Save Me: The Romantic Utopia of Personal Transformation.
Romantic love has become a collective emotional utopia today: in our postmodern world, people seek fusion (with their soulmate and with the Cosmos), salvation, transformation, and happiness through romantic partnership. Romanticism is also a kind of individualistic religion, with its tailor-made paradises and multiple hells, its rituals of union and separation, its own symbols, myths, heroes, heroines, and its martyrs of love.
Like any utopia, postmodern romanticism is a magical space filled with promises of change and transformation. Love is a personal revolutionary process because it disrupts our entire lives and creates turning points in our biographies: it stirs up our emotions, disrupts our schedules and habits, leads us to make important decisions, places us in extraordinary states that alter our daily routines, and lifts our spirits toward the vastness of the Universe, eternity, purity, perfection, and happiness.
In the stories we are told, the magic of love changes our lives: poor girls become princesses, immature teenagers become grown and brave men, frogs turn into blue princes, monsters regain their humanity, fairies paralyze you (put you to sleep, or freeze you), witches brew potions to drive their victims mad, the dead come back to life, birds speak, dragons fly, and love can do it all.
Love not only has the power to change our lives for the better but also holds a promise of salvation. The protagonists of the tales are saved from labor exploitation or confinement in a tower through love. In real life too, love saves us: the journalist who becomes the Queen of Spain for love, or the commoner who becomes the Princess of Wales. Neither of them will have to face, like their generational peers, female precarity, the fluctuations of the job market, economic crises, and unemployment.
Letizia and Kate were chosen by a European prince charming, but they are not the only ones: the girlfriends of millionaire footballers are also saved from economic distress when they are chosen by the heroes of postmodernity. Women who manage to partner with leaders who accumulate resources and power are all saved (as long as they can maintain the relationship), which is why it's not surprising that there are so many women in the world who, instead of working for their economic autonomy, prefer to wait to be chosen by a man to support them for life.
The girlfriends of drug lords are another example of how one can escape poverty through love. In many Central American and Latin American countries, teenagers dream of being chosen by these leaders: through them, they will achieve a social and economic position they wouldn't achieve on their own in an economy controlled by the drug trade.
But this love matter isn't just about resources and power; it's also filled with promises of happiness, eternity, perfection, and assured companionship. We ask love to make us feel unique and special, to dispel the fear of loneliness, to fix our problems, to rid us of deadly boredom, to fill all our voids and meet all our needs, to make us self-realized, to offer us security and stability, to provide intense and beautiful emotions, and to last forever.
Postmodern individuals like us enjoy living in other realities and escaping the present through narratives, drugs, parties, celebrations, or extreme sports. We relish watching movies, reading novels, and putting ourselves in the shoes of other people who do manage to find their soulmates. We love magic, and that's why we also enjoy constructing collective illusions like Christmas, Easter, Valentine's Day...
Those of us who inhabit the islands of postmodernity love being in multiple places at once and struggle to be where we are. Hence, we cushion the impact of the present moment by covering ourselves with screens, play with space-time through social media, multitask, build our virtual biography in the digital Cloud, get to know each other and fall in love on online dating websites. The boundaries between reality and fiction are blurred, and we can all construct our virtual worlds according to our preferences, even if they don't align much with our everyday reality.
The harsher the reality, the more we yearn to escape from it: romanticism is the perfect excuse to dream of alternative possible lives, to forget a world we dislike, to imagine other realities as we evade our own. Moreover, fantasizing about love not only helps us escape from a reality we dislike, but it also relieves us of the responsibility for our own happiness.
We struggle to commit to ourselves, so we ask an external person to commit to us. We find it hard to love and accept ourselves as we are, so we delegate to our beloved, thinking: "I'm full of insecurities, but if another person comes and tells me I'm wonderful, it'll be easier for me to believe it." Since I'm not happy, I ask my beloved to make me happy. Since I'm not well, I associate with someone who is well and who can infect me with their joy.
This idealization of love and its magical transformative power means that instead of investing our energy and enthusiasm into working for our well-being and that of others, we prefer to wait for life to bring us someone who will solve our problems. Someone who will give us the strength to live, restore our hope and enthusiasm, boost our self-esteem, and motivate us to do all the things we avoid because we're afraid. Or lazy. Or because we believe we can't do them alone.
