At the beginning of the pandemic, thousands of people organizing mutual aid in their communities turned to Dean Spade for guidance. Spade’s organizing, teaching, and writing spans prison abolition, trans and queer liberation, and the limits of the law — he’s been doing that work for decades — but he reached a new audience through his Instagram and his book Mutual Aid, which mixes political theory and practical tips for how to help one another get through crises.
Now he’s written some more explicit advice for all of us. His new book, Love in a Fucked Up World: How to Build Relationships, Hook Up, and Raise Hell Together, delves into love, sex, romance, and friendship. While the book takes the shape of a self-help guide, full of bulleted lists, questionnaires, and suggested exercises, it draws more from the genre’s radical feminist and anarchist roots than from its ill-designed, pundit-ridden present. Although Spade is critical of the cultural mythos of romance, his book meets its readers where they are; it is meant to appeal to people in relationships of all shapes and sizes. Contrary to the conventions of self-help, Spade knows there are no quick fixes or shortcuts for relational healing in the cruel and collapsing world of his title. What he does provide, however, are practical tools for repairing conflict, for dealing with common romantic issues in ways that align with feminist values, and for creating flourishing care networks of lovers, friends, and comrades.
Spade and I met on a rainy day in late December while I was visiting family and friends in Seattle, where he is based. Sitting cross-legged on his sofa over decaf green tea with jasmine extract, we discussed organizing, self-help, online friendship, therapy, and how we could be doing love better in times of immense isolation, grief, and suffering that will likely only intensify. As another feminist queer with both hope for a better world and dread for the year ahead, I had so many questions. Graciously, he answered.
Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Angelica Castro-Mendoza What inspired you to write about romance and sex?
Dean Spade The way I see it, all of my work is about the question, “How does transformative change happen?” I just went down a level of scale. One thing that’s so obvious is that our groups, projects, networks, and coalitions are only as strong as our relationships, and they fall apart when we treat each other poorly. We are all walking around with all this toxic bullshit in our heads — from every cultural thing that we’ve inherited and from our own traumatic experiences in our families or intergenerational trauma — and then we are playing it out on each other. Things that we badly need in our communities don’t happen because we fuck each other over. Relationships can be wildly isolating; they take people away from their political activity, or they can blow up groups. And so for me, it’s just a blinking red light. It is dangerous for us — dangerous for us individually and dangerous for our movements. We need to stick together, and we don’t!
AC Yeah! I think it’s such an unexamined part of movement work. Literature about social reproduction or issues of care is often quite academic. The tendency on the left is to go outward, toward the macro level.
DS We’ve been told that all this is incredibly personal, so we think, “You’re bad, I’m bad.” One of the things I hope this book does is help people notice that these are patterns. We are all sharing them, just like we are sharing the bus system, whether it’s good or bad. We’re sharing the jail and prison system even though we hate it. We’re sharing climate change. These are cultural conditions that we are sharing. It’s actually not individual to us. We can support each other through it.
I think people think that their sexual and romantic desires and reactions are who they are, and they defend them even when they’re harmful to others. We also judge each other really harshly about them. In the book, I write about the cycle of romance; how we encounter a group, or person, or a new friend, or a movement, or an idea, and we project that it’s so amazing, and then later, we experience a lot of disappointment, and there’s a lot of conflict in that. That is normal and gonna happen. The whole idea that the personal is political asks us to be aware that what happens in our households is political or what happens in our sex lives is political. There’s also a back-and-forth in that. To be in the tenants union together can actually change our interpersonal lives, can give us a taste of freedom, belonging, safety, connection — and all the relationships within the tenants union are made up of people who have beef, and have crushes, and who are ghosting on their tasks or whatever. It’s going both ways. All the macros are made of all the micros, and all the micro is made of all the macro. My sex life is influenced by living under racial capitalism — those things are not separate. This book, to me, is about that relationship.
Sex and love and romance are seen as a woman’s genre, much like women’s novels. It’s women who mainly go to therapy. It’s women who think relationships matter. But everybody in our movements is affected by their own and others’ sexual and romantic lives. It is the most dangerous area of our lives. No one is getting away from this!
