Anthropologists have long explored the forms of governability and the projects of subjectivation arising from national modernizing projects, and more recently ‘globalization’, in the Middle East and North Africa. Yet the ways in which people in flash and bones imagine their lives and craft themselves under local articulations of market liberalization and globalized patterns of consumption, transnational migration and media technology, require further scrutiny. Drawn upon ethnographic research, my paper investigates the notions of ‘love’ and ‘intimacy’ circulating among young women in a boom town of the Tadla Plain (Moroccan Middle-Atlas). Specifically, it focuses on the everyday practices through which they craft their sense of self by negotiating conflicting subject positions and romantic imaginaries. The narratives of the young women I worked with interweave discourses on ‘love’ and social change, thus revealing the complexity and the ambivalence of their life expectations. While ‘love’ has become a widespread idiom among educated young women to talk about their liaisons and to fantasize about their conjugal life, often the dream of romantic love remains unrealized. By engaging with various discourses on love not only do young women contest ‘traditional’ marriage practices and the ‘backward mentality’ of men writ large, but also they reflect upon the ways in which love, violence and power entangle within their intimate relationships. Meanwhile, they find themselves involved in different notions of ‘modernity’ which illuminate the competing gender politics and forms of subjectivity available in the society they live in. By and large, young women are caught up between powerful and conflicting global-local forces which endeavor to steer social change in different directions. On the one hand, the access to education, the labor market and transnational migration has provided young women with imaginative horizons and paths of self-fulfillment unthinkable for their mothers and grandmothers. On the other hand, Islamic reformism and mosque movements spread gender ideologies and trajectories of self-crafting that reframe the meaning of ‘modernity’ and of being a ‘modern subject’. In my paper, I focus on young women’s expressions on ambivalence to shed light on the contradictory aspirations and desires which inhabit their lives. In doing so, I aim to provide a deeper insight into the complexity of their personal trajectories as well as to emphasize the multiple hegemonic discourses that mould intimate dimensions of their existence in a specific historical, political and social context.