Intimate Justice: A New Framework

"Justice is what love looks like in public." —Dr. Cornel West

I have been turning these beautiful and evocative words over in my mind since I first heard them, sometime in 2011. I turn them over, look at them sideways, invert them - something always eluding me. Two reasons come to mind for this elusiveness - one, the overall deficit of both justice and love in the world, and two, a personal struggle to identify "love" as I've known it as something that feels like justice.

In my years-long process of engaging with this idea, I have arrived at a related but different question: if justice is what love looks like in public, what does it look like in private?

To explore this question, let’s begin with the landscape of justice as it is currently framed in the U.S.

What is Justice?

A brief taxonomy of justice frameworks:

Criminal Justice. Represents a fundamental distortion of language. This phrasing conflates justice with retribution and punishment. In practice, criminal justice maintains carceral systems and is designed to perpetuate rather than interrupt cycles of harm.

Social Justice. Social justice seeks equal treatment under the law and fair, non-discriminatory access to basic rights and privileges in a society. This is about social equality under current systems but still begs the question - how can we achieve social equality in a society organized along principles of supremacy?

Reparative and Restorative Justice. Related but typically applied at different scale. Reparative seeks to ameliorate large scale harm brought about by generational inequality, and the legacies of human rights abuses within and between nations. Restorative is typically a model for making amends between individuals, an alternative to the approach that favors retribution and punishment.

Transformative Justice. Focused less on outcomes and more on systemic causes of distributed harm, the transformative justice framework acknowledges that harm within systems of manufactured inequality is by design. It seeks transformation of systems, not reform or repair—addressing causes not only symptoms. The most radical approach, literally ‘from the root’ (Latin: radix).

Defined as a framework for responding to violence, harm, and abuse, transformative justice points to the roots of social dysfunction and seeks to disrupt and transform. What lies at the root of every society and community? Our most intimate relationships: partnerships, parenting, friendships, workplaces, families.

Intimate Justice. The premise for a framework based on the idea that justice can be practiced in intimate spaces by centering dignity, pleasure, accountability, and agency in how we relate to ourselves and each other. It reveals how patterns of domination, violation, and oppression are internalized and reproduced in our closest relationships and offers practices to counter these patterns. This approach operates within our sphere of influence, remaining accessible even when larger struggles feel overwhelming. 

Personal Origins

Foundation: Childhood

I didn't grow up with the kind of love that feels like justice—love that would make Dr. West's quote make sense to me. My childhood was defined by two overlapping contexts: the hippie cult I was raised in, and my immediate family which was dominated by an abusive parent. The developmental experiences in both set the stage for my obsessive interest in power dynamics, and how people make meaning and relate to each other.

In the hippie cult the ethos for raising children was very hands-off and framed as empowering, as a show of respect for our autonomy. In practice, however, the impact was one of neglect and abandonment. I was under-supervised and over-exposed to adult material and themes. As all children do, I adapted to my environment. In retrospect I can see the anxiety that permeated my early life.

In the more immediate context of family, my dad preached anti-establishment ideals while parenting with an arbitrary, unearned authority. He engaged me in passionate debate on politics, spirituality, and social change while exhibiting an active disregard for my physical, emotional, and psychological safety and well-being. 

Scaffolding: Higher Education

I pursued higher education primarily as a pathway to escape these environments. The fact that it fit my personality and fed my voracious appetite for learning was a secondary blessing and ultimately liberating. 

I earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Meaning, Culture, and Change from a small liberal arts college in northern California. Soon after, in my early 20s, I moved to New Mexico. I completed coursework for a Master’s degree in Language Literacy & Socio-cultural Studies at the University of New Mexico, and made it most of the way through a master’s degree program in Counseling Psychology as well. These institutions and programs were unique and rigorous. They furthered my understanding of how hierarchical systems of power work socially and globally, how people make meaning, and the impact that cultural narrative has on shaping individual reality. 

Understanding and investigating these themes was meaningful to me, and they also provided a lens through which I could see my childhood experiences in the same contextual frameworks. Unequal power dynamics operate similarly across scales, from the intimate to the social—whether between a parent and his children or the state and its people. 

These frameworks would ultimately inform my work in a seemingly unrelated field—therapeutic sex and relationship coaching.