AC In this book, you’re not saying, “Let’s question the couple form” or pushing for a particular change in relationship structures, necessarily.
DS I hope reading this book might cause people to ask themselves whether they like the couple form, or whether they’re pressuring anyone else up the relationship escalator, or whether they’re keeping various people at arm’s length. To ask themselves what it’s like to live in a society with compulsory heterosexuality and monogamy and how that’s affected their own desires, their own likelihood of getting what they want. All of that is shaping us, and I want people to have more freedom to say, “Do I want that? What does that have to do with me? Can I have actual consensual conversations about what I want and like?” I hope that this leads to those types of questions, but I actually don’t think any relationship form is inherently more radical or more healing. You can fuck people over in any form of relationship, and people do. You can also find interesting and healing connections anywhere if you have a bit of self-awareness.
AC Absolutely! I think my favorite line of the book is where you are talking about “promiscuous support systems.” What does this mean to you?
DS I just think that the romance myth and the couple form are a lot about making people’s lives very small and asking people to get all of their emotional support, their intellectual stimulation, from one person. When I think of us having robust, promiscuous support systems, I imagine something like this: You and I love to write together, and we’re each other’s intellectual comrades, but when I’m not around because I’m off working on my book, or I’ve gone off and had a baby, or I’m at a meditation retreat for a long time, you’ve got three other friends that you can write to and say, “I’m writing this thing, and I’m not quite sure this thing is right.” Or perhaps, you have a loss in your family — you have multiple friends you could consider bringing to that funeral. Or if you need support with your chronic illness, or if you wanna tell someone what it feels like to fall in love in this new way, or if you want to get support around boundaries in your kink practice, you have lots of different people, and you can consciously pick which you’d like to go to.
“The romance myth and the couple form are a lot about making people’s lives very small.”
AC Self-help is an easy genre to dismiss. A lot of it is informed by management theory, or psychology, or religion, or ideas about heteronormativity. But the phrase was also used by the feminist self-help movement, where people were setting up clinics and distributing literature about health care in a way that was radical. Sex-ed zines also come to mind. How can self-help support leftist causes, and what tools does it offer us, considering all the caveats?
DS I think the main problem of self-help literature around relationships and other things is that it’s individualizing. It’s like, “You have a personal problem with managing your money, or your sex life, or your marriage, or your parenting” and then there’s a framework around fixing you — as opposed to what we believe in our movements, which is that all of this is collective. We experience it collectively; we have to heal it collectively and relationally. That’s the difference. We should resist self-help literature that is highly politicized but that is depoliticizing or demobilizing toward our political beliefs. So many people I know in our movements have turned to self-help literature, or 12-step programs, or therapy, or astrology because it is hard out here. It can be painful to turn to tools and literature that feel at odds with your politics — that’s trying to talk to you about how to manage your money without ever talking about capitalism or trying to talk to you about how to manage your marriage without ever talking about patriarchy.
My real goal was to take some of these tools and share what was actually helpful because I’ve obsessively read that stuff since I was a teenager because I have been suffering from my own internal nonsense and pain. I tried to put it through feminist, disability justice, anti-capitalist, anti-racist lenses because those are missing in the neoliberal self-help literature. I’m hoping that the book comes across as a very gentle and compassionate approach. It’s not about there being something wrong with us and that we’re improvement projects, which is so cruel and capitalist. “You need to be different!” as a starting place doesn’t work.
AC Some of the tools you list, like therapy, are criticized in leftist circles. Like therapy — it’s so inaccessible for many, especially if it’s anything other than CBT (like psychoanalysis or somatic therapy). People often say, “Why not just call a friend?” What does this tool specifically offer us?
