE
Thank you for saying all that. It's very meaningful to me since you're one of the first people who've read it, so it's super, heartwarming to hear that. For me, this book has a lot of the wisdom of things that feminists and queers have learned in the community about sexuality, but the book is really for anybody who is political, even those just starting out and beginning to realize that there is something wrong with the systems they live under. I want to be in movements. Our movements are made of relationships. So, if you're just getting into our movements, or if you've been here for years and have been watching the ways we hurt each other and fall apart relationally, this book is about identifying these common patterns.
I have sometimes talked about my biography. Of course, everyone knows I'm trans, and I've mentioned losing my mom when I was a kid and living with foster parents when it's been relevant. However, this is definitely another level—to share more about my own healing process and my experiences in relationships. It'll be interesting to see what that feels like. I don't think of myself as extremely private, but I think I just accidentally am. Even though I love talking about these topics with people I get to know, a lot of my journey engaging with therapy and self-help stemmed from having that traumatic experience of losing my mom as a child. Before that, my mom was an alcoholic, and we were living in poverty. I shaped myself in ways that I think are pretty common for many people. I repressed a lot of feelings like grief and loneliness to get by, which I think so many people have to do. I overperformed at school because that was a place where I could gain attention from adults. That ended up being the way that I got out of where I came from—through scholarships and all that. There’s been a whole lifetime of trying to rebuild my emotional range, process what I couldn't feel back then, and recognize how those coping mechanisms shaped my capacity for authentic relationships with others. When you repress many of your feelings and overly compensate, it becomes hard to be truly vulnerable with others.
There is so much we cannot control that is terrifying and heartbreaking right now. We’re all seeing headlines out of Gaza, headlines about the ecological crisis, and the fear surrounding what the next Trump presidency will bring. We've been living this way for a long time, well before the recent election.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
Indeed, because love, by its definition, and activism, by its very definition, is high octane. You're going to always have those strong emotions. It's baked into it. So I think you gave tools, uh, you know, to step back, to analyze, and even to understand that you cannot always even be totally objective and in control.
SPADE
We are all under enormous pressure—the general global pressure and the specific pressures in our lives. We might take it out on each other. We might flake or ghost one another. We might be bossy or get really caught up about a small decision the group needs to make because our frustration, stemming from somewhere else, prompts us to want control over that decision. We might not treat ourselves well—I'm not sleeping or eating properly, for instance. I went through a period in my life where I was very disordered about my childhood experiences of poverty. I would give away all my money to the point where I couldn't afford the things I needed, simply because I could see the desperation of people in my community. I often know many people who are unhoused or have recently come out of prison and genuinely need help. I couldn't figure out the boundary of whether I could have anything if others didn't have what they needed.
There’s just so much dysfunction in our interactions. Sometimes, when we're friends or lovers with someone in the group, and there's a disagreement, it can be particularly challenging. That group may be the only place I'm expecting to feel a sense of belonging, and suddenly, it feels like the end of the world because some of the members went out to dinner without me, made a decision in my absence, or did not complete a task I had hoped they would. These things really matter. On the one hand, this can be incredibly hard, but on the other hand, this is a beautiful space for doing emotional work in groups. We are primarily injured in groups—within our families and our schools—and we can heal in groups as well. This is the right place to treat each other the way we wish people would, rather than how we've been treated in our society.
We need to notice how our group defaults to societal norms, like making one person the boss, rushing everyone, or being overly outcome-oriented without caring about the process. Is there gendered labor occurring in this group where women are doing the cleanup while men aren't? This can be a place where we heal together some of the fundamental issues we each carry. We all have slightly different coping mechanisms and individual paths, but as a group, we must also recognize how we might be acting out family roles. Am I becoming the angry dad or the petulant teenager who disrupts everything? Can we become more aware?
