LOVE IS LIBERATING. It does not confine itself within the four corners of a home nor restricts itself to soft gestures of affection on Valentine’s Day. It spills into the streets, daring to question the systems that trample, restrict, and dehumanize all that we must care about.
More often than not, we seek love in comfort. Society has led us to believe that to love is a retreat to safety, behind cliché rom-coms and formulaic standards of what relationships should be. We have been taught to view it as a quiet compromise, reducing ourselves to curated social media posts and lighthearted gestures deemed “desirable” by many.
This focus on passivity and individual security reshapes our thinking by prompting us to look at love separated from its transformative purpose; ignoring the systemic rot that has, and will continue to erode our social and political institutions.
“At its core, love is political. Tenderness and warmth are directly tied to our motivations for confronting oppression and standing with those excluded and rendered invisible. The very act of loving deeply and loudly, then, becomes a conscious effort to demand a better future for each and every one of us.”
Yet, love is unsettling because it is freeing. To love freely is to act in a way that unsettles and rattles the status quo. We speak not from comfort but from a source potent enough to stand on its own—a conviction that some things are too vital to leave to the mercy of injustice.
Beyond intimacy, we find that love liberates in marginalized communities. The fight for recognition, safe spaces, and visibility—among LGBTQ+ communities and Indigenous Peoples (IP)—remains a collective struggle that demands empathy and asks us to see and respond to the struggles of others as if they were our own.
At its core, love is political. Tenderness and warmth are directly tied to our motivations for confronting oppression and standing with those and rendered invisible. The very act of loving deeply and loudly, then, becomes a conscious effort to demand a better future for each and every one of us.
At a time where the concept of love has become pre-packaged into templates readily available, liberation exists to resist such commodification. Often, we find our expectations tempered by the reality of inconvenience and uncertainity, breaking the illusion of love spoonfed through years of conditioning.
Nonetheless, we find that love exists in acts of support and solidarity among friends, family, and community; free from all the insistence of control and conformity.
Email me at thebedan_editorinchief@sanbeda.edu.ph