Well, I got halfway through writing a short story and realized, with the help of a friend, that it was mostly shit. This always depresses me. Especially 4,000 words in. However…it was crap. So I’m going to have to suck it up.
In the meantime, I’ve noticed recently that I’ve been running into a lot of twitter friends suffering ennui. Well, actually, not from ennui, but I thought that sounded good.
Really, what we’re talking about here is desiring what cannot be had. This can, of course, take the form of unrequited love, and often does. But there are more twisted and complicated versions of the ‘desiring the unobtainable’ syndrome, too. The desire may be mutual, but any possible consummation of it may be either socially or physically impossible. More complicated still, you can be absolutely sick with desire for someone or something you know is just going to be very bad for you. Consequently, you decide not to attempt consummation. That doesn’t lessen the desire any. It doesn’t quench the fire or make the yearning any easier to bear. In fact, I’d have to say it’s worse, because it’s entirely self-inflicted.
Some nifty strategies for purging the yearning
1. First and foremost, when it comes to unrequited love, it’s pretty easy. I call this the ‘well, then, fuck you’ strategy. You need to have a relatively healthy ego to do this one. It involves convincing yourself that the person who doesn’t return your affection must be more of an idiot than you thought because, if they weren’t, they’d love you back.
2. Another strategy, for those of us with slightly more eroded egos is the ‘he/she/it is better off without me‘ method. This is not as satisfying as #1 and involves a few months of feeling nauseatingly emo. But basically, you reason that since you really do love them, and you acknowledge that you’re a fucked up loser anyway, the person is really far better off loving someone else.
3. The third strategy is more Buddhist, but does follow closely on #2. All pain, as the Buddha said, is desire. If you can free yourself of desire, you can free yourself of pain. Personally, I can’t manage this one and I find it fucks with my motivation to eat meals.
4. Observe and critique. This method is akin to #1, but a little more artful, less adolescent and, I find, really works a treat. The trick is to observe the object of your desire without interacting with them and force yourself to critically evaluate everything they do or say. If they’re human, they are inevitably going to say or do something really stupid. Now, if you are too busy interacting with them, you won’t notice this, and if you do, you may easily forgive it. But if you can obtain some distance, you can build up a list of pretty unacceptable character flaws that will, once you survey it for a couple of weeks, cause you to stop yearning for them completely. The key, at this point, is to not go overboard and start to actively hate them. This takes up almost as much energy as loving them and it’s way worse for your karma.
All of the above methods are useful for cases of classic, unrequited love. But what about the other types?
He’s married / she’s married / one of you is incarcerated.
This needs to be stated right up front. There’s no action that can result in a happy ending to this story; it always ends in tears for someone. Firstly, there is no guarantee that consummation of this love is going to work out. And what’s worse, there is really no way of knowing if the fact that the object of your desire is unobtainable is actually feeding your desire – which, believe me, is a very great possibility. The forbidden always seems a lot juicier. Basically, you either have to agree to consummate it and see what happens, or find the wherewithal to cut it off and walk away. At least if you follow the first path, you won’t spend the rest of your life haunted by ‘what ifs’. However, you do have to realize that you’re probably going to hurt some innocent bystanders in the process of finding out. All I can recommend is that, if you’re going to be a selfish cunt, the least you can do is be discreet – at least until you find out whether you weren’t just hankering for some forbidden fruit.
Sublimating Desire
No matter what anyone says about the Catholic church, you can’t run a large organization for long and be a total idiot. Sublimating or redirecting the energy that feeds your desire is a classic strategy with a long history. Some people take up sports. Some people take up self-flagellation. None of those have ever worked for me. If they work for you, you’re lucky. However, beware that some sublimation methods are not very nice. The Spanish Inquisition comes to mind. Just because you can’t have what you want, doesn’t mean no one else should have it. Any kind of fundamentalist religious practice should, in my opinion, be avoided. There’s a fine line between lust and zealotry.