When I feel upset, can I recognize that I'm upset? When I'm emotionally activated, can I understand that? Can I eventually identify that I might be projecting roles onto others, like seeing someone the way my sister bullied me? Or am I idealizing someone as my savior? It’s not about trying to avoid those feelings, but when we recognize them, we gain a little more choice—maybe I don’t need to say something harsh or ghost someone. Instead, I could communicate, "I'm feeling really avoidant of the group. Can I talk to you about it?" Just knowing it's happening is essential because most of us are gripped by these emotions and act as if they are reality. That's when we often stray from our values and lose the relationships or connections we long for.
That’s a lot of the skill set I wish for us all to have. Could we reach a point where we can express these feelings to each other? For example, a friend might notice, "Dean, you seem really stirred up right now; it's rushing the meeting. How are you doing?" Obviously, we need a certain level of trust to discuss these observations with each other. But what if we could build friendships where we receive direct feedback? Somebody might say, "It sounds like you have some anger regarding your ex, and I want to support you while also aligning with our values to avoid revenge." Could we cultivate enough skills, trust, and compassion to support one another in living our values? That’s something I deeply desire for all of us.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
What are your reflections going into this second Trump presidency? How does that change things? How do you continue your activism and mutual aid? I mean, we have to keep our heads, even though “all around us may be losing theirs?”
SPADE
I'm hoping that this last election was truly the death knell of liberalism and the Democratic Party for many people. They are obviously who they've always been, but it was so evident that liberalism is a project focused on remaining invested in the current genocidal and ecocidal systems. It has nothing to offer us. They align with immigration enforcement and do not care about queer and trans people or reproductive justice. They are fully behind these horrible wars, including the genocide in Gaza. I truly hope we can all turn away from that towards what is necessary because it drains a lot of people’s energy.
This is a hard moment, and I am not interested in any false hope about that. Okay. We are motivated to get it together with each other and be really bold and brave and really caring towards each other and really discerning about what is a waste of time in terms of trying to convince elites to rescue us. I feel like this moment is clarifying and hopefully mobilizing. Certainly, many people are filled with anxiety. One of the best solutions to that fear is to join with others, moving away from the isolation of our phones and the doom scrolling and instead towards collective grieving, fear, and choosing to act pragmatically right away.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
You talk about your own personal relationships and how we can control our emotions without having our emotions control us? How do we master those negative emotions? It's very hard. We think that we're critical thinkers, but when it comes to love…? You also discussed the Romance Myth. How do we break free from these frameworks that have been imprinted upon us from childhood?
SPADE
How can we enjoy some of these things without succumbing to isolation, controlling others, or believing that our safety is tied to controlling others? These downsides of the Romance Myth are very prevalent in our society, including in feminist, queer, and trans communities.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
In the introduction, you cite a feminist quote: “The personal is political.” There are a lot of different people points that we have to navigate in our personal lives in order to keep moving forward in the political sphere.
SPADE
I love the idea that the personal is political. When second-wave feminists said that, I believe they were addressing how the supposed liberation movements often dismissed women’s issues, suggesting that topics like what happens in the bedroom, who does the dishes, or who changes the diapers are personal problems. Women pointed out that this was a political condition, as they were compelled to shoulder the majority of reproductive labor, bringing attention to domestic and interpersonal violence and rape. They asserted that these issues are not private but rather huge political conditions affecting society, essentially declaring that we live in a rape culture.
They encouraged everyone to shine a light on what has been deemed private. It still exists today, with people arguing that dating or sex isn't serious to discuss. In queer culture, it may differ somewhat, but in many lives, the political discussions typically focus on policies like the Affordable Care Act or fracking, while the fact that people are relating with each other, or engaging in sexual unethical behavior within our movements causing disruption or harm, is left unaddressed.
We experience significant suffering in our relationships, and it matters. This suffering is linked to political systems that script narrow, gendered, and racialized roles for us. The Romance Myth, an insidious propaganda, gets into people's heads in unpredictable ways. We are told that things that are personal are natural. For example, when someone says, "I just want that," we need to question where that desire came from. Is it truly mine, or did I absorb it from somewhere else?
