While love has been represented variously in Western cultures, it has received a predominantly positive press. Unrequited love and love gone wrong may cause pain, and early-stage love may mimic a certain delirium or perform a particular madness, but, in general, love in all its forms is perceived as a good associated with intimacy, romance, family and friendship, and ultimately with fulfilment and happiness. Yet, as Simone de Beauvoir suggests in The Second Sex, inequality can create distortions that destroy the benefits of love, turning women into slaves and tyrants desperately seeking the recognition and love of men. Men, for their part, seek an impossible object who retains her allure and mystery by maintaining an aloof distance and independence yet also and paradoxically succumbs to his every desire, acquiesces to his views, and satisfies all his needs. Beauvoir nevertheless asserts the possibility of an authentic and reciprocal love between equals in which each would recognise, fulfil and sustain the other.

The French Antillean psychoanalyst, philosopher and Algerian anticolonialist revolutionary, Frantz Fanon, expresses a similar disquiet in relation to interracial love. In the colonial context the black woman and man, Fanon writes, desires the economically, socially and politically privileged subjectivity of the white. Black men may desire white women, as only they are able to confer, through recognition, a human subjectivity. Black women may desire white men for the economic security and racial privileges they can bestow. In colonised societies where only whiteness is recognised, rewarded, and respected, it is unsurprising that whiteness may be sought and desired.