The Radical Act of Decolonizing Love
Love is supposed to be humanity’s most universal experience, yet somehow it’s also one of its most policed. Everyone has an opinion on what love should look like. Hollywood, your grandmother, the church, even that one life coach who thinks “self-love” means buying her course for $999.
Add to that a century of films, Sex & the City re-runs, dating apps marketing humans like bananas, and porn setting the tone for intimacy, and we’ve inherited a strange cocktail of scripts: romantic obsession, transactional sex, soulmates who arrive with orchestral soundtracks, and swiping until your thumb cramps. If we’re not careful, we start mistaking all this programming for love itself.
When I talk about decolonizing love, I mean throwing these scripts in the recycling bin (where they’ll probably still pollute the planet for another hundred years) and asking: what if love were actually free? And I don’t mean “free” in the neoliberal sense of unlimited trials on Hinge. I mean free from systems that have taught us to shrink, contort, and police our ways of connecting. Free from patriarchy, colonialism, and white supremacy—all of which have made love look suspiciously like unpaid labor, control, or a status and beauty contest judged by people who don’t even like you.
Historically, “romantic love” is quite new. For most of human history, marriage was less romantic and more practical, less about soulmates and more about social survival. A deal to secure property, politics, or inheritance. Romantic longing existed, of course (think medieval troubadours singing about unattainable muses) but it wasn’t the foundation of marriage. Speaking of Europe: Only in the 18th century did Western societies start treating personal choice and passion as legitimate reasons to marry.
Let’s talk patriarchy. It’s an old dinosaur—still alive and well. Older than colonialism. Think of it as humanity’s longest-running, annoying reality show, still airing despite terrible reviews. It began as a way to control resources, inheritance, and women’s bodies. Long before European ships colonized the planet, men had already colonized women. Entire social structures were built to ensure men owned property, lineage, and reproduction. Love became something like a business contract: you provide heirs and unpaid domestic work, I provide “protection” (mostly from dangers created by men in the first place).
But patriarchy wasn’t everywhere. Many Indigenous societies across Africa, Asia, the Americas, the Pacific, so-called Australia, and the Subarctic were matrilineal, egalitarian, or organized around communal forms of care, where kinship, love, and gender roles were flexible and not rigidly defined by patriarchal norms. That diversity of models matters, because it shows patriarchy is not ‘human nature’ but one particular system—one that learned to spread itself like a stubborn weed.
Colonialism took that bitter weed and planted it everywhere. Colonizers didn’t just seize land, they seized imaginations. They exported rigid family structures, gender binaries, and their narrow idea of “civilized love” to the societies they conquered. Indigenous cultures with gender fluidity, communal parenting, or sacred non-binary roles were dismissed as “barbaric” and forcibly erased. What replaced them was the European nuclear family: man, woman, child, property. Essentially, patriarchy with guns and Bibles.
Then white supremacy added its own twist, sneaking into our desires and bodies. It decided who counted as “beautiful” or “worthy of love,” always measured against Eurocentric ideals. If you’re Black or Brown, you’ve probably felt this pressure to straighten your hair, lighten your skin, or wonder if your body could ever be seen as lovable in a world that equates beauty with whiteness. And even when desire comes, it often carries the stench of fetishization: the creepy thrill of someone treating you not as a person, but as a type, an “experience.” Nothing says romance like realizing you’re somebody’s anthropology project.
Which brings us to the myth of “the one,” the crown jewel of Western love mythology. Sold through fairy tales, wedding industries, and endless Hollywood nonsense, it tells us that a single romantic partner (preferably heterosexual, monogamous, and sealed with a mortgage) is the pinnacle of human connection. Friendships, community, chosen families… cute, but secondary. And so many people exhaust themselves chasing a perfect soulmate when, really, they’ve just been conditioned to believe their wholeness lies outside themselves. What if it doesn’t? What if friendship is love? What if raising a child with friends or community is as valid, if not richer, than locking yourself into a contract with someone you stopped liking twenty years ago? Why do we applaud lifelong endurance of loveless marriages while side-eyeing unconventional forms of care? The myth of “the one” doesn´t feel very natural for many. Perhaps patriarchy’s oldest and slyest trick.
And this is where capitalism quietly thrives—not just by selling things, but by shaping how we imagine love. Dating apps, beauty brands, weddings, Victoria’s Secret—they convince us that love equals desirability, and that it can be bought: the perfect body, the curated image, the relentless effort to be wanted. Hollywood romance, porn, and endless media narratives set impossible standards, teaching us we are never enough. Desire becomes a commodity, love feels like something we must earn or purchase, and we chase a dream that is unreal for most of us… breeding impossible expectations and chronic dissatisfaction. Insecurity drives consumption, and consumption fuels capitalism and the illusion that love equals desirability—while the system profits whether we find love or not.
So where do we go from here? Maybe by practicing what systems of domination have always feared most: honesty. Decolonizing love isn’t about inventing some perfect utopia. It’s about refusing to be boxed in by scripts designed to control us. It’s about expanding the definition of love beyond the narrowness of romance and recognizing its forms everywhere: platonic, communal, erotic, spiritual, self-directed.
We need to begin imagining (and reimagining) how we want to love, to be playful and creative in the ways we perceive it, and to open our hearts to possibilities we may never have considered. This isn’t easy, and it isn’t linear. It’s a process of discovering truer versions of love, ones that reflect our nature more fully, freed from the narrow stories imposed by oppressive systems.
Perhaps that is the point: to love as though we’ve already stepped beyond the scripts. To love as if liberation isn’t a distant dream, but something we are already living, in the ways we show up for each other.
If this resonated with you, moved you, or made you pause and reflect – consider this your cue. I’ve set up a virtual tip jar via Buy Me a Coffee. No monthly commitments, no strings, no memberships required.
Your sweet kindness helps keep the thoughts flowing, the energy exchange intact, and the glow of my inner goddess alive. It won’t fix capitalism, but it might buy me five minutes of joy (or at least a cortado).
Gracias. Thank you. Jërëjëf. Merci. Obrigada. Danke. Arigatō. Medaase. Grazie. Hvala. Tack. Asante. Shukran. Teşekkürler. Dziękuję.