Redefine your understanding of consummation
This is a good working model for both unrequited and forbidden love. We’re brought up to believe that there is a model for what people do once they’re in love. The most traditional version of this involves getting together with your beloved, marrying, breeding and undertaking a mortgage. But, if you can free yourself from that paradigm, there are really a lot of ways to love someone. In fact, you are absolutely free to create wholly new paradigms. For instance, who says that taking the image of someone to bed with you and masturbating isn’t just as legitimate an act of love as actually fucking them? The only reason we consider this a poor substitute is because we’re brainwashed into it. Well, that and the hardwired urge to perpetuate the species. But hey, that’s not why you wanted to fuck them anyway, was it?
The Greeks had interesting ideas about love in its different forms: agápe, éros, philÃa, and storgÄ“. (for more on this, see Wikipedia) Now, obviously, I’ve been discussing éros or erotic love here. But it is quite possible to morph it into agápe or virtuous love. If one could just let go of the fixation with fucking someone, the possibilities for how one might then continue a relationship really open up. Personally, I have managed to move from wanting desperately to fuck someone, to wanting to simply smell them. But that’s as far as I’ve managed to shift it.
Fermentation
This is really the hardest strategy to explain. It’s the one I practice and, I should state up front, not always successfully. However, it’s been workable for long stretches at a time, and has also had some nice fringe benefits.
1. Firstly, just admit it. You desire: you want, you lust, you yearn, you burn. It hurts.
2. The object of your affection may or may not reciprocate. This doesn’t matter – in fact, although reciprocation may be nice, but it’s totally immaterial. You’re going to love this person whether they love you back or not. Let that sit with you for a while. It does take a while, but actually, it becomes easier to accept than you think.
3. Find some form of creative practice that will allow you to tell the story of this love. It can be abstract, like painting or photography, or very concrete like writing. The point is, you take this story and re-write, re-paint it, re-compose it over and over again. Use it like a theme. Create a whole bunch of endings – some good, some bad, some happy, some sad. It will help you start seeing the desire as a process instead of a road with an end.
4. Of course, the natural course of desire is release, but what if it’s just not possible to release it? The other option is to sort of learn to feel it coursing through your system, invading all your cells, being contained within your body. Think of it as an intoxicant. You’ll start to notice that, after a while, you stop thinking of it as something that seeks release and realize it’s something that feeds you and lives in you. And the feeling of it actually does change over time. It starts to grow some really odd and interesting things. At first you walk around feeling like you can’t contain it, but after a while, it sort of makes you glow from the inside.
Best of all, by some mechanism I’m not sure I understand, the desire starts to separate off from the object of your desire. They become somewhat separate. Certainly, you still feel all yearny and wistful about the object of your love, but it doesn’t have quite the same knifey, desperate quality it had before.
Was all that too abstract and hippy trippy? My apologies. And, I don’t want to be a hypocrite. Fermentation does have some interesting outcomes, but I sometimes find it fails me. However, during the times it has worked for me, it’s made me a very productive writer.
Any opinions, advice, strategies? I’d love to hear yours.
I’m so fermented, I must be, like, 150% proof.
Hahahaha…hey, think of how much amazing stuff you have produced in the process?
Was just remembering, I once coped with unrequited by transferring my feelings from the real person to a character in a book: Cornelius Christian in JP Donleavy’s A Fairytale of New York. I painted pics, did drawings of him…
Amazing. As I was reading I was wondering which was my typical strategy, and when I got to number four I instinctually knew which was mine. No questions. I didn’t even have to read your explanation of the process.
I also realized that sublimating desire scares the shit out of me. The unintended consequences of this kind of action seem the most likely to do the greatest harm to the most people.
I was saddened by the realization that my approach is sour grapes, at least on a base level, but I quickly realized something more important. The desire is a manifestation of emotion and the truth of the matter is that it may not be related to desire, or love at all.