Love is an act of faith, which is why some people come together to love each other against all odds and are willing to do anything "for love": move to a different city or country, leave behind one life project to start another, break up with a partner, break ties with the family if they oppose our love...
There are countless examples of this transformative power in our culture: the journalist who becomes the queen of Spain, the prostitute who becomes Richard Gere's wife, the girl in a coma who is saved by a kiss of love, the Beast who turns into a prince...
All of us want change, it's just that while some work hard to improve our living conditions through social and political movements, collectives, and organizations, the majority dream of personalized romantic paradises following the motto: "Every person for themselves."
Postmodern capitalism doesn't benefit from people coming together to promote political, social, and economic change that would improve everyone's lives. That's why the romance industry sells us these tailor-made paradises: it keeps us entertained searching for our soulmate instead of uniting with others to fight for our rights and freedoms.
Love is a powerful mechanism of social and political control that serves to make everyone voluntarily adopt a lifestyle based on inequality, production, and consumption. But it can also be a revolutionary path to collectively transform the reality we live in.
The Romantic Love is a political matter
We love as we live: our romantic utopia is loaded with hegemonic ideology, invisibly obscured by the magic of love. Our structures of erotic, romantic, and affective relationships condition (and are conditioned by) the way we organize ourselves economically, politically, and socially. Through family, the process of socialization, education, and culture, we inherit structures of relating to people and the world based on the principles of patriarchy and capitalism: private property, self-interest, selfishness, hierarchies, inequality, exploitation, individualism, power struggles, and violence.
The romantic is political because love is a universal and collective phenomenon: it has existed in all times and cultures, and each constructs it based on the ideology that dominates the entire political and economic organization system. Each culture of love has its own myths, norms, customs, taboos, prohibitions, regulations, and punishments for sentimental dissidents.
Capitalist and patriarchal romanticism is as unequal and violent as the economic system. We relate to people in a hierarchical manner, always guarding our needs (power and resources): at work, in the community, in parliament, in unions, in political parties, in sports, in the family, among friends, and in relationships.
The first thing we learn when integrating the mandates of traditional romance into our lives is that we own the people we love. This implies a deep tyranny: "If I love you, you belong to me." "Because I love you, I have the right to know what you're doing, to limit what you do, to control your life, and to reproach you for not being as I expected you to be."
The sublimation of this romantic violence is what causes people to waste their lives trying to dominate each other. Violence and romance are seemingly opposing terms, but the reality is that our personal relationships are like our international relations: we exploit people, abuse people, exercise our absolutist power, colonize the people we love, and engage in terrible wars for resources and power struggles among ourselves.
That's why it's not unusual to come across people who declare themselves "romantic" or "loving" and proudly display their extreme "sensitivity" to "expressions of love" (for example, giving bouquets of flowers, jewelry, luxury dinners, etc.), but relate to their everyday world with hatred. There is no contradiction, for instance, in the person who cries during a romantic movie and two hours later, in a conversation with friends, resorts to insulting and justifying the inferiority of women, or violence against migrants. It's that person who sheds tears at weddings and feels disgust for beggars, the person who dreams of walking down the aisle in white and changes seats on the subway if a foreign woman sits next to them.
There is a lot of romanticism in our culture, but very little love. The media and advertising never show us collective love unless it's to sell insurance or mobile phone products. They never show us the capacity we have as individuals to come together, fight for a good cause, and achieve victory, because it would seriously threaten the established order. The system wants us alone, or in pairs, as that makes us more vulnerable and obedient, immersed in structures of mutual dependence by our own choice.
There are those who want to save themselves, and those who work on constructing alternative economic structures to the hegemonic capitalism, such as time banks, barter markets, networks of solidarity and mutual aid, recycling spaces, collective gardens, seed banks, social currencies... There are numerous spaces where people are coming together to confront the precarity, poverty, and violence of our current system. However, the majority continue to follow paths dictated by the hegemonic system under the law of the strongest: each one saves themselves as best as they can.
