To Love In A Fucked Up World

This moon's theme is love, mostly after reading two books I would recommend as a pair: the 1999 bell hooks classic All About Love and Dean Spade's 2025 book Love in a F*cked-Up World: How to Build Relationships, Hook Up, and Raise Hell Together. Reading them both together brought other things I encountered to mind, and so I've sandwiched them here too in between some highlights from the two books. The planet's most dominating forces continue to distort love into illusion with every passing day; so my wish is that this forage can help, even a little, with defending your heart in battle.

1. Tell them | The truth is that no one person can meet every emotional need you have, said Dean Spade. You are safer and have more creativity and stamina when you make trust and connectedness with many people. "If we want people to understand what we want and how we want to be treated, we have to tell them."^[1] They can say yes or no, and if no, you can look elsewhere, meet your own needs, or live without.
2. Tell him | In one of my most adored stories of Muhammadﷺ, he encouraged a man to confess his love to another man who walked by them.^[2]
3. More and less than sex | Sophia K. Rosa said intimacy is "primal and inscrutable, vital and elusive... a way of being together that might include fleeting or enduring experiences of affinity, vulnerability, nearness and love."^[3]
4. The essence is security | Though we are born with the innate potential for love and empathy, those seeds must be watered by experiences of security, said Gabor and Daniel Maté in 2022.^[4]
5. Not that bad | bell hooks said it can be difficult for us to accept a definition of love that changes how we see our families.^[5]
6. What you believe love is | What you think love is will affect how you behave in your relationships, said Dr. Sophie Mort in 2021.^[6] "What we believe about love derives from what we learned about love." Thinking about love in terms of nurturing your own or another person's spirit can simplify the concept. Then relationships can be reframed as a journey of connection, where you ask what the other needs instead of trying to read their mind. "How can I nurture that person in a way that suits who they are, and what they want in life? How can I connect with them right now and show them I'm here."
7. What negates love | bell hooks said that abuse and neglect cannot coexist with love; to think they can is a social myth that comes from a culture that claims abusive behaviour to children can be loving.^[5:1] The basis of love is care and affirmation. Abusive behavior negates love regardless of intention.
8. Even for a brief moment | The greatest secret we can learn from human poetry, thought, and belief, said Victor Frankl in 1946, is this: Love is "the ultimate and highest goal" to which we can aspire. "The salvation of man is through love and in love." Recalling his enslavement in Nazi concentration camps, he understood how one who has nothing left in this world may still know bliss, even briefly, in the contemplation of their beloved.^[7]
9. The only orientation | The fear of choosing the wrong door in life can be fixed with a working compass. Robyn Humphrys is convinced the compass needs to point to love as the highest value. This isn't about morality. Love is the only orientation that stabilises the mind when outcomes change: "loving yourself and others, even the people you dislike, especially them."^[8]
10. Will be the test | Carl Jung said loving someone else is easy, but loving yourself is as painful as "embracing a glowing red-hot iron." The escape of loving others is enjoyable when we do it, but eventually you will face the test of whether you can love yourself: "you cannot stay away from yourself forever, you have to return, have to come to that experiment, to know whether you really can love."^[9]
11. Root out the dominant programming | Consent is a framework for understanding "everything we are trying to heal and change in ourselves and the world," said Dean Spade.^[1:1] If we are to collaborate to survive disasters and destroy domination systems, we must root out the programming that dominant culture has installed in us.
12. In relation to good feelings | Children learn confusion about love from either harsh punishment or overindulgence, said bell hooks.^[5:2] When children are punished by adults they are taught to love, they begin to question whether love even exists. On the other hand, overindulged children learn that love is only about getting what they want. Both groups grow up thinking about love mainly related to good feelings framed around reward and punishment.
13. Behind the illusion | Dean Spade said that we already depend on each other and the planet to survive, but that web of care is mediated by violence and coercion for the profit of a few. Our job is to make planet-destroying systems obsolete, bring back and invent ways of living that nurture life, connection, and liberation. The skills we need to live together like this were sabotaged since birth by cultural messaging to be "competitive, individualistic, acquisitive, and hierarchical."^[1:2]
14. A corpse in their mouth | Raoul Veneigem said that discussions of revolution and class struggle are lifeless if they do not understand what is inherently subversive about love and refusing constraints.^[10]
15. The human responsibility | James Baldwin said if you cannot love anybody, you're dangerous.^[11] If you cannot do this responsibility of loving each other, then you have no way of learning how to move from one place to another through suffering.
16. Without using them to escape | Knowing how to be alone is central to the art of loving, said bell hooks. When we know how to be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape, said bell hooks in 1999.^[5:3]
17. That communion, that defiant love | We need the moments of joining a collective experience, what Kelly Hayes described as "that communion against injustice, that defiant love, that refusal to abandon, our willingness to stand in the cold together, and the ability to find joy in that togetherness, despite our comfort."^[12]
18. Generations of rebels | Although the system always wants to mediate our relationships, generations of rebels have fought to build revolutionary ways for people to be together and dismantle nuclear-family norms, said Dean Spade.^[1:3]
19. Conjure that social electricity | Organisers must learn to conjure the social electricity of connectedness to each other even in relatively 'normal' times, said Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba.^[13]
20. A way of knowing how to die | Love is the only power that allows us to hold one another beyond death, and so to know how to love each other is also a way of knowing how to die, said bell hooks in 1999.^[5:4]
21. 8 things about balanced relationships | Inspired by David Richo's 'Characteristics of an Adult Relationship' list from 2002, Dean Spade in 2025 made a list of 8 things we must understand to build balanced and supportive relationships.^[1:4]

