I think often about the fact that I am a first-generation lover. By this I mean that I am the first woman in my family to love entirely as I choose, the product of generations of arranged marriages for women – girls, some of them – in a South Asian culture preoccupied with enforcing rigid boundaries of caste. Love, to us, is a transgressive, abstract, Western thing, only tangentially related to the everyday work of marriage – in fact, we distinguish arranged marriages, the norm, from “love marriages,” in our everyday speech. “Love,” in this case, is a synonym for intercaste, or interreligious, spoken in a tone of hushed warning – we grew up with cautionary tales of love marriages gone awry, women and men who chose to love on their own terms and alienated their communities in the process. As a first-generation lover, I swing from feeling incredibly lucky to deeply confused. And as a novelist, I find myself obsessed with the texture and significance of relationships between women: friends, lovers, mothers, daughters. I am also gay, which to me is less of a sexual orientation than an existential condition of questioning, wondering, Is there another way? 

I won the strangest jackpot of history to be born in America, during an era of unprecedented cultural representation for people who look and love as I do. I live in Lesbian Mecca, also known as Brooklyn, where I’ve fallen head-first into queer community, a boisterous network of dear friends and lovers, continually colliding. My friends and I will often send each other voice memos with date recaps, sex play-by-plays, new loves and letdowns, all of us trying our best to love in accordance with our principles, again and again, as Charli XCX put it. Sometimes it feels like the blind leading the blind; other times it feels like we, in our collective brain trust, have experienced the entire pageant of human emotions. It is a privileged, historically unimaginable existence. It feels like I am joining the party at a high, but possibly also at last call – the world is getting actively worse around us. My same phone that pings with messages from my friends, my girls, brings ever-accelerating news of genocide, our slow descent into fascism. What is the point of being gay when polar icecaps are melting? I look to writers, to queer elders for advice. And so, when I saw online that a new Dean Spade was dropping, I thought, Thank God.

Dean Spade is a veteran of queer movements for justice, your favorite queer writer’s favorite queer writer. He is best known for his book Mutual Aid, an action-oriented handbook to organizing local communities, and for founding the Sylvia Rivera Law Project. He’s also brilliantly, eminently online, someone I’d look for as a green flag on a crush’s Instagram “following” list. Online, he leads workshops on relationships, films advice videos, and shares resources and calls-to-action. He is a man of the people, and he sees his people are struggling – on dating apps, in doomed situationships, in messy friend groups and incestuous political collectives. Love in a F*cked Up World is his response: a love letter to the gay, horny, and confused. 

Love in a Fucked Up World styles itself as a self-help book, a choice that is both earnest and subversive. The self-help genre can be mired in heterosexual or regressive advice, telling readers to “lean in” or put up with bullshit or generally hyper-fixate on improving themselves as individuals without acknowledging the social forces that shape them. What’s more, Spade roots his authority not in psychology credentials, but in his experience as a “lifelong participant and student of social movements,” a person on a lifelong quest to improve his relationships. Spade opens with a frank analysis of our situation – it’s dire. “We live in a time of intense conditions. We are told we are freer and more connected than ever because of technology, but every day we confront skyrocketing inequality, terrifying ecological crisis, and endless war,” he asserts. “How can we hold on to each other in these hard times, take the brave and bold actions required of us, and become better able to love each other through it all?” 

Spade’s commitment to situating our everyday romantic struggles within The Biggest Struggle of All Times – maintaining our dignity and resilience under late-stage capitalism –  takes its cues from his feminist predecessors, particularly Black feminists who insisted that “the personal is political.” His approach is also really, quintessentially, gay. If queer people generally have the sharpest read on societal norms due to our outsider perspectives, Spade’s trans activist lens questions everything. Spade takes aim at the big myths of heterosexual society: the book opens with a takedown of the dangerous “Romance Myth,” or the idea that “relationships should be exclusive, long-lasting, and follow a predetermined pattern of escalation.” But he also questions behaviors that are normalized, or even valorized, within the queer community, such as having a lot of hookups (he gently asks whether we are actually “numbing out” by chasing sex on dating apps). Or whether our well-meaning fixation with boundaries – setting up hard, automatic rules against other people – keeps us from interrogating the roots of our desires, the varied circumstances in which we say “yes” and “no.” Sometimes Spade is preaching to the choir; other times he’s subtweeting. 

Spade gets away with it because of his tone: measured, questioning, constructive, like a voice memo from your stablest friend. LOVE sweeps from the existential to the specific, demystifying the steps of initiating, tending to, and sometimes ending your relationships. Chapters cover topics such as conflict and apologies, choosing when and how to break up, and regulating your emotions through the rollercoaster of dating – what my friends and I call “being on the streets.”

I wondered whether Spade would draw from his own personal experiences; generally, he doesn’t. In this way, Spade avoids the trapdoor of confession, of using his own marginalization as the basis for moral authority, which often afflicts marginalized writers trying to theorize about the world. But Spade also doesn’t maintain the rigid, impersonal boundaries of a therapist, for he understands that trust and collective wisdom comes from shared stories. In LOVE, Dean includes fictional case studies,” short third-person stories about characters in complicated situations. One case study follows Denise and Kila, whose relationship ends because of jealousy in an open relationship. Or Mei and Honey, best friends who used to date, and maintain connection by co-hosting an annual Lunar New Year party. 

It’s not surprising that LOVE was developed from online workshops Spade teaches; it is a book that knows its audience. Many words in his book – “polyamory,” “bodywork,” “attachments” – do not appear in the Bible, as the saying goes, but could be transcripts from your group chats. LOVE is interspersed with worksheets and charts (“Seven Steps for De-Escalating a Crush”), very screen-shottable, one of which I texted to a friend in a sticky romantic situation: maybe helpful for you?! She laughed. It felt like LOVE had been eavesdropping on our voice memos. 

