Wanting More

The day after I posted my blog last week, I went to the mailbox and found two editions of the same weekly magazine—one a week late. Why now? The late one was graced with a photo featuring “Happily Married Man” and “Not His Wife” together in bed—top billing for the article entitled: “The Affairs of Men.” The on-time magazine chronicled a firestorm of letters in response. Here it was on the page: desire bashing 101.

At first the opposite seems to be true. In the article, the happily married male author shares his yuck feelings (May 28). He wants more sex. His wife doesn’t. He is frustrated.

In response, he takes the first sidetrack I described last week: he roams the landscape of evolutionary theory, hunting for reasons why he should get what he wants. Perhaps we are not wired for monogamy—women or men. Perhaps our ideal of life long passionate love is an historical anomaly, a physiological improbability, or a psychological impossibility. If so, he argues, then why couldn’t it be OK for him to have some extra-marital sex, release the tension, dump his surplus desire, and still preserve his happy marriage?

Readers responded from the other sidetrack: making pronouncements about what we, humans, should do. Readers scolded, calling him irresponsible, childish, and worthy of divorce. The overriding messages were those well-worn in our mind-over-body culture: sex and love are at odds. In marriage, sacrifice, compromise, and competition are inevitable. Self-control is the way to maximum pleasure.

Author and his readers: The two positions, seemingly so opposed, are not. They share the same attitude towards desire we have been unraveling: “it” is a physical urge that “we” must manage through some cocktail of indulgence and repression. There is no wisdom in desire.
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Shift to the perspective of bodily becoming—I am the movement that is making me. What if our desire for sex is a desire to giving and receiving a life enabling touch? What more is there to say? What kind of wisdom could the author’s yuck feelings possible contain?

To begin, he wants more. And what is that more?
He wants her. But not as object. He respects her. He loves her.
What he wants is for her to want him.
Or rather, he wants to be the person whom she wants.
Meaning: he wants to be the person who can touch her in a way that releases her into the present, into the fullness of her own desire for him, so that she can touch him as he wants and needs to be touched.
But he can’t and he isn’t. Hence his frustration.

It is this dissatisfaction that prompts him to consider outlets outside of the relationship. Yet even then, the outlier alternative he proposes is less than palatable to him. When his wife responds: “Sure, and I’ll be out Wednesday night,” suddenly the idea is not so compelling. It is obvious that the problem is not her lack of desire.

What turns him from her, then, is not his respect for her. What turns him away is fear. His fear of not being enough—not desirable enough, not good enough--his fear of not having enough.

When it gets right down to it, no amount of extramarital flinging is going to help, even though he imagines it might. For he is, in that moment, choosing to live in fear, not love. Opting out of relationship while pretending to stay in. Pitting himself against himself. Satisfaction will elude.

But is the only alternative to grin and bear it? No. It is possible to trust the wisdom in desire—the wisdom that wants more.

How? (Breathe to move, move to breathe.)

For one, it involves realizing that desire is not the problem—not his surplus, not her lack. The shapes of dissatisfaction and resistance are what the two partners are creating. The partners in this case, and most cases, are perfect mirrors of one another. Neither is content; both want more. And they both want more of the same thing—more of the touch that will enable them to release into the fullness of themselves. The fullness of their love for one another.

It is not about sex. It is about learning to give and receive a life enabling touch.

Second, it is realizing that this touch can occur on any register, within any span or our sensory potential—emotional, physical, intellectual, spiritual. The touch we need in any given moment has no set source or destination. No given point of contact. Its coordinates will change from moment to moment, day to day. In one moment it could mean sharing a concern; in another, taking a walk, working together on a project of mutual interest, or helping out with the housework. It involves seeing and being seen by another human as a whole human.

This is the challenge, the adventure, the exquisite, transformational, liberating work of being in a relationship. It is not about finding the fail-safe technique to pacify, but about getting to know another human. It is not about figuring out a list of likes and dislikes, but being a part of another person’s becoming. It is not about “talking” versus “doing it,” but about realizing the potential for pleasure in every moment of our living that desire senses is possible.

The challenge, then, is to be vulnerable. It is to be honest about what we are feeling. It is to ask for what we want in the faith that the other can give. It is to hear what our partners ask of us as the information we need to succeed in learning to give to them.

I have to say it again. That we do or don’t feel like having sex is not a problem. It’s not the issue. The issue is how do two people develop the ability to connect with one another in the moment wherever they are, however they are feeling, greeting our patterns of resistance and yearning as opportunities to go deeper in knowing each other.

Desire guides us to do the work of opening to one another that pleasure in relationship demands.
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I’ve been searching for metaphors to try to animate the various view of desire.

One thought for the mind over body perception is this: desire is something like a butterfly, a flirting fluttering perpetual quest for the ultimate nectar. Lifting its wings from flower to flower, the butterfly hovers in the light, skipping over obstacles, never if ever touching the ground. It is all about its own pleasure, never satisfied, always on the move.

But when I try to come up with an image that honors the wisdom in desire, all I can think of is a bulldozer (with apologies to my two year old). Or rather, two bulldozers, facing each other. As a mutual desire draws partners close, each pushes a larger and larger pile of dirt. When they get close enough, the dirt forms a wall between them. This wall, created by desire itself, is made up of all of the possible feelings and hurts, angers and resentments, the misreadings and misconceptions of our own desiring, that hinder us from opening to one another. It is the more we want, the more we believe the relationship has to offer, the more we have to give, the more we want to heal.

However, if we rev our engines long enough, unable to fly over, around, or through the wall, we run out of gas. One or the other or both turns the motor off. Partners agree to settle into the current proximity, with whatever arm’s length connection is possible.

However, the pressure of desire can also transform that dirt into a bridge—an opportunity to cross over to one another, and allow the love we share to grow stronger than the pain and fear that separates us. In this case, desire, in its frustration, is what motivates us to deal with the dirt—to free ourselves from what holds us back in all areas of our lives. Here, the metaphor surely breaks down.

Do you have a better one?

Next week: More (and the) Cycle of Breaths