1. Tell them

The truth is, no one person can meet every emotional need we have. We are safer and better off with more kinds of connection, are more able to survive and resist with creativity and stamina when we cultivate trust and connectedness with many people. There is no “normal” way of being or relating. If we want people to understand what we want and how we want to be treated, we have to tell them. They can say “yes” or “no” to our requests, and if they say “no,” we can seek to get our needs met elsewhere, meet the needs ourselves, or live without them being met.

— Dean Spade, 2025

2. Tell him

A man was with Muhammadﷺ when another man passed by them. The man with Muhammadﷺ said: "Messenger of Allah! I love this man." The Messengerﷺ then asked: "Have you made it known to him?" The man replied: "No." The Messengerﷺ said: "Tell him." The man then went to the other and said: "I love you for Allah's sake." He replied: "May He for Whose sake you love me love you!"

— Anas ibn Malik, circa 622-632 CE

3. More and less than sex

'Intimacy' is primal and inscrutable, vital and elusive... Intimacy is much more (and much less) than sex – though perhaps sex itself could be a helpful lens through which to understand it. Whilst intimacy in general need not include any semblance of sex, as an experience it might mirror some of the reasons people can find sex meaningful. Like sex, intimacy can allow us to access desire, pleasure, comfort, tending, tenderness, coming together and feelings of ‘being seen’. But just as not all sex is intimate, not all intimacy is sexual. ‘Intimacy’ encompasses many kinds of relationships. It is a way of being together that might include fleeting or enduring experiences of affinity, vulnerability, nearness and love.

— Sophia K. Rosa, 2023

4. The essence is security

“We are indeed born for love,” assert the science writer Maia Szalavitz and the child psychiatrist and neuroscientist Bruce Perry, “[but] the gifts of our biology are a potential, not a guarantee.”^[14] Certain kinds of experiences water the seeds of love and empathy that Nature has planted in us; absent that consistent nourishment, growth is compromised. The essence of those experiences can be expressed in one word: security.

— Gabor Maté with Daniel Maté, 2022

5. Not that bad

An overwhelming majority of us come from dysfunctional families in which we were taught we were not okay, where we were shamed, verbally and/or physically abused, and emotionally neglected even as were also taught to believe that we were loved. For most folks it is just too threatening to embrace a definition of love that would no longer enable us to see love as present in our families. Too many of us need to cling to a notion of love that either makes abuse acceptable or at least makes it seem that whatever happened was not that bad.

