OUR BAND COULD BE YOUR WIFE #15 - THE DESIRE QUESTION
A Valentine's Day newsletter about romanticizing everything
Recently, culture writer Daisy Alioto posed a question to over 60 people: Is it better to desire or to be desired?
After mulling it over for a few days (the question, not my decision, I’d wasted no time making up my mind—we’ll get to that in a minute) I asked five friends. They were, like most of the people that Alioto surveyed, writers. Three were novelists, two were poets. All of them were Team To Desire. I was outnumbered.
My initial reaction to the question was something along the lines of:
Be desired. Are you fucking kidding me? It’s no brainer.
If you picked “to desire,” congratulations, how does it feel to be a winner? How does it feel to not only be LOVED and WANTED, but be so used to being LOVED and WANTED that you take it for granted? You’re like those millionaires who pay thousands of dollars to go on retreats where they have to do farm work and harvest their own water and shit, because wanting for nothing got too boring and now they need fabricated struggles to keep their lives interesting. You’re Kylie Jenner and Travis Scott buying their daughter a yellow school bus, y’know the kind that most of us grew up riding, the kind that smells like hot rubber and moldy applesauce? I bet you love escape rooms too, you sick fuck. I can lock myself in a room whenever I want, FOR FREE.
Desire? Oh, you mean the thing that, according to the Buddhists, is the root of all human suffering?
All I DO is desire. Literally. Aside from maybe breathing or sleeping or drinking water, desiring is probably the thing I do the most, and the latter two don’t even really count because I’m an insomniac who regularly forgets to drink water until I’m bloody from tearing the dry skin off my lips with my teeth. But you know what I somehow never forget to do? That’s right, desire. Desiring, to me, feels innate. It’s something I’ve always been able to do without even trying, but somehow it still feels like work. It’s sisyphean. The movements of desire are reflexive, but the muscle that I’m working out still feels the strain. And let me tell you, if it was a real workout, I’d be fucking RIPPED.
Desire or be desired? That’s like saying “Would you rather wait at a restaurant for a meal that never comes, your eyes glazing over to the tune of your hollow, grumbling stomach, or would you rather eat some delicious fucking food?” When I brought up this point during our spirited debate, one of my friends posed a similar question:
Them: What’s better—edging or cumming?
Me: Cumming, obviously! That’s like asking what’s better, Heaven or Purgatory.
Them: Oh, definitely Purgatory.
(I find it necessary to mention that this friend was one of the poets in the room)
I’ve always had more desire than I know what to do with, I don’t need more of it. Desire isn’t some novelty to me, it’s my job and I’m working overtime and barely making minimum wage. Being desired—now that’s a luxury. Being desired is a vacation. It’s a lovely little break from hour after hour in the hot, dark depths of the Desire Mines.
When I tried to plead my case to my friends on Team To Desire, I told them that my desire feels like heavy, overstuffed bags that I’m constantly carrying around. To be desired was for someone to come up to me and say “here, let me get that for you.” I’m begging the same question that Anne Carson did in The Glass Essay:
You remember too much
My mother said to me recently.
Why hold onto all that? And I said
Where can I put it down?
When I say I would rather be desired, I’m asking for somewhere to put all the excess. I’m asking for someone to match me, desire for desire. This desire isn’t always necessarily romantic or directed at a particular person, more a shapeless fog of wanting that surrounds me as I move through life. I can just as easily fall in love with smells or weather patterns or a shade of green or a guitar tone or a stupid joke or a cool-looking pebble or a really good sandwich. I’m just waiting for the day that the world will love me back so I can stop being so embarrassed by my massive and painfully obvious crush on it.
It’s Fiona Apple running her voice ragged at the bridge of “Daredevil,” barking “Seek me out! / Look at me! / Look at me! / Look at me! / I’m all the fishes in the sea!” and it’s Fiona Apple eight years later opening Fetch The Bolt Cutters with “I Want You To Love Me,” a song that’s about her crush on some guy, but also about her crush on the universe.