I’m speaking of the desire of love/sex but also our desires for other things.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that finding out what the emotion and motivation driving the desire really is could be a more revealing, and more liberating strategy for dealing with desire.
I also think that it’s safe to say in general terms that desire is the earliest manifestation of a growing love, an instinctual-hard-wired-procreate-the-species reaction that doesn’t necessarily mean that one would want to or could consummate on the desire. Realizing as you say in the redefining portion that love takes many forms and the desire may be masking a different kind of love for a person can actually lead to something that is richer and more beneficial to everyone involved.
I supposethat it’s easier to think these thoughts outside the bounds of classic unrequited love, because sometimes that’s exactly what it is. In which case I come full circle, back to number 4, though I would like to think better of myself…
Your article here brings to mind something I’ve always questioned and it’s the most boring sort of question because when you ask it or write it out it looks ridiculous: What is love?
I know of love as an idea that is introduced to us as children – our parents are always telling us ‘I love you’ and teaching us to say ‘I love you.’ We learn love by rote and to associate the word with the physical comfort of our parents. Later on, of course, we (well, not all) experience lust, the output of desire and all those messy physical needs we (though not all) have. We learn to mix the two together – and we start early by learning romance from books and films and songs, but romance is just an idea too, a clever way to woo one another, though it adds another dimension of meaning to our lives that is almost always torn to ribbons by adulthood.
In my experience, desire is simply a matter of time – from that initial burst of whatever that makes you want someone – given enough time it will simply dissipate. You can, as you point out, take proactive steps to rid yourself of it or sublimate or transfer or whatever it might be, but I follow the idea that most desires are a form of limerence – and whether you do anything or not, will end on their own.
How much desire or idea of love is really just a kind of immaturity, that need for the comfort of the familiar (not always accompanied by sexual desire)? We read about ‘soul mates’ – more fantastical imagery, really – and once in a while we happen upon that person who ‘gets’ us, the person whose conversation or ideas or sense of humor or all the above most closely match our own. We admire them in the way we might have admired a teacher from childhood or a parent, only with that extra difference – we might start to find them physically attractive. Automatic fantasies of romance, togetherness, the ideal relationship start to form – is this just by rote or something else?
I’m several years out of practice in such relationships and always found something wanting in my own lack of physical desire for others, but that need for the twin, that like-mind, never really goes away. It has to be about more than sustaining life, procreating, building a stronger race or whatever evolutionary standards we put on it – and our lack of fluidity in relationships keeps us limited to what we’ll physically accept.
I think of a line from the film Broadcast News – Albert Brooks is Aaron, this slightly neurotic, hopelessly clever and brilliant news reporter who shares his anxieties with his best friend Jane, played by Holly Hunter. He tells her something like – “Wouldn’t it be great if anxiety and desperation made us more attractive? If needing were a turn-on?”
It’s meant for a laugh, but it’s honest, too. He’s too shy and Jane is too much his best friend for him to tell her he’s in love with her – he later says, I wish you were two people, so I could tell my friend about the one I like so much. Of course, they don’t end up together. That would be too neat. And Aaron doesn’t bend easily. He’s too certain in his judgments.
Love, if there is such a thing, is really the same way. I prefer to stay clear.
In the past, in the days before I met my Dearly Beloved, I had any number of wild infatuations. I fell in love twice a day and in lust twice an hour. These were passing fancies, momentary self-indulgences. Occasionally I would meet someone who truly moved me and I would be lost. I found that in striving to be what the other wanted, I became what they had had before. I was at various times an alcoholic, an arsehole and briefly an estate agent (don’t ask).
I went to a production of Hamlet last night. Polonius’ admonition to Laertes to be true to himself is sound advice as far as it goes but it’s no good for those of us who have desired the unobtainable. We have to be what the other wants so that they will want us too.