While it's not true that having a husband will lift you out of poverty (there are many husbands in the world who spend their wages on alcohol, gambling, or prostitution, leaving their eight children without food for the whole month), the narratives of our culture make us believe that the only solution for women to escape poverty is to captivate a man who will support and love us.
Patriarchal education consists of convincing us that girls need a protective and resource-providing father, and later, a substitute for the protective father. Boys are made to believe that there will always be a female servant in their lives who will tend to their basic needs (food, hygiene, care, pleasure).
In this way, in our patriarchal education, autonomy does not exist: we are half oranges that will only be complete by finding someone with whom we fit. Someone who possesses what we lack to face life, who has knowledge and skills that we lack to solve our basic problems.
While it's true that boys are taught to cherish their freedom and defend it, they are not provided with the tools to achieve complete autonomy: they are not taught to cook, sew, care, heal, wash, etc., so they will always need a servant by their side.
From a young age, women are conditioned to adore the male figures in our surroundings: they are the powerful ones who protect us and sacrifice themselves to bring us money, food, and resources.
To make us believe that men are crucial in our lives, we are portrayed in stories always alone. The women in fairy tales never have mothers, sisters, cousins, friends, neighbors, aunts, or companions. The more alone they are, the more vulnerable and dependent they become.
The heroine's solitude justifies the existence of a prince charming, who would hardly matter if the protagonists had a strong social and emotional network around them. Female dependence also justifies the greatness of the Savior: if heroines had confidence in their own abilities to move forward, they wouldn't remain inactive, evoking pity while waiting for someone to rescue them.
The message from patriarchal narrative is that waiting alone is the only effective action to escape confinement or break free from a spell: we must have faith, be patient, and maintain our beauty and charm so that, when the moment of love arrives, we can captivate the prince with our allure.
In romantic stories, the Savior has a dual mission: rescuing a damsel in distress and saving their people-community-kingdom or planet from fierce enemies (the flying dragon, the orcs, the communists, the extraterrestrials, the mafia, the cyberterrorists, the thinking robots, etc.). The male protagonists of our stories sacrifice a lot "for love" of Humanity: they push themselves to their limits, come face to face with death, conquer their own fears, endure thirst, hunger, and sleep deprivation, tolerate physical pain and bleeding wounds, empower themselves to win all battles…
The male existence revolves constantly around the axis of success/failure. No man desires to be the loser, which is why any means are justified to achieve the end: violence is just as valid a means as any other to avoid downfall, prevent death, impose power, acquire resources, seize treasure, take control of government, kidnap the beloved, save the planet. The use of patriarchal violence is thus justified as a matter of survival for the male: defeat is death.
We are a part of success, we are the reward for effort, we are the spoils of war, we are the ones who care for the warriors between battles, we are forever grateful for having been liberated from our confinement or labor exploitation. When there are no women, this role is generally fulfilled by squires, those companions who are always shorter than the hero. Or they are black. Or they are chubby. Or they are clumsy. Or they are inexperienced teenagers. Or they are gay and enamored with the hero, happy to serve him and be close to him.
Women are drawn to powerful alpha males, with resources, physical strength, and the ability to win, because we play with a significant disadvantage. The world belongs to men. They are the ones who own 98% of the land, accumulate wealth, mostly lead countries, banks, companies, armies, churches, unions, and global organizations. We are poorer, more illiterate, suffer more malnutrition and violence.
It's normal, then, for patriarchy to educate us to form complementary couples where one has power and resources, and the other has the gift of selflessness, service, sacrifice, and surrender. One handles DIY tasks, the other handles domestic chores. Some give orders, others obey. Some are aggressive and authoritative, while others are sensitive and generous: as long as everyone fulfills their role, the balance seems perfect.
However, this romantic mirage of complementarity doesn't work: it doesn't help us to be happy, nor does it provide us with a minimal quality of life. Divorce rates demonstrate that this balance is neither eternal nor perfect, and that romantic relationships, like all others, are marked by constant power struggles. Rates of women murdered by their romantic partners also demonstrate that this fantasy of romantic complementarity is unequal, unjust, painful, and very violent.