People recognize aspects of this in their consumption patterns. Why do you want that SUV or vacation in Hawaii? You acknowledge that colonialism and capitalism shape those desires, making you part of a war machine that colonizes Hawaii. Yet, when it comes to intimate feelings, we often feel that jealousy or the desire to have a baby with someone is just natural. Could we, instead, dissect these emotions? Could we understand that these are shared cultural fantasies tied to our human needs for belonging, safety, connection, and creativity? They don’t have to manifest in the prescribed ways.
Countercultures have long played with these ideas—nothing new about countercultures considering free love, sexuality, and childrearing differently. Can we refuse to relegate these conversations, which determine our lives, to a category of unimportance? Many people shy away from self-help literature, dismissing it as neoliberal or trivial. However, there’s something in that dismissal I consider a bit sexist. Women are expected to worry about the emotional lives of families while serious matters are to remain in the boardroom and in serious activist meetings.
As feminists and people who care about liberation, we believe everything is connected. The personal and political remain utterly relevant and radical concepts for me. Moving from being seen as serious in my previous writings to embracing this topic is important. This is just as serious—people I know lose their lives and go to prison because of complications in their love relationships. It’s momentous.
In many groups we need to exist and do vital work, lives are endangered because of bad breakups or sexual exploitation. We live in an anti-sex and sexist society that belittles these issues, insisting they are not serious or important. For me, life is short. I won’t engage in anything that isn’t absolutely necessary for our movements to thrive. This became a nine-year project because I believed it was that important.
*
And just to go back to the thing you just said about this question, are humans rational beings? We are rationalizing beings, you know? And I think I see this a lot in our political movements. Like I feel jealous of you in our activist group or I feel irritated by you, and I come up with a political rationalization for why you're not good. I'm really scared about how we weaponize our politics to try to justify our strong emotions in our movement. It's really dangerous and really common. When I'm feeling a strong political difference with someone and I'm feeling really stirred up. Is it just that the political difference is likely to be there too, but is there also any emotional work I need to do? Or am I trying to put it all on the political difference or the identity difference, things like that?
For me, the places where I learned this stuff, I would say where I learned everything in so many ways, are women of color feminisms. So much of my work has come from the lessons in the anti-violence movement in the United States against policing and criminalization, which really generated this kind of abolitionism we have now. This movement was born in those feminist spaces that were all led by women of color who were identifying the problems with the white anti-violence movement, focusing on policing and punishment, which was never going to work for women of color, immigrant women, and women with disabilities. The ways that queer and trans people were central to those processes were also significant.
This thinking comes from recognizing that there are many relational problems in our movements and communities. How do we solve them, not pretending that the police can solve them, since, of course, the police make everything worse and don't resolve anything? Those people have been trying to work out relational problems in communities through frameworks like transformative justice for decades. I have been studying and collaborating with those individuals, which has provided a lot of deep wisdom about what relationships really are, as opposed to the fantasy of them. We are learning how to relate to each other in ways that allow us to support one another in the long term. Being in the prison abolition movement, I have spent years developing decades-long relationships with people who are in prison. That is a very complicated relationship with a lot of power dynamics.
There are intense harms happening; learning by being in these relational settings where we are dedicated to love, care, and compassion against very difficult odds has deeply informed my thinking. Some of the people whose writing and activism have been immensely influential won’t surprise you—people like Miriam Kaba, Adrian Marie Brown, Andrea Ritchie, Mimi Kim, and Lauren Berlant. I could go on to include Shira Hassan, and others who have been deeply involved in harm reduction movements or anti-violence work. They are thinking about how the realm of feeling and relating underlies the big systems of violence we are all fighting and bringing their work down to those levels to solve issues instead of simply passing useless legislation that states police shouldn't do certain things to us, which never works. They have recognized that those elite solutions don’t work; everything is actually taking place within community and relationships, and the question is, how do we do that?
How do we solve conflict? How do we stop violence? To me, this is where the most wisdom resides concerning all of our liberation, honestly, because it all happens at the interpersonal level. Every other level is constructed from the interpersonal level over and over again. What we practice with each other produces the world. Just trying to imagine someone from on high telling everyone to stop acting in certain ways seems inadequate.
