Love Quote by Charlotte Bunch

America, in Charlotte Bunch's hands, isn’t a flag or a founding document. It’s a partner: charming, persuasive, and chronically unreliable. Calling the country "an unfaithful love" is a deliberate provocation because it refuses the usual patriotic framing where disappointment is a personal failing or a lack of gratitude. Instead, Bunch casts disenchantment as rational: you believed the promises because the promises were made to be believed.

The line lands with activist precision. It acknowledges the seduction of the American story - equality, freedom, opportunity - while insisting that seduction has a history of selective delivery. "Promises us more than we got" is quiet but scathing; it points to the gap between rhetorical abundance and lived scarcity. That "us" matters, too. Bunch’s feminism and human-rights work have always been about who gets counted when the nation tells its self-flattering myths. Women, queer people, people of color, the poor: groups invited to fall in love with the ideal, then told to wait their turn for the real.

The subtext is not cynicism for its own sake, but a strategy for staying politically awake. If America is a faithless lover, then loyalty becomes conditional: earned through accountability, not demanded through ritual. The metaphor also hints at the psychology of reform movements: people don’t keep organizing because they hate the country; they organize because they once believed it, and they refuse to be gaslit into calling betrayal "progress."