DS I think that’s why this book is so much about friendship. I think the first line of support, ideally, is friendship, and a lot of people right now don’t have any friends. That’s really real. The level of isolation in our society is huge. A lot of people’s only contact in their life is their partner, and so if you are having trouble in your relationship and need support from a different perspective, you’re not getting it. In the book, I talk a lot about being good friends; how to learn to listen to our friends better, have conflict, and repair with our friends better. I also talk about other things like body-based movements, art practices, music, and reading fiction. Reading fiction really helped me learn about feelings when I was young and really shut down from trauma. Reading fiction was one of the most therapeutic things I did: “How do other people feel? What are feelings?” I have used a lot of the more professional tools you’re describing and also have used the 12 steps, which is really complex and problematic but also free and peer-based.
Some therapists do abuse their role. People have had experiences that make them never want to go to therapy again. If you’ve had certain diagnoses, or are part of certain groups, or speak certain languages, there are so many reasons why certain tools don’t feel available. Everyone is trying to navigate this dangerous terrain, trying to find where healing is offered, and it’s all so imperfect and much of it inaccessible.
If people want to use specialized and professionalized tools and can access them and want to, they should go for it. But I’m in favor of the deprofessionalization of this kind of support. It’s not realistic to have it all be professionalized and paid. Our communities just don’t have the resources. But there are a lot of things that we can do. I think feminist consciousness-raising groups are an example; climate grief groups, adoptee support groups. We should have so much more of this care in our communities. For some people, that’s jogging clubs. For some people, that’s board games. Whatever breaks your isolation and brings you to the possibility of telling someone else if you’re in trouble or if something is really hard. Or having someone to visit you in the hospital. This is what’s missing for so many people right now.
AC What about online communities? I’ve met some of my closest friends online, but those networks are formed through flattening mediums that don’t fully allow us to connect with the humanity of another person. There are so many miscommunications, or often, we’re just arguing with each other.
“I think the first line of support, ideally, is friendship, and a lot of people right now don’t have any friends.”
DS Online support also doesn’t necessarily translate to in-person support when you need that. I want everyone to have all the online friends they want, but people also need in-person support. You might need support when you’re sick, or to care for your chronic illness, or for neighborhood safety stuff. We all just need lots of support through the current and coming conditions. If it’s all online or we get deskilled about knowing how to seek out the in-person stuff, it can be really dangerous.
AC You talk also about “numbing out,” which, for me, happens via the internet or through doomscrolling. When every other day we see something awful on the news — a genocide, climate disaster — how do we move forward without numbing out, without resorting to these super individualized ideas of self-care, and, at the same time, not falling apart?
DS Inside that question, I hear another one: The activities that feel good or relieving from the stress of living under the conditions we’re living under — things like entertainment, technology, TV, video games, etc. — how do we figure out what’s a good amount of that to do? One of the questions that I’ve been introduced to is: Is this a resilience activity for me or not? How do I feel while it’s happening, and how do I feel afterward? Do I feel more open, more connected, more grounded, more belonging, or safer? Or afterward, do I feel toxic, or exhausted, or drained?
Just asking those questions is important. Just learning this for ourselves because we’re all different. It’s not about judgment or perfection but about an assessment of whether something is an activity that builds an ability to keep going or steals some of our steam. We should have pleasure, but we also should be aware of the impact of some of these numbing experiences. If I numb all of the pain, it’s harder for me to feel joy and connection.
AC What is something that brings joy, desire, and life to your organizing?
DS I just went to such an excellent queer sex party at a bar here in Seattle. I love to go to queer spaces wherever I travel. Just seeing how people are finding each other or creating spaces that celebrate sexuality, especially if people are being political about it. I just love to see people trying to produce community spaces that are sex-positive, and body-positive, and meaningfully inclusive. It is such a sign of life in such a difficult landscape, and people have been doing it for so long. I love reading histories about nightlife and organizing that overlap so thoroughly with celebrating queer culture and sexuality and art. It just reminds me we’re alive. I really want to feel alive in this time of the collapse of consumer industrial society. I think it’s likely that my life will end early because of that collapse. We are not going to have the kind of life we have right now for much longer.
Noticing that I am a living animal is huge for me. There’s something about going to queer sexual subcultures that feels like that — aliveness. It tunes me into other people choosing aliveness. It tunes me into cultivating each other’s aliveness, collectively.
Angelica Castro-Mendoza is a cultural worker and writer based in New Jersey.
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