Since their forced displacement to Algeria in 1975, Sahrawi women in particular, have built and sustained the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic in refugee camps. Their extraordinary effort during the years in which most Sahrawi men combated in the Western Sahara against an invading Moroccan army (1975-1991) sees its continuation in the current post-cease fire period, because as Sahrawi men live in permanent movement in and out of the Republic for the purposes of income generating activities and secure livelihoods, it is mostly women who continue to sustain the resistance of the Sahrawi Republic through their everyday labour of political leadership, administration and domestic care. For the pending decolonization struggle of the Western Sahara, the revolutionary archetype of the Sahrawi munaḍila (female militant, although in Hassaniya it carries the broader meaning of “struggler” or “revolutionary”) has become emblematic of the Sahrawi nation in and of itself. In this paper I discuss the prevalent complaint of a “lack of romance in the desert” I encountered among Sahrawi youth during my eighteen months of fieldwork working with the National Union of Sahrawi Women in the Sahrawi Republic (2011-2013). How can romantic love serve as a window to understand larger social and political transformation? What is the place of love in revolutionary processes? Through an analysis of the location assigned to love during the early revolutionary period (1975-1991) as well as the transformations in marriage practices initiated during this period, I argue the lament of love’s absence articulates a critique of the dominant model of female empowerment in the Sahrawi Republic that is suggestive of the way in which the figure of the munaḍila is being renegotiated under the conditions of a prolonged UN-mediated peace-process in the region