Rejecting Disposability: Decolonial Love in Capitalist Ruins

Varshini Balaji and Cecilia Gomez

Many, many, many conversations about the process of dating, red and green flags, the impossibility of finding “true love,” and affirmations that “your person” does indeed exist spill over in brunches, lunches, picnics hangs, and long existential phone calls with friends and family. We share story after (horror) story, commiserate, wallow, and wonder, subsequently returning to the seeming mundanity of our independent lives, reminding ourselves that life goes on. Somewhere in these capitalist ruins, many of us quietly contemplate the possibilities that are hidden within and underneath these ruins, but we don’t name them explicitly because we’re too afraid of being perceived as naive, delusional, or overly optimistic. Optimism in a dystopia is both frightening and simply unimaginable, rendering our dreams of connection altogether uncertain. And so we file away our hopes and desires for community, connection, partnerships, companionship, care, and the big L word…love—and return to the capitalist ruins and daydream in silence.

Conversations about connection are sharply juxtaposed with the abysmal realities of dating apps that are supposedly designed to offer a variety of “options” to help you find “the one.” To ‘optimize’ our experiences, we are presented with a choice to pay to match with seemingly more desirable or compatible people. Unsurprisingly, it’s hard not to feel like you’re another item in a large supermarket, walking down aisle after aisle of different “personality packages.” Arguments can be made in favor of dating apps, espousing sentiments of agency in how you portray yourself, the ease of swiping to meet a number of different kind of people that you might otherwise not encounter in everyday life, and reduced social pressure. Several moral, ethical, and political questions around the commodification of people, reduction of “love,” surveillance, and discrimination can also be raised. Let’s not forget—we’re now in an era of roster dating, where romantic prospects line up like tennis players playing Round 1 through the finals of a Grand Slam—some with clean backhands, others fumbling the serve, and yet all vying for a spot in the Final.

Dating apps simultaneously generate feelings of euphoria, connection, possibility, vulnerability, rejection, and fatigue. These apps elide place–based connections, thus opening possibilities for swiping at home, in the subway, at a club, and even in classrooms. The questions that are buried deep within the zeitgeist appear fairly simple yet are burdened with complexity: 1) What does it mean to connect and communicate with each other? 2) How do we do it? These questions blossom beyond dating contexts and surface conundrums about relationality, navigating the infamous loneliness epidemic, building and maintaining community, and learning to live in meaningful relation with one another.

Many of us find ourselves building relationships in this precise reality of a fast paced, scarcity minded, transactional, extractive, vacuous zero sum game.

Frequently, these conversations are often reduced to simple binaries: collectivist vs individualistic societies, abundance vs scarcity, or transformational vs transactional relationships and while these binaries are helpful entry points into these conversations, they often overlook prickly questions of care, obligation, relationality, and reciprocity that are nested within these binaries. In other words, how might we care for each other even (and especially) when it’s not “convenient”? What does it look like to ask for your needs as they come without placating or watering it down? Where does the sentiment of feeling like a “burden” live? In particular and with special emphasis, why does it take enormous social and political collapse to activate, pour into, and lean into our communities? How do we retain and magnify each other’s humanity?

The last few years have been punctuated by numerous forms of social, environmental, and political upheavals: the global and ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, ongoing genocide in Palestine, LA fires, Asheville floods, the collapse of higher education, and the disintegration of social safety nets across the world, among several other examples. These moments are emblematic of the many pillars that maintain the infrastructure of (neo)colonialism—disposability of people, extraction of resources, systemic violence, human supremacy, contesting the right to have rights, militarism, etc. Social collapses have also been intimately entangled and overlapped with personal crises: health, financial, partnerships, family, friends, and work oriented crises. Many of us have adopted and been socially conditioned to respond to moments of crises with a sentiment of “what next?,” in that, we’re closely attuned to the practical reality that life moves on and that the tentacles of empire are ruthless, generating a sense of apathy and alienation. There are no simple, straightforward, or easy answers to these complex and evolving issues, and yet, during crises, many of us return to our anchors: community, friends, and family. Let’s be real, when we think of community and community care, we’re not only talking about interpersonal relationships. We’re also talking about the political and social stakes present in community care. In other words, what does it really mean to be in accompaniment with one another?