Until I met my Dearly Beloved, I thought that I wasn’t so much desiring the unobtainable as desiring desire itself. It’s a little like RG’s separation of desire from its object but more extreme, more distilled. Even less happy. My experience is that few can take destructive unrequited love and turn that energy and emotion into anything good. I know I can’t. I just went from one sad addiction to another. It amazes me that anyone can.
I am here as a writer/publisher via the fermentation route (with a detour for observe & critique late in the journey). It was requited but unconsummated love that first inspired me to attempt to craft erotica. It was a grueling trip, but I like the person who survived it.
I like her too. Very much
I go the number 1 route – the fuck you route. And I try to cultivate that, I think there’s a healthier recovery that way.
I have never ever understood people who go all Number 2, he’s better off without me. I have friends who do this, and I don’t get it. So I think your explanations were great.
thanks.
I love the idea of the relationship between desire and writing. Without unfulfilled desire I think a lot of brilliant novels and stories and poems would not have been written. And Lacan would have been out of a job!
Thank you, thank you, thank you for this, rg! I’ve been thinking through fermentation, having recently read a book (Purple Hibiscus) that kind of introduced the first two parts…. acceptance, I guess. But this handy dandy guide to gettin’ over it is truly helpful. Plus, may I also add that it’s damn useful to be reminded that, heck, I’m not the only one being consumed like this. You know? There’s nothing like that feeling of being the only one in the entire world who could possibly feel such powerful, never-ending love (one-sided, mind you, but we won’t pick that apart!) to fuel the flames of desire.
You’ve made my day!
I’m afraid that the technique I used for too many of my formative years (which extended until I was 30) was substitution. If I wanted and couldn’t have Miss X, eventually, I’d grow so frustrated and unbalanced that I’d find a Miss Y who became instantly attractive. Particularly if Miss Y’s dominant qualities were those that I missed most in Miss X. It was much like Romeo abandoning Rosalind for Juliet.
Of course, it still works, to a lesser extent, these days. That’s largely because my unobtainable obsessions are no longer romantic attachments, but other difficult-to-obtain items, like my graphic novel published (the current obsession and passion).
I read this post and thought this is kind of like the Kubler-Ross’ 7 stages of grief.
Sometimes I go through all of them. Sometimes only some of them, but usually I kind of run the gambit.
I see that I’ve done all. And I’ve been going through this constant process for a couple of years now with one person.
I’m not inclined to #1. Although at times utter frustration, I’ve felt it. I usually go with #3 and #4. It’s my fault since I’m the one who felt it first and put it out there. I’m also the one who’s not free to go for it, so I must take responsibility for what I feel without putting anything on the object of my desire. So quietly I do #3 and #4.
#4 though is harder to do with online relationships. If you’re lucky and can be around this person on a regular basis, then it’s easier to do. However, if it’s predominantly and online connection, but you’ve met to know that what you feel is real and not just some fantasy you built up around an unknown person, then it’s hard to observe and critique only through online interactions. It can be done though, I’ve been doing it to some degree.
I’ve never passed through #2 with anyone, ever. I think I’m a worthy person so this would never cross my mind. heh.
On to he/she/is married, well, I’m the married party and I’m the initiator so I have the responsibility to everyone involved keep everything on the up and up and not take it further than will make anyone feel uncomfortable. I have been honest with everyone and upfront so I have a clear conscience in that. I respect and love the people involved too much to cause pain in anyone. So I have to eat mine.
But because that desire cannot be fulfilled, I’ve ended up doing:
“Redefine your understanding of consummation”
I’ve done this in the past with people and I’m doing it now. Since the DH has allowed me to meet this person and explore, I think because this person is not a man and he feels less threatened, even though I haven’t explored in the physical sense, all three of us have learned to sort of redefine traditional ideas of relationships to some degree and we are all working on it.
The last thing, is your Fermentation process.
Instead of #3 of your Fermentation process wherein I would find some creative outlet for my desire, I’ve written constant, long, intense love letters to the person of my desire. I’ve been lucky enough that the person has been very open to me and allowed me to express all that I feel, even my crazy around all of this. And I’ve gone insane a few times from what I feel, trying to deal with it while trying not to hurt people.
