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I’m on holiday in New York with my friend, let’s call her Emily, and she’s absolutely cleaning up. We’ve only been there a matter of days when she finds herself on a date that finishes with a lock-in at a wine bar. Another night, she goes back home with a girl we meet in a club and they have sex on the roof of her penthouse apartment, the lights of the city twinkling underneath them.
One evening, Emily and I are sat in the kitchen while she tells me all the juicy details of another encounter: the scruffy chihuahua Cookie yapping at her feet when they came back to the flat, the park they went to the morning after where there were turtles bathing in the pond. She pauses, sensing my envy.
“What about that guy?” she asks me.
I’ve downloaded Hinge and have been talking to some people, him most of all. Earlier in the week he’d invited us to a house party but we’d agreed it was too high-risk to dedicate a Friday night to a stranger. After that he was busy most of the time.
“He’s kind of rude,” I say, laughing.
Emily takes my phone from me and reads the messages. When I said I couldn’t do Thursday because of my friend’s birthday, he said that she should cancel the dinner. He didn’t ask many questions.
“You deserve to date someone who actually wants to date you,” she affirms and, as she says it, I realize how easy it has been for me to slip into the same pattern I’ve been trying to fight for a while now: fancying people who don’t fancy me, looking for the hardest option and convincing myself that’s the right one.
Emily heads out to a comedy night but I’m feeling pretty drained so I make a big salad, because I can’t remember the last time I ate a vegetable, and then head to bed. I want to blame men for being rubbish, when in reality I just tend to pick the rubbish ones. I’d had other options—an older guy wanted to take me out for dinner. Another laughed when I replied to one of his pictures saying he looked like that meme of Robert Pattinson looking awkward in the kitchen. In both instances I’d sent a couple of messages and then I’d ignored them.
Just being aware of your own patterns makes you more likely to challenge your actions. When you know you’re only pining for someone because your brain has decided that their disinterest makes the pursuit of their love more valuable, you stop wanting them quite so much. And there are other things you can do to change what you find attractive.
I remember an essay in Amia Srinivasan’s The Right to Sex that really resonated with me. According to her, the things we desire aren’t something we’re born with, they’re shaped by the society we live in. We’re told to fancy certain genders, body types, races, and, rather than just accepting this, we have a responsibility to interrogate and disrupt those tendencies. To “look at bodies, our own and others, and allow ourselves to feel admiration, appreciation, want, where politics says we should not.”
Srinivasan mentions an email she received in response to an essay she wrote. It’s from a gay man whose husband is “a large fat man.” The emailer emphasizes that he loves his husband deeply and has a satisfying sex life with him, but explains that he has to “work, deliberately and consciously, to let him be sexy, if that makes sense.” The emailer goes on to say that “while we cannot alter what does and does not turn us on, we can, on the one hand, displace what might be getting in the way of erotic excitement and on the other teach ourselves to eroticize what is happening in front of us during sex.”
Srinivasan is referring to politics and I’m talking about psychology, but the idea that desire is something you can change still makes sense in this context. We need to, in her words, “ask ourselves what we want, why we want it, and what it is we want to want.”
On the New York trip, I began to explore what it’s like to cultivate attraction in different places, to identify responsiveness and communication as grown-up tendencies, a sign that someone knows what they want and how to get it. I try to start viewing people’s vulnerability and openness as brave, even if saying that out loud makes me sound like an Instagram graphic. I try to let myself be loved in the way my friends love me: for the eyeliners that fall out of my bag and the stupid things I say.
I get back home from New York and sleep for so long that when I wake up my mouth feels sticky. I watch more of the stupid Viking series I’ve become obsessed with. I run an ice roller over my face to try and get rid of the puffiness because I’m going to Cardiff to see Beyonce.
I declare to my flatmates, although I’m not sure if it’s true yet or not, that “I want to be adored.” I want to feel someone solid as a rock next to me, leaning my head over to rest on their shoulder.
On the train to Wales, a guy who I used to know likes a picture of me and it gives me butterflies. I instantly take it as a sign. I know deep down it doesn’t actually mean anything, so I ask my friend Moya how to get over it. She gives me the following advice:
- Imagine he feels towards you the way you do about people you’re ambivalent about but occasionally give a like.
- Tell yourself over and over that he’s happy without you.
Those are the paths towards acceptance, she says. It doesn’t really matter what he actually feels because A) we don’t know and B) it’s irrelevant. If we can fantasize ourselves into something, we can fantasize ourselves out of it.
It feels like a big thing, letting go of all of the stories I tell myself, like that one day this guy will turn around and run after me, like they do in rom-coms, to stop me getting on a plane. I need to remind myself that they’re just men and often they’re ones who are good but not good for me; nice, harmless, friendly men who I can have polite catch-ups with instead of plotting who I’ll make out with in front of them in order to get them to come running back.
At night, before I fall asleep, I replace my fantasies with something far away from the realms of my experience. I imagine I’m a Viking from that show I like—until I start lusting after Vikings who go off to war instead of talking about their feelings. No Vikings for me either. In a way it’s like I’m taking off my rose-tinted lenses. But maybe that’s good; maybe that means the dreams will start to take place outside of my head and in the real world. Maybe, next time, I’ll be the one on the roof.