Coming together and caring for each other is a radical rejection of capitalist tendencies and white supremacy culture that are designed to create conditions of isolation, separation, and scarcity. Capitalism’s extreme reliance on hyper individualism over interdependence, extraction over reciprocity, and self interest over mutual care erodes communal and interpersonal trust, commodifying human connection into an unattainable luxury instead of an essential component undergirding our collective existence. Investing in each other is a recognition of what anthropologist Marshall Sahlins calls the “mutuality of being.” Sahlins describes it as “persons who are members of one another, who participate intrinsically in each other’s existence.” For Sahlins, “mutuality of being” is a symbolic sense of belonging to one another and of being intimately involved in each other’s lives because that’s what friends, community, partners, and family do for each other. That’s what we owe each other. It’s simple! We do it because we owe each other respect, trust, radical honesty, moral integrity, and accountability (among others). When we say this, we’re not advocating or suggesting you compromise your boundaries, abandon discernment under the guise of connection, overextend yourself, or de-emphasize self-preservation. Quite the opposite, actually.

We’re all stitched together in the fabric of reality. We need each other. We owe it to ourselves to build a humanity where we don’t easily give up on each other or conveniently disengage from what isn’t in the here and now. Instead, we remain committed to practicing decolonial love and cultivating a humanity yet to come. Now, the big question that is probably circling your mind right now: “This all sounds lovely and enchanting, but seriously—what is decolonial love, and how do we meaningfully practice it in our real lives?”

We often return to bell hooks’ who reminds us: “To love well is a task in all meaningful relationships, not just romantic bonds.” Too easily, we have accepted the disposability of people and human connections. We want to take up hooks’ call in the most non-trivial way possible. Apart from the necessary and self-evident components (such as empathy, respect, communication), here are a few non-exhaustive tenets that guide our orientation to relationality:

1. Reciprocity: Reframing notions of care and love from an extractive approach to one that centers generosity, attunement, abundance, and a desire to give as much as receive.

2. Awareness of power dynamics: Recognizing and actively disrupting the covert and overt ways in which power operates interpersonally through identity, decision making, gender roles, resource distribution, or communication patterns.

3. Radical honesty: Engaging with the real, messy, confusing, and complex parts of each other by opening the portal of curiosity, seeing different situated perspectives, and lifting the burden of performing for acceptance or approval.

4. Integration and praxis: Moving beyond learning jargon and buzzwords to meaningfully integrating and practicing the values one espouses. In other words, minimizing the dissonance and disconnect between words and actions.

5. Moral integrity: Making good faith decisions in ways that are closely and deliberately aligned with one’s values and principles.

6. Disrupting the zero sum game: Challenging the simplistic and misguided notion that vulnerability and display of care creates a “winner-loser” binary based on who feels more deeply, who expresses unabashedly, or who goes first.

7. Accountability: Taking responsibility for one’s mistakes, making repairs, and connecting through crises by honoring and earnestly understanding each other’s needs, fears, hopes, concerns, and remaining committed to repairing the ruptures, fissures, and fractures in relationships.

8. Vulnerability and softness: Embracing the reality that true connection is built in and through the ever evolving process of expanding our capacity to be vulnerable and hold others’ vulnerability with care, consideration, and gentleness.

9. Trusting the community so they become trustworthy: Elements of risk and vulnerability are inherently embedded in the act of trusting someone and yet it is only by repeatedly placing one’s faith in people that we create the conditions for them to become trustworthy and reliable.

10. Collective liberation: Practicing love as an active force that deliberately and thoroughly challenges the (neo)colonial condition by investing in each other’s growth and capacity to imagine a liberatory future beyond our current reality.

There are ways to overly theorize and intellectualize many of the themes we’ve discussed in this piece (we know we’ve intellectualized it too!), disconnecting us from the radical unscriptedness of our world. We’re all going to mess up, and we may not always understand each other. A practice of decolonial love is aspirational—perhaps even tender in its hopefulness—but it is certainly a worthy pursuit to counter the isolation, alienation, darkness, neglect, and disillusionment that surround us.

The tapestry of the human experience is often perplexing, antithetical, and incomprehensible but what we do know is we all have a yearning and desire to be seen, to belong, to matter, and to mean something. Love, care, connection, and relationality are life sustaining forces. We can’t build a decolonial future unless we practice it in our interpersonal relationships. We owe it to ourselves and to each other to nurture hope, to have faith in humanity, to be in accompaniment with one another, and to center an ethic of care. Unsurprisingly, we find ourselves anchored in bell hooks’ wisdom: “When we choose to love, we choose to move against fear— against alienation and separation. The choice to love is a choice to connect—to find ourselves in the other” (All About Love).