Male domination is sublimated and mythologized in our culture (all action movies from the Hollywood industry glorify the power of the violent male), but the reality is that patriarchy is a disaster and its structures do not serve us well in terms of happiness. It is true that a few benefit greatly from this system of hierarchical domination, but for the vast majority, it makes us very unhappy because it doesn't allow us to build beautiful relationships based on pleasure, tenderness, or love.
Patriarchal romanticism is useful for creating poetry, dramas, tragedies, operas, and cinematic masterpieces, to perpetually perpetuate the battle of the sexes, to justify the privileges of a few wealthy white heterosexual males, to justify patriarchal violence and personal and collective wars.
But it doesn't serve us to construct a better world, a kinder, more supportive, more loving, and more peaceful world.
Our romantic relationships are self-interested and violent in the same way as other social and affective relationships: we come together with a person to form an alliance that allows us to face the world. Human life, like that of other animals, is conditioned by the search for and acquisition of resources: all animals, from the moment they wake up to when they go to sleep, have to secure a minimum amount of food that enables them to survive, they have to fend off other individuals to defend their territory, and protect themselves from other predators who also need their share of food.
Some animals fight alone, others organize into communities to thrive. We belong to the latter group: we survive as a species thanks to our ability to work as a team, divide tasks among ourselves, and help each other.
However, despite being social animals who need each other for individual and collective survival, in our fictional stories, the focus is not on the group: there's only one winner, one hero. Just as we transitioned from polytheistic religions to monotheistic ones, pagan narratives also mythologize the lone hero who saves everyone else.
God saves us from sin, the alpha male saves us from alien invasions: they are always males, and they are always alone. Mythologizing the lone hero and mythologizing the pursuit of individual happiness is the best method to distance us from the temptation of collective happiness.
The cost of opting for personal salvation is high, however. In our culture, love is always associated with sacrifice, renunciation, suffering, absolute devotion, and surrender. Women are told that we are born with a gift to love and care for others, to give ourselves without asking for anything in return, to forget about ourselves, our needs, and desires. We can be happy if we find someone who wants to be loved by us, and if we fulfill our historical role with fidelity and selflessness.
In our stories and legends, giving up personal freedom and autonomy is a test of love that will bring us more love. That's why I can give up anything and demand the same from the other: if I stop hanging out with my friends, you stop hanging out with yours. If I only think about you and construct my life around you, you have to do the same.
However, renunciation and sacrifice are not the same for women as they are for men. Women's freedom is suppressed worldwide under the pretext that we are wild beings that need to be tamed. Millions of girls are mutilated around the world so that they don't enjoy sex, under the belief that they will be less unfaithful to their husbands. Thousands of women are publicly stoned for exercising their freedom, and many others are killed in their homes every day. The media doesn't report these murders: in most headlines, women die on their own. If the husband becomes violent, it's because she disobeyed him, lied to him, betrayed him, or abandoned him: "crimes of passion" always have some reason, and we are the culprits for rebelling against patriarchal authority. Femicides aren't treated as a political issue because they happen in the private sphere, it's something that occurs between a man and his property, and others don't have the right to opine (the women must have done something to deserve such punishment: they brought it upon themselves by deviating from their submissive role).
Double sexual standards serve to justify male freedom and condemn female freedom. The world is full of men who go to brothels every week, who maintain two families at once, who have affairs when they need to. On the other hand, women are demonized when they engage in promiscuity, leave their homes, or disobey their husbands. The punishment for women exercising their freedom is monstrous: social ostracism or expulsion from the group, imprisonment, flogging, stoning to death.
Patriarchal love is a very effective structure for perpetuating this inequality because women fall into the trap of the romantic paradise, thinking that we can free ourselves and be happy by having partners. Since they don't tell us what comes after the wedding, we have to experience it firsthand. We discover too late that reality is different from what the stories tell us: the world is full of women trapped in their crystal palace or cardboard shack, disappointed, resigned, tired, overloaded, frustrated, and hurt. Some can divorce, and others can't, depending on their economic situation and the number of children they have. Some fall in love again and build another paradise, thinking that this time it will be different, while others resign themselves, believing they have bad luck, and wait for a miracle to happen (that their husband falls in love with them again, that a prince charming comes to rescue them from the ogre, that they win the lottery and don't have to depend on anyone financially, that time passes quickly so their children grow up soon, and they can dare to live the life they want...).