Even my DH has not condemned me for my insanity around this and has held me even as my pain could not be hidden at times. But I’ve been allowed to express all my desire in writing. That has been a huge relief for me and it’s helped me get clear about my feelings as well as get some objectivity in the situation.
Sometimes I just write long, aching letters to the person, but don’t send it. It relieves some stress in me although at this point, I’ve reached the tail end of #4 of your fermentation process.
Now I’ve reached a point of peace with what I feel and have started the separation process. It’s been a couple of years, so it’s been a long process and still I have moments of deep ache for this person, but I much easier separate from it now and see that it’s there, but I’m not as attached.
Very interesting post. 🙂
Insightful, true-ringing, and, oddly, fun. I graze at this smograsbord of strategies…and find that nothing really dissipates the longing, though fermtentation does the most to transform it into something approaching good. Thanks, Rgrl!
I have decided 19 inches produces your best work.
Was that too abstract and hippy trippy? Absolutely not; this installment further serves to illustrate the depths of your penchant to intellectualize emotional issues. NOT a complaint, as I happen to think that trait is attractive. (See the average length of the comments? Your readers share this trait.)
Fermentation is my favorite way to deal.
Of course, I also wallow in the pain of immersion, where you do everything you can to unobtrusively insert yourself in situations where the lovely “babe of the week” will also be present … and then behave as if it is all just coincedence.
Oh RG… this is the stuff that is the fertiliser for most acts of both creation and destruction, in my opinion. We all fundamentally want to be loved, love is the single most important factor in whether a person will thrive or fail in this life (after food, water etc) and I’m not talking grand erotic amour, just simply to be unconditionally loved and really FEEL that love from one human being is, I think, enough for many; but, sadly, many never experience it.
If we don’t experience it as a child from our Mother then we pursue it or reject it avidly as we grow, and if that dysfunction’s not worked on in some way it can become a highly damaging drive. (Before anyone jumps down my throat re: gender, it’s established by research that bonding occurs with mothers first & is most formative in terms of forming the ability to form and maintain intimate relationships. End of discussion from my perspective.)
This is a difficult one for me actually, a similar post to yours has been percolating in my own mind the last months. I tell those that I love frequently that I love them, this is a wonderful thing to most people in my life, but not all.
One person this year asked me to stop telling them I love them, another said they wished I didn’t love them; I find this heartbreaking. I know it can touch off old and sometimes deeply painful childhood emotion to truly be unconditionally loved. For some they just simply do not understand it, they never had it, can’t comprehend it and back away from it.
Some back away from unconditional love because it sparks off old wounds of not having experienced it as a child and the reminder of the pain of that is triggered and is unbearable – that’s my hypothesis in this particular instance. However… I stopped telling her I love her because she wanted me to, but I still do love her unconditionally and no, there’s no pain as I take the Buddhist route on this one (well, I would!) but it’s uncomplicated in that I don’t want to fuck her 🙂
The person who wishes I didn’t love them has had to come to terms with the fact that I do, unconditionally and with deep erotic desire, we have, however, carved, and continue to carve, a new way of relationship, for both of us; I do appreciate though that being in relationship with someone where that’s possible is a rarity.
For me the acceptance of others as and who they are is crucial here and indeed the acceptance of myself. I am the creature I am, others are the creatures they are, if I truly accept another as themselves, see them and experience them for who they are without my own filter of experience and expectation layered over them then I am more likely to just love…
Afterall, if I don’t fully accept the other person for all that they are, and all that means, then it is not love, it is something else entirely…..
