Non-monogamy is not the same as fucking around, and neither of those things are essential to freedom in love. The idea of ‘free love’ has become bastardised by post-hippy clichés, by the enduring image of 1960s counterculture chauvinists with open shirts and flowers in their hair trying to wheedle women into bed without worrying about commitment. That’s not what free love means. Free love is love that is not co-opted or coerced, love that is not mutually oppressive, love that is not another word for work, duty and conformity.
If we want love to be free, and if we want women to be free, we have to refuse to define ourselves by romantic love, by Love™, or lack of it. The power of the neoliberal notion of romantic love is such that it is almost a century since feminists routinely questioned its omnipotence, but today’s growing girls of every age might do well to recall the words of Alexandra Kollontai: