Ole Liebl – Freunde lieben

Why we need to rethink friendship. Friendship and sex don't go together. That's what countless relationship guides, romantic movies and often our own environment say. Nevertheless, more and more people are looking for friends with benefits. Traditional family images and the ideal of one great love seem to be completely overloaded with expectations and demands. So is friendship plus just an attempt to escape from obsessive romance? Or does it not rather serve as a model for new ways of intimate relationships?
Ole Liebl looks at the development and practice of this unusual form of relationship. He examines its emotional and ethical conflicts as well as its utopian potential: Is there really no escape from the romantic norm and its claims to possession? Are our intimate relationships subject to mere market mechanisms? What sexist narratives shape our ideas of friendship and where do they come from? Is there a friendly eroticism? And in what ways do we allow ourselves to love our friends?
Radical, critical and visionary, Ole Liebl formulates a utopia of friendship and provides us with an overdue perspective on how we can think about friendship differently and find a fairer way of working together: self-empowering, taboo-free and deeply familiar.

The author
OLE LIEBL, born in 1992 in a village in Rhineland-Palatinate, studied philosophy and computer science at the TU and FU Berlin. On his channels on TikTok and Instagram, he explains various topics related to toxic masculinity, sexuality, gender and relationships from a queer-feminist and scientific perspective. Ole Liebl lives in Berlin and works in an LGBTIQ care facility.