The Missing Curriculum

It is accepted wisdom that relationships require hard work.

But imagine for a moment attempting to read this essay without literacy skills. Even if it were partially familiar—maybe the letters are recognizable, a few words—reading and engaging this way would be extraordinarily hard work.

Now imagine that intimacy—relating of all kinds, emotional awareness, the ability to communicate across difference, and to navigate needs and limits—wasn’t assumed to come naturally, but was recognized as a learnable skill set, one acquired through deliberate transmission. 

Humans are wired for language acquisition, but language acquisition and literacy don't occur in a vacuum—they are modeled, taught, and practiced. As social animals we are also wired for connection, but in contrast, relational "literacy" isn't explicitly taught; it is implicitly modeled. The current landscape—littered with surface-level advice, tips and tricks, and awash in magical thinking—fails to develop genuine relational competency.

Patterns

Two examples of how dysfunctional dynamics show up in intimate contexts are the zero-sum game and misunderstanding the function of boundaries.

The Zero-Sum Game

The zero-sum game reproduces in relationships as the pervasive and unconscious belief that a gain in one area must inherently represent a loss in another. Sacrifice, compromise, and transactional negotiation are normalized and accepted as relational truth, wisdom even. This is scarcity framing. Even when navigated with good intention, the expectation is that we lose something in order for the other to gain; in order to gain something the other has to lose. 

Fighting to win is another manifestation of this pattern. When conflict arises, the drive to win (win what?) and to establish who is right, and who is to blame is one of the most common dynamics I see. The outcome of this kind of engagement rarely brings anything other than a temporary, anxious peace—a peace that only lasts until the next round kicks off.

Boundaries: The Fuck Me or Fuck You Paradox

Most of us orient to our own boundaries in one of two ways. One, we bypass ourselves and tolerate our boundaries being crossed, often because this was modeled as a way of showing love (think about saying no to someone you care about and you'll see what I mean). Two, we maintain rigid boundaries as a strategy for self-protection. Typically, the latter follows the former in an exhausting cycle—we tolerate until we can tolerate no more and previously porous boundaries become brittle and inflexible. The mistaken belief underpinning this behavioral swing is: in order to be connected to you, I have to disconnect from myself; in order to be connected to myself, I have to disconnect from you. Fuck me, fuck you. 

Dovetailing with zero-sum thinking, boundaries become binary math—with neither extreme actually supporting love or connection.

Principles

Justice in private looks like relationships organized around principles of dignity, pleasure, accountability, and agency. Dignity and pleasure are about our worth and well-being; accountability and agency are about how we move in the world and engage with one another.

Dignity 

The understanding that each of us is inherently worthy and that our needs, desires, gifts, and challenges all deserve respect. Honoring our own dignity and that of others pushes back against zero-sum thinking, the binary approach to boundaries, and establishes the context necessary for collaborative negotiation.

Pleasure 

Beyond meeting the basic needs of survival, a principle and ethic of pleasure is about the right to thrive. It includes access to and space for leisure, play, and creativity. Dignity and pleasure are not rewards that must be earned, regardless of the narratives we have internalized that whisper (or scream) otherwise. Both are vital.

Accountability 

Accountability begins with the recognition that we have impact—whether negative, positive, or neutral. We will make mistakes, fuck up, hurt and get hurt, and that doesn't make us bad people. With dignity intact, we can be accountable for our impact without veering into self-loathing over the mistakes or into arrogance when our influence is beneficial.

Agency 

Agency is the right and capacity to choose within real structural and relational limits. In relationships it is making intentional choices while considering ourselves and others. This mindset—choice made with awareness of limits—alters the landscape from one of sacrifice and compromise to one where we are empowered to explore creative solutions.

The Revolution is Relational

Intimate justice isn’t individual work, it is relational work, interpersonal and interdependent. The power of this framework rests in its accessibility. Our sphere of concern may extend well beyond our sphere of influence, but daily life and our closest relationships remain sites where we can always act and have impact.

As social realities influence our private lives, so too can our work in intimate spaces ripple out in the opposite direction. Collective work and intimate work inform each other. Whether we call it love or justice, the principles of dignity, pleasure, accountability, and agency can be practiced across the relational spectrum, from the intimate to the social.