The truth is that the messages directed at postmodern women are highly contradictory: as girls, we are made to dream of "romantic salvation," while at the same time, we are expected to excel in school. As young women, we're told to partner up and prepare for the job market; as adults, we're expected to be good wives and mothers and also successful in our careers. The job market makes it very challenging for us, but almost all of us dream of economic independence while emotionally relying on love. And what's curious is that no matter how hard we try, in the end, our university degrees often don't save us from precarity. The most practical solution in these times of savage capitalism remains finding someone to supplement your income and help you deal with the uncertainty of contracts or maternity dismissals.
Love magically obscures this economic issue and hides the cost of immersing oneself in the romantic structures of mutual dependence, especially for us. We're asked to give up everything in exchange for happy, secure, and eternal love: that's why we suffer so much when we realize it's all a lie, or it's nothing like what we were promised.
There's a lot of suffering involved in loving under these mythologized and idealized patriarchal structures. We relate to love with so many demands that the level of disappointment we feel is similar to that of a child who makes a wish list for the Three Kings (or Santa Claus) and doesn't receive anything they wished for, only coal, and they wonder what they did to deserve this.
The Pleasure of Suffering and Romantic Violence
Without suffering and conflicts, there are no love stories: if the Capulets and Montagues had eaten paella together every Sunday, they wouldn't have hindered the love between Juliet and Romeo, they would have married happily, and there would have been no Shakespearean drama or tragedy in poetry. There would have been no deaths, no bloodshed, no weapons, and no poisons involved. There would have been no good or bad characters in the story.
Humans love romantic challenges, secret loves, impossible relationships, lost causes, strong emotions, and exceptional states. That's why we get bored when we have a beautiful, stable, or balanced relationship: without dramatic conflict, life is less intense and exciting.
There are hardly any love poems or songs that celebrate love: all boleros, tangos, folk songs, pop songs talk about heartbreak. They all contain reproaches or insults toward the loved one, they all carry a burden of suffering, some are very victim-centered, and most place us in two opposing poles: either we are the good ones (those who love), or we are the bad ones (those who fall out of love, those who don't love, those who share their love with others, those who break the exclusivity norm).
In the 19th century, Romanticism sublimated and mythologized the suffering of love, a luxury that only the upper classes and the emerging bourgeoisie could afford. The vast majority of people didn't have time to indulge in imaginary sufferings: they had to work from sunrise to sunset and ensure survival (their own and that of their sons and daughters).
Many centuries before, our Christian culture indissolubly associated love with the sacred and love with pain: Jesus endured terrible agony solely because he loved us and wanted to save us all from our sins. He is the ultimate example of how love is sacrifice, renunciation, and pain: a martyr of love.
Thanks to his sacrifice, all of us nowadays think that true love involves suffering. And the worse we suffer, the more divine we seem, the more spiritually elevated, sensitive, and loving. We have mythologized the image of the romantic person who can't bear reality, who never works to transform it, and who enforces their love through tragic or violent acts like "suicide for love."
The mythification of romantic suicide in the 19th century presents violence towards oneself as the ultimate test of love, although from my perspective, it's pure violence based on emotional blackmail. The message is clear: "If you don't love me the way I want you to, I'll kill myself so you feel like a bad person and guilt eats at you."
Romantic violence also leads to daily murders, what we now know as femicide: millions of men resolve their romantic conflicts by killing the women who don't love them or don't obey them. Our entire culture justifies this passionate male violence with explanations: "He killed her because jealousy blinded him," "He hit her because he didn't want to lose her," "He threw acid in her face because she contradicted him," "He gouged her eyes out because she was unfaithful."
Women also exert their own form of violence, but we often don't use physical force as much. From a submissive position, we use various mechanisms to dominate those who dominate us: insults, humiliations, reproaches, accusations, threats, manipulation. Women also seek revenge, make the beloved's life bitter, and construct hells filled with hate, pain, and malice.