Spade is invested in helping readers live their lives on purpose. He is unflinching in his diagnoses of common “cognitive myths,” which he calls “distortions,” such as the romance myth, or disposability culture, or individualism. But beyond his diagnoses, Spade is pragmatic and intentional about offering solutions, concrete ways to revise our patterns of thought and action. He did, after all, write a self-help book instead of a novel.

This is a joke I can make as a novelist, but also because the fiction I’m drawn to write and read shares overlapping concerns with LOVE: how to build relationships in late-stage capitalism, across significant power and identity barriers, and persist amid horrors. This is a large, vibrant, interdisciplinary literary project. The novelist Miranda July recently shouted out LOVE as a recommendation for readers of her bestseller ALL FOURS. I thought this was a lovely suggestion, to read LOVE as a nonfiction companion to, or debrief after, her fiction, which follows a menopausal woman’s riotous sexual awakening. I work in a genre of contemporary fiction about women and queer people in transgressive, damaging, revelatory relationships; I derive continual comfort knowing that all of my romantic experiences have already been described in totalizing detail by gender-marginalized writers before me. Fiction can use sex to physicalize otherwise invisible, private feelings of powerlessness or alienation in the world. What I encounter less often is an interest in unfurling how relationships are made to work, what they look like when they are healthy and functional. That might make for less sexy fiction. Indeed, Spade calls out the cultural narratives around us that romanticize relationships that are dramatic, driven by “subterranean wounds,” making stable relationships seem less exciting. His intervention, then, is to translate the raw experience of life, the reality refracted and theorized by fiction, and illustrated by his “case studies,” into something we can hold: he synthesizes it into action. 

“A core idea in this book is that awareness is key to liberation,” Spade writes of the internal romance narratives that guide us. “Noticing allows us to catch the patterned cultural norms and scripts so we can say, ‘Hey, that’s not me, that’s not mine!’ and make conscious choices.” These choices, to Spade, make all the difference.

The world that Spade urges his readers towards has its seeds in the world we currently live in. By we, I mean his readers – I’m imagining queer people living in urban centers with rich histories of activism, beating hearts connected by arteries of public transportation and walkability. Material things, like trains and bars and bookshops – I’m thinking of Brooklyn, my gay utopia. But when I think of the state of American dating more broadly, I feel less hopeful. My generation, Gen Z, is in the middle of a loneliness epidemic. Many of us live at home, since we cannot afford rent in the kinds of cities that foster human connection. Only 4 percent of American attends a social function on a given weekend – and can you blame anyone? My friends and I often joke that it costs twenty dollars to stick your foot out of the house. We are still seeing the psychological fall-out from Covid, which prematurely stunted our social development as teens. Our boys have been slingshotted into an internet rabbit hole of incelhood. I believe in the world Spade prescribes, but I could not lend his book to a straight friend. The worlds in which we live, and love, would not be the same.

While I find dating revelatory, an opportunity to learn and practice my principles, most straight women I know find it demoralizing, degrading, or straight-up terrifying. Stories of violence against women regularly make headlines, slow-cooking the nervous systems of those who date men. Queer dating isn’t utopic, but queerness, the framework of Spade’s book, operates in a world much freer of violence. Amid the violences of capitalism and war that trammel us all, Spade assumes that within his readers’ relationships, nobody is trying to hurt the other, that the relationships themselves are not inherently exploitative or unfree. After the second Trump election, Gen Z American women took to TikTok to call for a 4B movement, not to practice accountability with men. For lovers to be equal, engaged partners in Spade’s prescribed work of managing relationships, there must be minimal power differentials between them – and I fear that is rarely the case. 

Coming from Spade, this doesn’t feel like an oversight, but rather optimism. Spade, a longtime veteran of movements against criminalization and shame, is choosing against throwing any of his readers under the bus, especially men. Expressions like “toxic masculinity,” for example, which have become shorthand in our culture for a range of unpleasant male behaviors, rarely come up in the book – even if they could help analyze certain patterns of control or dominance that cause relationship dysfunction. Similarly, phrases like “white privilege” or “cis privilege,” seldom come up. Instead, Spade moves away from a suffocating, unequal world of one-on-one romantic relationships, and into a different relationship terrain altogether: friendships, where we come up for air. 

Liberation, in Spade’s imagination, comes in the form of friendships. In my own relationships as a young person post-Covid, friendship is a truth I have settled in over and over again, each time with a fresh sigh of relief. “Romantic and sexual relationships are rarely this free. Family relationships are bogged down in prescribed roles, and work and school relationships are often hierarchical and oppressive. From what I have seen, friendship is the closest most people get to each other,” Spade writes in his final, strongest chapter, Revolutionary Promiscuity. Here, Spade is not calling for sluttiness, exactly, but rather a generosity and outpouring of effort and love into our friendships and broader community networks, instead of chasing a single romantic partner. Friendship, to Spade, is a “refuge for freer relational practices that thrive outside the confines of romantic love and family. Increasing the significance of our friendships leads to more of the liberated connection we need to survive these harrowing times.” 

Spade’s conception of “promiscuity” was a breakthrough for me, putting language to the rising tide of love I have found, attracted, and cultivated in my own life. I am an active thrower of house parties and suppers, park hangs. My goal is for people to find love at one of my functions; so far, a few people have hooked up, which is a promising start. Love, to me, is an offer to cook lunch for a friend — restaurants are expensive — or run errands together, or buddy-read a book; sex is good, but have you ever had your best friend offer to wash your dishes for you? Friendship, Spade reminds us, is not the answer in itself: it is the base organizational unit, the loving nucleus around which we can build larger community projects, even resistance movements. These are movements where I feel I have more than enough.