Love is oft portrayed as effortless, euphoric and redemptive – the magical solution to conflict and the key to self-fulfilment. It is rendered glossy and weightless in films, advertising and pop cultural fantasies: an ecstatic collision of souls, a miraculous cure for loneliness, a feeling that simply happens. Yet this is not love – it is infatuation: the saccharine vanillin to real love’s vanilla. Infatuation is fleeting, aestheticised and commodified – a pleasant, sweet and unthreatening imitation of something far more complex and raw. Real love is earthy, bitter, fragrant – alive. It does not sweep us away in glitter and sparkles, but is chosen and returned to, wrestled with and unravelled. To love well is to persist in relation when things fall apart, to remain present to pain, and to hold complexity with intimacy and conviction. Real love is insurgent, demanding and achingly precious.
This essay argues that to love well in crisis is to reject the ornamental cultural fantasy of effortless infatuation and instead embrace the ethic of radical, relational love – one forged in grief, in vulnerability, in resistance. Drawing on lectures by Selma Dabbagh, Guilaine Kinouani, Yehudis Fletcher and Yasmin Gunaratnam – alongside the works of bell hooks, José Esteban Muñoz, Audre Lorde and Saidiya Hartman – it contends that love, when embodied with grit and integrity, is a transformative force of resistance, healing and reworlding. This love is a haunted ethic of attention, an affective force of refusal, and a deep, deliberate commitment to hope for ourselves and for one another.
Love as Bravery and Political Defiance
Salma Dabbagh explores love through the lived realities of Palestinian resistance, where love is not soft sentiment, but a political act of survival. In contexts shaped by occupation, surveillance and state violence, love emerges through defiance – through the audacity to care, to create and to remain human under dehumanising conditions. Rather than being ornamental or private, love becomes insurgent: a force that preserves memory, nurtures connection and fuels resistance (Dabbagh, 2025). Drawing from both legal and literary frameworks, Dabbagh positions solidarity as a political mode of love – one that resists erasure and insists on collective dignity.
This framing echoes bell hooks’ understanding of love as an ethic rooted in action rather than feeling (hooks, 2000). For both thinkers, love is chosen: a practice of accountability, presence and relational struggle. In this light, loving well in times of crisis becomes an intentional act of resistance. It is expressed in both grand gestures and quiet refusals – in protest chants that reverberate across ruins and in the slow, archival work of remembering what oppressive regimes would rather erase. Love here is not passive or romanticised, but sustained through risk, through repetition, through refusal. To love well, Dabbagh and hooks remind us, is to choose connection even in the most fractured of landscapes.
Love as Vulnerability and Liberation
Guilaine Kinouani foregrounds love as a relational force of liberation – grounded not in control or certainty, but in ethical openness and non-attachment. She positions love as the antidote to the dissociative logics of crisis: the numbing, withdrawing and depersonalising responses that allow violence, grief or injustice to be minimised or ignored (Kinouani, 2024). Instead of turning away, this form of love invites us to stay emotionally engaged, to hold space for discomfort, and to commit to the labour of remaining in relation. In doing so, it calls for ethical accountability – demanding that we feel with and through the world’s wounds, even when doing so risks implicating our own complicity.
Kinouani embraces love not as escape but as mourning – an ongoing, open refusal to treat rupture as final. She suggests that love can continue after loss, altered but enduring: marked by absence, yet still active. This affective resilience echoes José Esteban Muñoz’s utopian call for imagining new and better ways of being, where love is not nostalgic but a generative force for liberation (Muñoz, 2009). By staying with the pain of connection rather than retreating from it, Kinouani performs the very world-making Muñoz describes. Her work also deepens bell hooks’ vision of love as a political and transformative act (hooks, 2000). To love well in crisis, Kinouani argues, is not to remain untouched but to break open – to still choose to stay.
Love as Epistemic Justice and Narrative Refusal
Yehudis Fletcher reframes loves as a commitment to epistemic justice – an active refusal of the silencing and narrative control that often structure high-control communities. Drawing from her work with the Charedi, Fletcher highlights how gatekeeping mechanisms often protect the powerful by suppressing or discrediting the vulnerable (Fletcher, 2025). Within such systems, loving well becomes an act of resistance: it requires seeking out marginalised voices, interrogating whose stories are being told, and refusing to accept dominant narratives at face value. This form of love is attentive, disruptive and deeply political.
This ethics of listening aligns with Audre Lorde’s insistence that silence is never protection – it is complicity (Lorde, 1984). Fletcher’s framework argues that when love avoids confrontation, it reinforces the very harm it ought to challenge. Miranda Fricker’s concept of testimonial injustice further explains how marginalised individuals are denied credibility by these systems, resulting in harms that go beyond knowledge to strike at recognition itself (Fricker, 2007). In this light, love becomes more than empathy: it is an uncomfortable, necessary engagement with truths that destabilise power. Loving well, especially in times of crisis, involves amplifying fractured narratives and standing in fidelity with those whose voices the world prefers to erase.
Love in Death and the Ethics of Staying
Yasmin Gunaratnam turns to end-of-life care to illuminate a form of love that is neither redemptive nor solution-oriented, but profoundly relational. She presents care not merely as a response to distress, but as a practice of restoring connection and collective humanity in the face of death (Gunaratnam, 2025). In hospice contexts, this love takes the form of staying, withholding the urge to fix, and instead bearing witness to another’s final days. Through this framing, love is not about overcoming mortality, but about accompanying it. Drawing from the palliative ethics of Cicely Saunders, Gunaratnam emphasises the imperative to support not only peaceful dying, but meaningful life until the end
This quiet persistence echoes Lauren Berlant’s idea of intimacy as communicated through the subtlest of gestures – those small, often wordless acts that hold space when language and agency begin to slip away (Berlant, 1998). In such moments, love becomes deeply embodied: a held hand, a shared breath, a pause that signals presence. Saidiya Hartman expands this ethic into a broader political frame, describing care as a practice that counters systemic violence and sustains freedom (Hartman, 2008). In both hospice and society, love is not a cure – it is a commitment. To love well at the end of life is not to seek resolution, but to remain: to stay human, attentive and beside one another when all else falls away.
In the Wake, We Remain
What we are so often sold as love – effortless, euphoric, redemptive – is merely its vanillin mimicry: sweet but shallow, comforting but superficial. Real love resists this illusion. It is not ease but intensity, not spectacle but commitment. It does not simply arrive; it is chosen, returned to and fought with and fought for. Across the crises herein explored – from political resistance to epistemic silencing, from relational rupture to the intimacy of dying – love emerges not as escape, but as ethical entanglement that calls to our humanity. It is found not in fantasy but in refusal, in grief, in the wake of all that has fractured – and in the weathered, persistent hope that something more wondrous might yet take root.
To love well is to remain where there is no resolution, because love refuses to abandon what pain renders inconvenient. It is to challenge the powerful, to listen to the silenced, to mourn without retreat – and to choose relation again and again. Real love holds complexity, tethers us to one another, and insists that care be practised even when nothing can be repaired. It does not rescue – but it stays. Fierce and fragile, it remains with us in the ruins. To love well is thus not to escape the wreckage, but to build something beautiful in its shadow – insurgently, passionately, endlessly – because it is in the shadows that we become human.