In our culture, women are also capable of anything to achieve love: the heroines of soap operas are women full of hatred, yet deeply romantic. The "bad" characters compete with other women for a man's affection and have no scruples to achieve their goals. The "good" characters are the victims who suffer and wait, hoping things will resolve themselves and that romantic justice will prevail.
This is one of the reasons why we end relationships in warfare: we start a relationship with love and almost always end it with hatred. At the beginning, we give our best, and at the end, we show our most violent and petty sides. We don't know how to separate with tenderness: we create conflict to form two sides, with some being the culprits and others being the victims. Under the rules of romanticism, victims can legitimately exercise violence: they have every right to make the life of the person who broke their heart miserable.
This patriarchal romantic justice that divides the world into good and bad allows "the good" to fulfill their revenge by using all kinds of weapons and strategies, under the motto that "love and hate are two sides of the same coin." In our loving culture, romantic hatred is a sublime proof of love. This is why we've believed ideas like "those who fight the most desire each other the most," "who loves you will make you cry," "there's a thin line between love and hate," "love requires suffering." That's why our culture glorifies sadism and romantic masochism so much: we like to suffer, we like others to suffer for us, we like to dominate and be dominated, we enjoy living catharsis, tragedy, and drama.
The best example comes from Greek mythology, where Hera, an obsessive-compulsive woman, spends centuries taking revenge on her husband, trying to control him, to subjugate him so that he remains faithful, to punish him when he behaves badly. Zeus' vital drive is to escape his wife's power, to elude her vigilance, to exercise his freedom, and to seek pleasure by violating as many goddesses, semi-goddesses, and humans as he can find. Thus, the story of the divine marriage is based on a circular structure that repeats itself constantly: she lives to monitor him, he lives to escape, she discovers and punishes him, he escapes again.
Thanks to Hera, 21st-century women follow the same life pattern and center their lives around the titanic task of controlling the other. We remain the handbrake that limits the freedom and promiscuous voluptuousness of men. There are millions of women who continue to go to bars to take their husbands home, who try to prevent them from spending the month's resources on prostitutes, from getting drunk with friends and putting their lives at risk, or allocating too much budget to maintain their younger lovers. The role of patriarchal women is to monitor, scold, and punish their partners as if they were rebellious children who need a firm hand. Many men also seek women who can control them, scold them, tolerate their misbehavior, endure everything, forgive them, and love them unconditionally, just like their mothers did when they were young.
And this doesn't only happen in heterosexual couples: gay and lesbian individuals also engage in romantic wars and passionate violence, they also build relationships of dominance and submission, and they create their own domestic hells. Patriarchal violence transcends our loving system and we all practice it to the extent that we need to exert our power, access resources, and feel important to someone.
We relate to love as a means to achieve other ends. Contemporary love resembles an investment to attain the promised paradise, where we invest a great deal of energy, time, and resources. That's why if we're left, we feel like we've failed. We believe we've wasted our time because we gave love and didn't get what we needed or wanted (a happy and lasting partnership).
We don't know how to engage in horizontal and equal structures because our world is entirely hierarchical. Although we love each other a lot, we don't know how to love well. We're passionate about romanticism, but we lack tools to suffer less and enjoy relationships and life more.
We don't know how to handle our emotions: in school and at home, we're forced to repress them and not display them publicly. When we're consumed by anger, we're told to hide it, but we're not given tools to alleviate such strong emotions. We're not taught how to manage sadness, overwhelming joy, sexual desire, or terror: our fears are signs of weakness that must be concealed, especially in the case of men.
We learn to feel and relate sexually and emotionally through narratives, constructed based on a narrative schema centered around the heterosexual, monogamous, young couple with reproductive intentions. This schema has been repeated for centuries, even though the names and faces change. By sublimating this type of relationship, we've reduced the concept of love to a story of boy-meets-girl, boy-saves-girl, boy-gets-girl. All happy endings are the same: they end with a wedding as the symbolic day where love triumphs... and it's clear why they don't tell us what comes after the wedding.
