Questions about decolonizing love

Why decolonize love?

Colonialism did not only seize land and labor; it reshaped how people are taught to love. It imposed compulsory monogamy, broke extended kinship and communal care into the isolated nuclear family, and spread amatonormativity, the assumption that one exclusive romantic pair is the goal of every life. Alongside it came hierarchical thinking, a scarcity mindset around love and belonging, and transactional, ownership-based ideas of partnership. These were presented as natural and universal, but they functioned as tools of control: cutting people off from wider networks of support made communities easier to dominate and resistance harder to organize. Decolonizing love means seeing these patterns as inherited rather than inevitable, and rebuilding our relationships around consent, abundance, and community. Because colonizers reached into the most intimate parts of life to hold power, decolonizing our relationships, values, and mindsets is part of the work of liberation, not a distraction from it.

What has polyamory got to do with decolonizing love?

Polyamory is not the point of decolonizing love, but it is a useful doorway into it. By practicing abundant rather than scarce love, polyamory directly challenges the scarcity mindset and the rigid, exclusive structures that colonialism normalized. It surfaces the hierarchical, patriarchal, and possessive values embedded in mainstream relationships, such as ranking partners, treating a lover as property, and assuming one person should meet every need. Examining those assumptions opens a wider conversation about consent, autonomy, and how power moves inside intimacy. You do not have to be polyamorous to do this work. Monogamous people benefit from the same questions about ownership, jealousy, and communal care. Polyamory simply makes the inherited rules visible, because choosing more than one relationship forces you to negotiate openly what most people are taught to take for granted.

How was monogamy spread through colonialism?

European colonizers imposed monogamy to establish control and to secure clear inheritance of land, wealth, and power within male-dominated hierarchies. A single legal wife and legitimate heirs made property easy to track, tax, and pass down. Christian missionaries taught that lifelong monogamy was morally superior and cast Indigenous and African relational practices as sinful, while colonial governments criminalized plural marriage and dismissed kinship systems that did not fit the European model. Land titles, citizenship, and legal rights were often tied to monogamous, church-sanctioned unions, which pressured colonized people to abandon their own traditions in order to survive. Over generations, these laws and moral teachings hardened into the assumption that monogamy is simply natural. Recognizing that it was enforced rather than freely chosen is the first step in understanding compulsory monogamy as a colonial inheritance instead of a universal human default.

More answers