— bell hooks, 1999

6. What you believe love is

Seriously, what do you think [love] is? Your answer to this question will affect how you behave in your relationships. If you believe it is a physical experience, you might wait until you feel something in your body that tells you you are in love. If this physical feeling disappears, you may think your love has too, assuming this is a sign that the relationship has run its course. If you believe love is possessive, you may interpret someone’s jealousy of your connection to others, and their desire to control your social diary, as true love. True commitment. If you believe it is wild, uncontrollable and passionate, you may interpret whirlwind emotions and arguments as a positive sign in your relationships. If you believe that ‘love is a ball and chain’ or ‘love hurts’ or ‘love will make you weak’, or if you were ever punished and told, ‘I’m only doing this because I love you’, you may believe that love is painful. If you believe that love is service, and that you deserve service, you may expect to sit around while your partner carries out the household chores, bringing you everything you wish for and need. It could be the other way round, of course, should you believe that, once in love, you are meant to be the one carrying out service. If you saw Disney films, and learned that men rescued women from their poor, lowly, trapped lives and whisked them away to be princesses with a pure and enduring love, you may have… well… an unrealistic notion of what it’s like to be in a relationship! What we believe about love derives from what we learned about love. What did love look like in your family? Was it nurturing? Was it affectionate? Was it there for you no matter what? If so, what did you learn that love could look like for you? Did you pick up expectations from TV shows and films? Probably. We all do. How do your answers to these questions affect how you feel about love and relationships now? [...] Love is something that we can choose to be doing every moment of every day; something that is there to benefit and nurture ourselves, another or many others. If you think about love in terms of nurturing your own or another person's spirit, personhood, soul, the essence of us/them - whatever word you use to describe that very central part of what makes people people - does it change something for you? It did for me. And it did for my client too. It simplified the concept, and suddenly meant we saw relationships as a place to connect and nurture. A journey, with each moment a new chance to show love. When in relationships, it made me think, How can I nurture that person in a way that suits who they are, and what they want in life? How can I connect with them right now and show them I'm here. It made me realise that, rather than trying to read their minds, I could ask them what they want and need. Suddenly I had a shot at the most human experience of all - I had hope that I could find and create love.

— Sophie Mort, 2021

7. What negates love

One of the most important social myths we must debunk if we are to become a more loving culture is the one that teaches parents that abuse and neglect can coexist with love. Abuse and neglect negate love. Care and affirmation, the opposite of abuse and humiliation, are the foundation of love. No one can rightfully claim to be loving when behaving abusively. Yet parents do this all the time in our culture. Children are told that they are loved even though they are being abused. It is a testimony to the failure of loving practice that abuse is happening in the first place.

— bell hooks, 1999

8. Even for a brief moment

Real or not, her look was then more luminous than the sun which was beginning to rise. A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth— that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved.

— Victor Frankl, 1946

9. The only orientation

Every single person watching this wants the same thing: peace. But here's the problem: We don't know how to choose our way to peace. Life is like a hallway of doors. You go through this door, maybe you go to business school. You go through this door, you break up with your partner. And we live terrified that if we choose the wrong door, we will lose our happiness. But what if the fear isn't in the door, but in the choice itself? Here's the truth: You don't need more doors, you need a working compass. Now stay with me. We're going to ask the question that nobody ever asks: What should the compass point towards? People are going to argue with me here, and I rarely say what you should or should not do, but I am going to tell you in no uncertain terms, your highest value needs to be love. Loving yourself and others, even the people you dislike— especially them! Not because it sounds noble. There is no morality here. It's because [love] is the only orientation that stabilises the mind when outcomes change.

— Robyn Humphrys, 2025

10. Will be the test

To love someone else is easy, but to love what you are, the thing that is yourself, is just as if you were embracing a glowing red-hot iron: it burns into you and that is very painful. Therefore, to love somebody else in the first place is always an escape which we all hope for, and we all enjoy it when we are capable of it. But in the long run, it comes back on us. You cannot stay away from yourself forever, you have to return, have to come to that experiment, to know whether you really can love. That is the question— whether you can love yourself, and that will be the test."

— Carl Jung, 1930s

11. Root out the dominant programming

Consent is a framework for understanding everything we are trying to heal and change in ourselves and in the world. Our movements are fighting against governments and corporations controlling our lives, putting our people in cages, fighting endless wars for profit, and making the planet uninhabitable. We want everyone to get to decide for themselves how to live. If we are to collaborate to survive the disasters shaping our lives and to destroy systems of domination, we need to root out the programming that dominant culture has implanted in us.

— Dean Spade, 2025

12. In relation to good feelings

There is nothing that creates more confusion about love in the minds and hearts of children than unkind and/or cruel punishment meted out by the grown-ups they have been taught they should love and respect. Such children learn early on to question the meaning of love, to yearn for love even as they doubt it exists. On the flip side, there are masses of children who grow up confident love is a good feeling, who are never punished, who are allowed to believe that love is only about getting your needs met, your desires satisfied. In their child’s minds love is not about what they have to give, love is mostly something given to them. When children like these are overindulged either materially or by being allowed to act out, this is a form of neglect. These children, though not in any way abused or uncared for, are usually as unclear about love’s meaning as their neglected and emotionally abandoned counterparts. Both groups have learned to think about love primarily in relation to good feelings, in the context of reward and punishment. From early childhood on, most of us remember being told we were loved when we did things pleasing to our parents. And we learned to give them affirmations of love when they pleased us. As children grow they associate love more with acts of attention, affection, and caring. They still see parents who attempt to satisfy their desires as giving love.