Not only in romantic tales, but in all genres and formats, the protagonists of stories use violence to resolve conflicts and get what they want. That's why people love stories of romantic abduction: the man loves the princess so much that he must use violence to have her in his arms and possess her. Romantic kidnapping is a man's struggle against other men to obtain war booty: typically, it's the groom's struggle against the father's law. Young men kidnap brides because women are their fathers' property and then their husbands', although they don't see it as a transfer between two masters but as liberation: see Juliet bravely defying her father to join Romeo and become his wife.
Juliet becomes fulfilled as a woman and an adult through her struggle to merge with Romeo. This is the grand dream that keeps us all away from civic affairs and busy searching for our better half. Romantic love is the means to free oneself and save oneself: it's one of the most significant personal projects of our lives. It's no wonder, then, that this romantic self-absorption leaves us all feeling alone and deceived, disconnected from a world we dislike.
Other ways of loving are possible.
Love is a construction (cultural, social, political), and that's why, just as it is built, it can be deconstructed, reformed, eliminated, reconstructed, and transformed. Love is neither a deadly virus nor a disease that one must face alone: we are not condemned to suffer the spell of love that robs us of reason and sensibility, that steals hours of sleep from us, that makes us unhappy and miserable, that drives us mad and alienates us without us being able to avoid it.
I am convinced that love can be lived with joy, and it can be built from different perspectives. We can dismantle love to reinvent it: it is urgent to get to work, individually and collectively, because we have to counteract the disaster of the world we live in. To put an end to this world based on the exploitation of nature, animals, and people, and on the violence of all against all, we need a political, economic, social, affective, sexual, and cultural transformation.
We need a profound radical change in our ways of relating to people, animals, nature, peoples, and countries. To achieve this, we need to create networks of solidarity and mutual aid, put an end to the culture of "every person for themselves," and work collectively to improve the lives of everyone.
We need to dismantle gender inequality in order to build relationships based on freedom, not on the need and selfish interest of each gender. We have to unlearn what it means to be a woman or a man, in order to be as we want without having to submit to the "gender norms" that impose a lifestyle, stereotypes, and roles on us, and lock us into an unchanging identity.
Depatriarchalizing love will allow us to love and care for each other on equal terms, without hierarchies, domination, and violence. Demystifying all our love stories will allow us to love each other just as we are. In order to dismantle patriarchal and capitalist romanticism, we must expand the concept of love to the entire community, without reducing it to just one person.
We have to tell each other different stories and invent other happy endings, showcase the diverse love and sexuality of the real world, build collective protagonism, and create characters capable of saving themselves, free from hegemonic masculinity or femininity.
It's necessary to tear down the old structures of dependency and invent new ways of relating based on solidarity, empathy, freedom, and social tenderness. This way, we can put an end to romantic wars, learn to come together and separate with affection, relate to everyone with love, and diversify our affections.
By loving each other well, we can put an end to phobias and social illnesses like sexism, misogyny, racism, xenophobia, homophobia, or classism. With the wars we wage against neighbors or coworkers, against the strange and the different... with more shared love, we'll have more tools to build a more peaceful and livable world.
To learn, organize, celebrate, and collectively transform the world we inhabit, we need a lot of genuine love: it's a political matter that concerns us all, which is why it's so important to take the debate to the streets and squares, to congresses and academies, to assemblies and bars, to media outlets and public discussion spaces: we have to advocate for good treatment, the right to pleasure and joy, mutual respect, equal relationships, the expression of our emotions, the joy of living and building with more people.
We have to collectively rethink love, free it from the constraints that bind it, break with the norms of traditional romanticism and sexual double standards, dismantle the heterosexual regime, put an end to the sanctity of duos, and question all our taboos.
The challenge is exciting, because once we've analyzed and deconstructed love, we have to dive into rebuilding it anew without references or magical formulas, to try new paths of sexual and emotional relationships, to create other romanticisms that allow us to suffer less. And let us love each other more and better.
Other ways of loving are possible...
We must fearlessly embrace the Love Revolution.
Coral Herrera Gómez
Original article: Lo Romántico es Político