When I do want to fuck someone it is, of course, slightly different, there’s a physical craving for skin to skin, smell, taste, 3D sight etc as well as the love. I find if I just want to fuck someone then that passes very easily for me, there are afterall, plenty of people in the world to desire to fuck, it’s only problematic to me if I want to fuck them AND love them at the same time (see above). For the most part I will take the Buddhist tack mixed in with a little leftover hippyness, muddled with some professional ‘stuff’ (yes, that’s a highly technical term); but, when I’m unable to do that it’s always because I’M feeling another feeling or something else is gong on in my life that prevents me thinking clearly & creates a need in me.
Without getting any more confessional, my strategy when I’m unable to take my usual philosophical approach is to turn a mirror upon myself, what is it that’s going on in ME that’s creating this need of another human being, what need am I looking to be filled by another that I cannot fill and that will usually resolve the issue of ‘unfulfilled desire’.
For the most part I stay (I think – but you’d have to ask others) in a place of wanting to love and however that love is accepted is how I will give it.
Oh, RG,
Once again, you have ripped me open and read my heart! How do you do it?? I knew that other people felt the same way as I – well, I knew in theory that someone must. But to discover the depth of shared experience is both encouraging and frightening. Thank you for your insights.
I can’t do number 1 – I am too weak. But too strong for no. 2. Number 3 is what the object of my desire wants me to do – which makes it all the harder! (Difficult in itself but also because I am stubborn, childish, and – as he loves to tell me – an egoist.)
So number 4 it is. And since I am a Christian (though not Catholic) I try and find peace and release in a mixture of sublimation and fermentation – redefinition hasn’t quite worked for me. I have tried redefining my love and end up redefining myself. Fermentation is the most immediately satisfying, though for long-term soul-rest, I find myself falling back on my faith for comfort. it means taking a hard look at the self and the situation though, so short-term it feels worse. But perhaps it’s true that it has to hurt if it’s to heal.
And Richard, your story sounds so similar to my own – and your description is funny and poignant : “I found that in striving to be what the other wanted, I became what they had had before.”
And so we have changed the very things that are ourselves, and any chance we had of having or keeping their love. I tried to become this person I love, since it seems impossible to be his equivalent. And so I push him further away.
I think I can see why some people cut themselves, for surely a physical release can facilitate an emotional/spiritual one? Or is it just another pale imitation, a substitution?…
An unrequited love? I’m not sure how it *should* be handled. I’ve seen all of your described methods used through out my life with varying degrees of success.
My least preferred method is #2 — because I think a person needs to have a healthy sense of self, especially when you’ve just been rejected by someone. To say “oh they are better off with out me” might be true, but it’s also saying you are not worth having. Definitely don’t like that one.
In the past I’ve treated a “break up” or “unrequited love” as a death: I mourn the end of it, going through the gamut of emotional responses (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance). I’ve worked through it at my own pace and noticed it takes me a year or better to get through all those.
I’ve been working the past several years on what you call redefinition, even beyond the sex. Underneath my more aggressive longing, what I found was just my own weak, raging ego. I have an annoying psychiatrist friend who cornered me a few years ago after one of my “But I *love* her!” rants and she just kept saying, “And?” or “So?” By the end of the conversation, I had really shifted my thinking from what I realized was a construct of my own identity. I always saw myself as being part of a couple, a romantic meant-to-be, against-all-odds love story lifted stupidly from the surface our culture. I now have accepted a sort of messy, pointless multiplicity. For example, I can be deeply in love with a man who is unavailable and recognize part of what I love is his containment behind said wall, and the longing it generates. I try to let myself enjoy that, without some goal of setting it right and ending up in some marriage bed next to him in perpetuity. It’s a bit pseudo-zen, I realize. But I am unsuccessful at stopping myself from loving and wanting people. Now I just say, “I love her, and she’s certifiably insane so I will just keep her over in this chamber of my heart and love her without expectation.” Or “I am devoted to him, but I really don’t want to rip him apart from his children and destroy who he is in the process for my own convenience.” Or “I lust for her and feel some warm affection so we will have occasional phone or cybersex and I can enjoy that even if she is not poised to be the next great love of my life.” I believe the only constant companion I will have will be that ego.