Is is not human to want to be wanted? Love is commonly listed as a need for humanity along with food and shelter. The Beatles even claim that "Love is all you need." Love is beautiful and should be freely shared. Desire, on the other hand, is sinful and forced into privacy. Desire seems to complicate ideas of love and its necessary role in human life. Desire can exist legitimately in society only accompanied by the guise of love. Love has two feet to stand on. Desire, if not held in love's embrace, seems to be lying ready on its back.
The worst possible scenario is one that involves an unequal exchange of affection: a lover loves and desires their lovee, but the lovee does not or can not match that love (if they love at all) and/or the lovee does not or can not match that desire or the lovee is only interested in being loved and desired with no interest in reciprocity. Is love and desire as economic as described above?
Do love and desire only function if their is equality of exchange?
I want to be wanted. I desire to be desired. I love to be loved. Yet, without adhering to the economy of love, my wants and desires seem unnecessarily complicated. It is not that I do not respect or enjoy the company I find myself in with my random romances. I am eager to acquaint myself with others and explore the complexity of their individual humanity - get to know them, their minds and bodies, their way of life, their social behaviour etc... But I do not find it necessary, in this process of acquainting and exploring, to reciprocally love or want them in return. (Desire is integral in order to pursue sexual intimacy, which is always a requirement in my romantic relationships.) Yet, under the hegemony of this economy of love, I am forced to consider if my need to be needed is not a human need, but something pathological. Am I psychologically or emotionally abnormal to need to be needed? Or is this only deemed abnormal by a society that is ruled by marriage and monogamy? Can not I, as a healthy and responsible human being, be wanted and desired and loved by another, even if I do not reciprocate the same feelings with the same passion and intensity? Is there not other people whom enjoy wanting and desiring and loving just as I enjoy being wanted and desired and loved? Is it pathological to continually be involved in economically unequal romantic relationships?
Maybe I have little interest in wanting or loving these persons, because I know I have someone whom I want and desire; unfortunately this person can not at present offer me the company that I need, so I look elsewhere for actual physical companionship. Maybe, as a homosexual, I refuse to live in the cage of monogamy established by the tyranny of Christian marriage... Maybe I am willing to express the plurality and fractured nature of human existence through my love life...
Maybe this IS really a psychological and emotional pathology...
Here I am. It takes two to tango, but my dancing partner isn't around to twirl me about the dance floor. So I am looking for other partners who'll dance with me for a short while. I don't want to dance with any one person too long. I want to take advantage of my opportunity to dance briefly with everyone who is willing to dance with me. Yet, if everyone is looking for a partner for life and I am just looking to dance for a song or two, am I, until that happy day when my beloved and I will be re-united, destined to being dancing with myself?
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7 comments:
if you ask me, there is no such thing as unrequited love. (We've had this conversation before...) If someone loves you more than you love them, one of you is lying. To each other, to yourselves, I don't know. But I think it is impossible to love someone who doesn't love you. I guess someone can find you attractive even if you don't find him attractive, but if someone isn't attracted to me, I'm totally turned off, so I still think that's hard to accomplish. I think people are in love with ideas of others or certain types of relationships.
Either way, I think there are other people who just want to dance a bit until they find their partner. It seems to me (though I haven't seen you in a while--we may need to email more for actual details) that you find them all the time!
i like this blog.
But don’t we each have our own individual pathology? Aren’t the symptoms just individual behaviour? The scars just personality? The descriptions just diagnoses (guesses at best)?
We are all living out our own syndromes, messy and incurable. We just have to live with ourselves, so let’s all find someone (or a bunch of someones) who can ease the suffering and stoke the happier side-effects. And if we can’t, well, maybe that’s part of the disease: we’re better off on our own.
I don't know.
But life can't only be comprised of asking questions. Sometimes we have to answer them too. The people we share this life with certainly deserve them.
The people we share our lives with deserve honesty - or rather, the closest thing we've got with the information we have at the time. I'd rather hear "I don't know" than a falsehood, no matter how well meaning the falsehood is.
i think some of our dissatisfaction with love comes from the pursuit of defining it - and worrying that what we have, or don't have , or want or don't want, doesn't fit into what 'love' is supposed to be - making us feel as if we are missing something, or pining for something that might not exist... instead of just experiencing what does exist without trying to define.
Love doesn't have one face....it adapts for every culture, for every individual.
I think part of being young is dancing with different partners. It's how you learn what love might just mean to YOU.
and I think 'love' is a direct result of wanting to be wanted. You want someone to want you, desire you and eventually 'love' you. love is something that is created between people after the need to be wanted to has been achieved. from my experience, anyway. again, different for everyone.
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