Courtship is a three-act play. We begin with desire: the yearning, longing, dreaming, aching, hoping, speculating. It’s a whisper that beckons you in, like walking past a bakery and inhaling butter. Romance comes next: the heady honeymoon phase, more highs than lows, novelty overcoming everything, a giddy reality. Romance is a perfect meal at your perfect restaurant at the perfect time of year, the moonlight glowing in a perfectly clear midnight sky, the perfect kiss at the end of the night. Then, if you’re lucky, there is love. Steady but full of compromises. Lows too. A steady power that grows over time. You know the feeling even if you’ve ‘never been in love’. It’s the kind you get with family, friends that feel like family, and hopefully with yourself. It’s the meal you always return to.
I’ve been thinking about this ever since an email landed in my inbox just after midnight, the subject: is it better to desire, or be desired? The sender was Dirt, one of my favourite newsletters, and the email came with a poll to submit your own opinions on the matter. It felt like a trick question. I think that the ‘right’ answer is to take ownership of desire – to confidently want without needing to be wanted in return. Of course my truest answer in the deepest corners of my heart was whispering, ‘be desired’. I wondered what that said about me; I clicked the button and waited to be analysed.
It was comforting to know that 41.4% of participants felt the same as I did. That perhaps these people have also spent most of their lives desiring people in their own dreamworlds. Crushes made up most of my teenage years, then lust took up most of my twenties. After almost two decades of desiring, I now desire to be desired.
Weeks later, they sent a follow up email with anonymous responses. The narrative is obvious: desiring is active, a way to control a situation. To be desired is passive. And while there might be expectations created within this bubble of desire, its very definition allows us to live outside the realms of possibility, sometimes accepting that the desire might not translate into anything more than that hope, that yearning, that dream.
Desire is not really about having or accomplishing the thing we desire, because then desire would cease to exist. It’s a feeling and state of being that occurs only when we are in motion towards an ideal. It’s thrilling and hopeful and inspiring and dreamy and so telling of our own values of what’s important to us. I’d never want that ability to experience myself, or life, like that to be taken away.
Of course to be desired is infinitely more terrifying. You must relinquish control. You must allow yourself to be shaped in someone else’s head. You must accept that they will see you in a way you might not see yourself. You must be the potential.
The question – to desire or to be desired – is as abstract and conceptual as desire is itself. Desire is a hypothetical. An outline. An open door that no one has stepped through. It’s imaginary which is why it is infinite. In order to arrive at the next phase of courtship (romance), we must meet each other at the doorway of desire and find a way of stepping through, together. And isn’t that the fear? Whether you desire or are being desired, that it’s just one person opening the door that the other won’t want to walk through?
So how do we cross over that threshold? We have to be willing to accept that the fantasy might not match up to the reality; that the question we asked won’t be matched with the answer we get; that the desire we hold actually has nothing to do with the other person, and everything to do with ourselves.
My next question is, how much desire can we hold in our bodies? I know I wrote that desire is infinite, but we are not. Our bodies and our lives are finite. I sometimes worry that I have become so wrapped up in desire that it's inhibited my ability to be desired. To truly see another person, because the object is too distant, too blinding, too unattainable.
As I write this, a song I’ve never heard comes on.
So I don't let anyone too close / Or anyone too good looking / Nowhere near me after midnight / Because it always gets too desirable / And then I regret it / I have never been anyone's favourite person / Have you? / How does it feel? / I get addicted to skin and smell / But I know it's just cheap lust / And replaceable heads.
So poignant, Cat. Been thinking about this too. I think that perhaps part of the allure of desire is that it makes us, in that fleeting moment, feel like we can really “feel” love in a tactile manner.
I feel like desiring is much more terrifying, while being desired means you wield the power. I have a complicated relationship with desire because desiring makes me feel like I’m vulnerable. Very interesting question!