— bell hooks, 1999

13. Behind the illusion

If we break the illusion of separateness, we can see that we already exist in a web of mutual care necessary for us to survive— we get everything we need from each other and the planet. It’s just that this web is mediated by violence and coercion so that a few people can profit. Our job is to resist and destroy the systems that turn our lives into fuel for exploiting, planet-destroying industries. We must both invent new and restore old ways of living with each other, ways that nurture life, connection, belonging, and liberation. From the day we are born, those skills are undermined and sabotaged by cultural messaging. We’re taught to be competitive, individualistic, acquisitive, and hierarchical.

— Dean Spade, 2025

14. A corpse in their mouth

People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth.

— Raoul Vaneigem, 1967

15. The human responsibility

If you can't love anybody, you're dangerous. Because you've no way of learning humility. No way of learning that other people suffer. No way of learning how to use your suffering and theirs to get from one place to another. In short, you fail the human responsibility, which is to love each other.

— James Baldwin, 1978

16. Without using them to escape

We all long for loving community. It enhances life’s joy. But many of us seek community solely to escape the fear of being alone. Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.

— bell hooks, 1999

17. That communion, that defiant love

That irresistible urge to join in a collective experience, to embrace a fuller sense of connection and communion with those around you because something beautiful is happening, is not attached to every moment of protest or struggle, but we do need those moments to exist. [...] while we do not all practice the same faith, and some of us have no religious faith at all, we were all bound together in that moment by something sacred. That communion against injustice, that defiant love, that refusal to abandon, our willingness to stand in the cold together, and the ability to find joy in that togetherness, despite our discomfort. I was so grateful in that moment, because in our incredibly fractured world there was a sense of wholeness to be found, out there in the cold, in struggle with other human beings.

— Kelly Hayes, Relationships, Reciprocity, and Struggle, 2023

18. Generations of rebels

There is a lot at stake in how we relate— the system knows it and always wants to mediate our relationships, isolate us, squander our time, drain our energy, and pit us against each other. Working to resist its pressure to conform connects us to generations of rebels who have fought to dismantle nuclear-family norms and build revolutionary ways for people to be together.

— Dean Spade, 2025

19. Conjure that social electricity

Like an electrical current that reactivates a stopped heart, crisis can create a social defibrillation that re-enlivens our connectedness to other human beings and allows our compassion, imaginations, and political will to flow more freely. This is why protests, mutual aid projects, and innovative new modes of connection and support emerge rapidly in the most perilous times. As organizers, we must learn to conjure that social electricity even in relatively “normal” times. We believe in caring for each other as a form of cultural rebellion. We believe in the need to foster a counterculture of care—a politics larger than any siloed issue, one that can challenge dehumanization and the erasure of atrocity while allowing us to hold on to each other and our humanity amid disasters daily and acute. The state has the capacity to help us all survive—and even thrive—but in its current form, it is actively opposed to doing so. We must have the will to survive in collectivity, as people who are willing to seize, defy, and upend whatever they must for the sake of life, dignity, and decency—and for the sake of each other.

— Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba, 2023

20. A way of knowing how to die

Love is the only force that allows us to hold one another close beyond the grave. That is why knowing how to love each other is also a way of knowing how to die.

— bell hooks, 1999

21. 8 things about balanced relationships

What do balanced relationships, or relationships with less reactivity and more consent, look like? How would relationships feel that do support our well-being, the wellness of people around us, our liberation movements, and the planet? To build relationships like that, we have to understand that:

1. No one can control or change someone else, and it is not necessary to do so.
2. Genuine intimacy requires constant permission to come closer or take more distance; we are always changing.
3. No one can love and satisfy us perfectly; we are responsible for our own happiness.
4. No one is perfectly honest all the time— feelings of betrayal are part of intimacy.
5. We all show up with wounds that limit our abilities to connect, feel, communicate, and be intimate. The best we can do is to try to be aware of this and to be compassionate to ourselves and others.
6. Blaming others and trying to be right undermines our healing and connection.
7. We are naturally inclined toward healing and freedom, but we have a lot of baggage to work through with humility.
8. Powerful attraction often tells us more about our own childhood shaping and settings than whether the other person is a good match for us.

— Dean Spade, 2025

If you know how to reach me, please send me what came to mind! I want to understand love better, and of course through what you have saved about it that means something to you.

As ever,
Liy

More foraging

More narrative resources gathered in this context here: are.na/liy/doing-radical-intimacy