Yes, maybe my choice to be the reluctant but wholehearted captain of Team Be Desired is linked to the fact that about 98% of my crushes (in the predictable, non-universal sense) have been unrequited or the lifelong nagging notion that I’m undeserving of any love I might happen to receive, but it’s more than that. I believe that there’s value in desire for desire’s sake, and that even if you don’t act on it, desire itself is active, but desiring without getting anything in return gets old after a while. When I think of the Desire Question, I think of Lana Del Rey moan-singing “When’s it gonna be my turn?” And then I think of the chorus that she follows it up with: “Open me up / Tell me you like it / Fuck me to death / Love me until I love myself”
The desire I’m grasping at is an idealized one, one that implies that along with being desired, I’m being seen and understood and cared for, even though none of these things are guaranteed. I’ll admit that recently, I neglected one of the most important people in my life when she was going through a crisis, so caught up in all the things I wanted that I forgot about what she needed.
Not all desire is well-intentioned or constructive or even all that deep. Desiring someone can break them down just as easily as it can build them up. Last night while painting my nails a shade of cosmic glittering dark blue called “Scorpio Seduction”—I’m a simple woman and am not immune to O.P.I.’s astrology based marketing tactics and long-lasting shine—I ended up crying to Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Want To Have Fun,” which, if you really listen to the lyrics, is about a girl who can’t catch a fucking break. All she wants to do is enjoy her finite time on this earth but nobody takes her seriously and everyone thinks she’s a failure, and the boys who desire her, desire her like she’s property, not a person. I’m aware that this sounds very, “Baby’s First Gender Studies Lesson” and I promise you I’m not about to go on a tirade about the gender politics of a pop song from the 80s (albeit an incredibly moving, timeless, and iconic one, Ms. Lauper is truly one of the greatest to ever do it) but it did bring me back to one of the pro-To Desire arguments that kept coming up earlier that day. My friends/opponents all framed the Desire/Be Desired dichotomy as one in which the desirer is active and the desiree is passive. They claimed that there’s no agency in being desired. I volleyed back that while I agree the role of the desirer is an active one, so is that of the person being desired. What about the power that comes with holding someone else’s desire in your hands?
I don’t want this essay to come across as poor little me crying in a corner because no one loves me or wants to come to my party. I feel loved every day, by my family, by my longterm boyfriend with whom I’ve been lucky enough to build a life, by my friends near and far—some of whom were in the room when I posed the Desire Question. This is a relatively new occurrence, not the being loved, but the feeling loved. I’ve always had love in my life, but letting myself feel it hasn’t always come easily. Sometimes it still doesn’t. In some ways I find it easier to desire than to be desired—“easier” not meaning less strenuous, but more automatic. I picked Be Desired because I like the idea of an external desire that I can let wash over me, but historically I have not been particularly good at doing that without sputtering and kicking against the current; much like how sometimes if there’s a lull in a conversation I’m having, I’ll make up an excuse to leave, convinced that the person I’m talking to is sick of me, only to walk away worried that I’ve given them the implication that it’s me who’s sick of them. The reality is that even if someone sees me struggling to carry all my bags of desire and offers to help, I’ll still get the impulse to say “oh no, that’s okay, I got it.”
I think when I say I’d rather be desired than desire, what I actually want is to know how to let myself be desired in a way that feels easy. That I want being wanted to come as naturally to me as wanting does. I want to hand over the bags without protest. I want to be able to strike gold in the Desire Mines and feel entitled to it. I want to sit down to a meal at the Desire Bistro and dig in fists first, manners be damned, to lick my fingers and spill wine down my dress and not even care. Or better yet, I want my desire to be a home-cooked meal; I want arms around me as I stir the pot, or a hand hovering under a wooden spoon held to my lips and a voice saying “here, taste this and let me know if it needs anything,” and when we sit down to eat I want nothing to go to waste.
Real quick I want to link an essay from friend-of-the-newsletter and known Valentine’s Day enjoyer Elise:
And here is, as the title suggests, a cute, sexy, cool Valentine’s Day playlist, a kaleidoscope of matters of the heart. Whether you’re spending this holiday with friends, with a partner, or by yourself, I hope it helps you celebrate love in all its myriad forms:
Your friends are idiots. I am firmly and forever on Team Be Desired. Great writing, Grace.