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.
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