When you are aware of your patterns, you are more likely to challenge your behavior. When you know that you desire someone only because your brain has decided that their disinterest makes their pursuit of love more worthwhile, you stop wanting them that much. There are other things you can do to change what you find attractive.
I remembered an article from Amia Srinivasan The Right to Sex that really resonated with me. According to her, the things we desire are not something we are born with, they are shaped by the society in which we live. We are told to like certain genders, body types, races, and instead of just accepting that, we have a responsibility to interrogate and disrupt those trends. “Looking at our own and other people’s bodies and making ourselves feel admired, appreciated, wanted, while politics say we shouldn’t.”
An essay she wrote . It comes from a gay man whose husband is “a big fat guy”. The emailer stressed that he loved his husband deeply and had a satisfying sex life with him, but explained that he had to “work consciously and consciously to make him sexy, if that makes sense.” . The emailer went on to say, “While we can’t change what turns us on and what doesn’t turn us on, we can, on the one hand, replace what might be holding us back from sexual excitement, and on the other hand teach ourselves what’s going on with porn Sexualization. Sexuality happening in front of us.”
Srinivasan means politics, I mean psychology, but the idea that desire is something you can change in this case Still makes sense. We need, in her words, “to ask ourselves what we want, why we want it, what we want.”
On my trip to New York, I began to explore the Different places cultivate what it feels like to be attractive, identifying responsiveness and communication skills as adult tendencies, a sign that a person knows what they want and how to get it. I try to start seeing people’s vulnerability and openness as bravery, even if saying it out loud makes me sound like an Instagram picture. I try to allow myself to be loved the way my friends love me: for the eyeliner that falls out of my bag and the stupid things I say.
